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Saturday, 26 November 2005 09:35

“The room was dark, and there was a couple making out in front of a raging fire. It was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen…except that it was my wife and my best friend. By the way, don’t get married.”

(Adhesive Press; 65 pgs b&W; $4.95)
(W/A: Various; Published by Shannon Wheeler)

Too Much Coffee Man Magazine is imbued with all the black humor that we’ve come to expect from TMCM creator Shannon Wheeler. Joe Sayers’ “Passing Periods” strip imagines a 15-year-old girl whose parents welcome her to the world of dating—by setting her up with the old man who works at the supermarket. Sid Givens interviews a friend whose wife was a bank robber and, it turns out, a cheat. “One night I came upstairs from my office to the living room,” he relates. “The room was dark, and there was a couple making out in front of a raging fire. It was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen…except that it was my wife and my best friend. By the way, don’t get married.”

That’s not all you’ll get… There’s a perverted little strip from the ever-sensitive and horny Jeffrey Brown, and a deeply disturbing jaw-dropper of a story called “Birthday” by Jed Alexander, in which the author is discovered by his parents while masturbating to an old video of his own birth (shiver).

Wheeler’s own TMCM strips are always worth it, and here, he’s at his best when he goes “meta.” For instance, a man, for no particular reason, screams more and more angrily at a cat. Finally, he takes a running kick at the cat and boots it right out of the panel. In the next comic, an armchair-psychologist commentator breaks down why the man kicked the cat. His portentous, annoying explanation continues until he himself is kicked out of the final panel. Playing with form—it’s a good thing.

The reviews section has more of that unsparing wit. Drew Winchester’s “Remake-o-Rama” reviews no less than 30 films and their remakes. “Steve Martin is the undisputed King Whore of remakes,” he writes, “with Little Shop of Horrors, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Father of the Bride, The Out-of-Towners, Cheaper by the Dozen, and the forthcoming Pink Panther to his credit. He should be strung up by his ball hair and mummified in electrical tape until he gets serious again.” Reviewer Matthew Speer ponders the possibility of a Muslim version of the Christian end-of-times Left Behind books, to be called Dude, Where’s My Virgin?

But the very blackest and best thing of all in TMCM #21 is a devastating war-protest comic by Peter Conrad. A legion of babbling idiots in jingoistic T-shirts blankets the land. They’re ugly Americans, awash in the glory of team sports, Jesus, SUVs, and anything red, white, and blue. The final panel is a jarring splash-page that reads “Meanwhile…” and shows a planeload of coffins draped with American flags. The anger is blunt, revelatory, and brilliant. Bravo.