Oddball of the Week: Too Much Coffee Man

Who’s prepared for espresso? This week’s Oddball prize winner is the one and solely Too Much Coffee Man, a personality tailored for the comedy of fashionable comedian e-book diversifications.

Satire has overtaken superhero cinema. Depending on the challenge, it’s both been accomplished to perfection, as in the case of The Boys and Peacemaker, or it has been accomplished to loss of life, i.e., Marvel’s Phase 4 product. Certainly, the spandex-loving sect of each the MCU and DCEU make for simple targets in terms of comedy. I might argue it takes extra creativity to make an viewers take a superhero significantly than it does to make them snort.

Of course, none of that is misplaced on the comics neighborhood. Satire has lengthy been a comic book e-book custom, and it’s most frequently accomplished by means of a intelligent character. Thus we now have an impartial comics legend, Too Much Coffee Man.

Created in 1991 as a joke by The New Yorker cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, Coffee Man is mainly all of us. Wired to the gills on caffeine, he broods over the state of the world, significantly specializing in politics. In some ways, he’s reflective of the old style Sunday morning cartoon characters, and he really has starred in comedian strips of his personal.

Coffee Man has developed a cult following, and his title received an Eisner Award for Best New Comic in 1995. Over the years, he has been featured in quite a few iterations, together with a 2006 opera.

With satire having overtaken superhero cinema, it will appear that the time is correct for Too Much Coffee Man to look in both an animated sequence or maybe in stay motion. That would make it price the gamble to select up these key points.

Too Much Coffee Man (mini) #1

In a way, Wheeler was forward of the curve. These days, kickstarters are all the rage for up-and-coming comedian e-book creators. In the early Nineties, that possibility merely didn’t exist. To deliver Coffee Man to life, Wheeler virtually did all the work himself, even photocopying the pages to self-publish his creation. It jogs my memory of the first run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, however it will appear Wheeler was on a smaller finances than Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. There can be 4 whole points in the preliminary run, and getting any of them is an journey.

Since these have been made by Wheeler himself, there are few copies on the market. In truth, this can be one of the rarest comics of the ‘90s out there; the CGC census has only one single copy listed in its database. You’ll discover extra Action Comics #1s than that. Because of that, there are not any identified gross sales information for this ‘91 mini-comic, making this an especially onerous comedian to search out.

Two years after Coffee Man’s debut mini-comic, Wheeler began his personal publishing model, Adhesive Comics. Of course, he stored a seat heat for Coffee Man. The angsty character would make his first look in a standard comedian e-book in 1992’s Jab #1.

The gross sales listed below are few and much between, which is comprehensible for such an obscure character. The final time a 9.8 traded palms on-line was in 2019 to the tune of $90.

In 1993, Wheeler lastly gave his star creation a self-titled comedian. While it could not deliver large costs, this ought to be in your procuring record on the off probability that Coffee Man is revived for both animated or live-action diversifications.

The highest graded copy to ever promote has been the 9.0, which introduced $14 in 2010.

The ‘90s are known for their gimmicky comics, and Adhesive may have the title of most unique. For this 1993 issue, all 3,000 copies printed had an actual bullet hole through the book. Each comic was individually shot with a small-caliber round; the stories were told around the hole piercing all the pages. Again, there are no graded sales listed, but this is such an interesting idea for a comic that it’s price proudly owning simply as a dialog piece.

IT’S TIME FOR COFFEE

Not solely has the mainstream viewers fallen in love with comedic comedian e-book diversifications, however the present political setting is ideal for a personality like Too Much Coffee Man. In the current state of issues, the jokes virtually write themselves. That makes it prime time to commerce in the spandex for pink long-johns underwear and a coffee-cup hat.