In 2004, The San Francisco Chonicle introduced the All Over Coffee comic saying:
“Paul Madonna shuffles around his San Francisco apartment in corduroy slippers, working on his cartoon art.
When he goes out to sketch, he has plenty of shoes to choose from — a nice pair of Fluevogs, some favorite hiking boots, a well-worn pair of running shoes.
It’s a far cry from his shoeless days, those penniless months more than a decade ago when he peddled his comics on Telegraph Avenue.
On break from his studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he whiled away a lost summer with two friends.
Despite the fact that he couldn’t afford BART fare then, the budding artist moved back to the Bay Area upon graduation.
“I really romanticize that time,” he says. “I didn’t remember the hunger, the fights, getting ripped off. I remembered the intense feeling.”
The feeling of All Over Coffee, Madonna’s new strip, which premieres this week in The Chronicle, is less intense than contemplative.
But the attention to detail — the chance detail of everyday existence — makes for a potent kind of poetry.”
Yes, this illustration is poetry.
For anyone who has lived in this city, these buildings, streets and falling sidewaks make us nostalgic and eager to return as soon as possible to one the most fantastic cities in the world.
These sketches are pure San Francisco.
Why doesn’t every newspaper do the same?
(Click on the images to see them bigger)
