Darkness on the Edge of Town

Four years ago, Paul Madonna was just another broke, unemployed 30-year-old San Francisco artist, struggling daily to finish a graphic novel while his BFA (from Carnegie Mellon) sat on a shelf. But his idea of what constituted a graphic novel was frustrating his creative process, forcing him to coalesce fragments of language and pictures into a linear story that was bulging at the seams. “I knew I could write and draw,” he says, “but I felt like I was wearing a giant rubber suit and all I could do was smear big marks on the paper.”
The turning point came in the fall of 2003, when Madonna created a new kind of comic strip that first ran on the website Mister SF. To do so, he left his studio and hit the streets. “I wanted to pay attention to what things really looked like.”

The new strip depicted Victorian rooftops and SF cityscapes, devoid of action or people, dotted with floating snippets of conversation and thought. Madonna called it “All Over Coffee” (as in, “We met, fell in love and got engaged, all over coffee”). By February 2004, the Chronicle had picked it up. This month, City Lights Publishers releases a book of the same name featuring the hauntingly shadowed ink-wash drawings that now grace the paper’s Pink section each Sunday. This, together with his first graphic short story, “Out of the Grapevine,” which appears in the spring issue of Zyzzyva, hints that Madonna may be forging a new conceptual approach to graphic literature.

As with most art that charts new territory, viewers tend to love it or hate it. While many readers find moments of quiet beauty and poetry in the strip—there’s no doubting Madonna’s talent with a pen, and he doesn’t even sketch in pencil first—others find it inaccessible. Both camps write to him regularly. “Some people think I’m trying to make them feel stupid,” he says. “I’m not. Before the strip, I was making art that was piling up in a corner. So I’d rather have the misunderstandings [of the strip] with at least some possibility of communication.” And Madonna himself is anything but esoteric. Raised in Pittsburgh, he credits his parents’ blue-collar work ethic for instilling in him the motivation and self-discipline necessary for the artistic life.

This summer, “All Over Coffee” may be drawn from the road as he embarks on a cross-country book tour with his wife, Joen. If it seems strange to see Madonna’s aesthetic transferred to other skylines, it will be just as odd for him to market an SF-set book outside the Bay. “The concentration of my audience is here, so this should be interesting,” he muses. “I picture it like a scene from Spinal Tap. I show up at a bookstore, and there’s one person there going, ‘Dude, can you sign my Mutts book?’ And I’m like, ‘No that’s not me.’ But as long as I get back home with my humor intact, then it’ll be a success.”

All Over Coffee (City Lights) In stores April 1, allovercoffee.com,