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Trickle-Down Theories

Caffeine Blues: Too Much Coffee Man in his cups over a woman

Why are today's comic-book heroes guzzling so much high-octane java?

By Richard von Busack

Have our young people been reduced to such a state of impotence that even coffee drinking is now a cool, transgressive act? Or is the mockery of elaborate rituals of coffee consumption a way of pointing out the ridiculousness of decreeing some mildly dangerous drugs illegal while others are completely respectable? I don't pretend to know the answer to those questions, so here's another query: What's all this about coffee in these underground comics?

The new issue of Java Town (#5; $2.95), from San Jose's Slave Labor Publishing, is the work of Saratoga's Scott Saavedra, who has an easy, pleasing style as an cartoonist but as a satirist is gentle to the point of inoffensiveness. A grab bag of cartoons and features, Java Town is loosely associated with an imaginary city in which coffee is the main industry, with a skyline that looks like old-fashioned percolators.

A parody edition of the JT Weekly doesn't get to the heart of what can make many weekly newspapers very bad indeed. (Motorbooty, king of the zines, recently put it very bluntly: "concern about sexism and racism, without concern about other isms, plagiarism and nepotism.") Yet Saavedra has a way with found objects, particularly the "Look What I Found" column, which features some of the bargain-bin oddities he's turned up.

Saavedra also contributes a coffee-shop story in the fairly poor anthology Coffee World ($1.50; World Comics, PO Box 6529, Portland, OR 97228-6529). His tale of a beeper mishap in a coffee shop is the sole highlight of the book, except for co-publishers Ian and Tyson Smith's "Cup a Joe," in which a group of cafe loungers uncover a haunted espresso machine that's apparently turning clients into oatmeal.

His humor is much sharper in the noncoffee-related Comic Book Heaven, #3 ($1; order through scottjava@aol), a self-published zine in which he rakes through his no-doubt extensive comic-book collection for especially weird odds and ends.

One section in the new issue samples 1950s tough-guy dialogue, including the immortal "Why, for two cents, I'd--I'd--" (from Warfront, #19, February 1954), and two others, both drawn from the same issue of Fighting Fronts #5: "I'd sure like to pump hot lead into some Reds, Harry. Too bad it's so quiet around here, eh?" and "Talk with yer gun, kid ... not yer mouth."

Naturally, the best-known underground java man also appears on a page of Coffee World: Too Much Coffee Man, a self-published minicomics character who has worked his way up to commercial appearances on MTV. Issue #4 of Too Much Coffee Man ($2.50; PO Box 5372, Austin, TX 78763) features several stories in a new vein about the bulbous wired-up character with a giant steaming coffee cup for a hat.

Artist Shannon Wheeler seems to be pulling the focus away from the super adventures of TMCM and more toward the love problems of a young guy who tries to drink a lost girlfriend off his mind but instead throws up on her front door.

Wheeler is a much better artist than most of the younger cartoonists, and he has a good sense of the bizarre and the cinematic, but for now he's giving into self-pity, borrowing Gilbert Shelton's licks and, of course, facing the limitations of superhero stuff.

One reason I think he'll grow is that he's open-minded enough to have reprinted Peter Bagge's less-than-ringing endorsement in the letters page: "I have such a bias against superheroes that it extends to parodies of them as well. But that's my problem, and if you're into it, then do what you must."

It may be that the only way to draw readers to autobiographical, non-superhero cartoons is to create a leotard-clad character to parody. Nonaction comics (come to think of it, Inaction Comics would be a great title for a self-published comic) may also be using coffee guzzling and paraphernalia as a gag to sell the idea of conversation instead of adventure in comics.

Of course, there's still the question of advocating a coffee-drinking life style, without regard for the human cost: sleeplessness, incipient colitis and poetry readings. Is it really time to associate a general youth movement around a cup of bean water? Still, lord knows, youth movements have catalyzed around even more insubstantial things.

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