Paul Madonna HOME

       In March 2011, Everything Is Its Own Reward, the second collection of All Over Coffee strips, will be released from City Lights Books.
       In hardcover and full color, this book will be more than a continuation of the first collection published in 2007. Over the past 4 years and 200 strips, I've been bouncing between a handful of approaches to the strip, and the pieces will be arranged in thematic chapters to create a loose narrative.
       More info will come in time as I complete the book. Many of the pieces I publish over the next couple months will be to fill out the composition, and I'll be making extra notes to these pieces and posting them on the All Over Coffee homepage, as well as on SFGate.

In April I took a drawing trip to Tokyo and Shanghai. Six months earlier I was in Buenos Aires. If you follow AOC, you may have noticed the departure from San Francisco over the years. After the first AOC collection started selling internationally, I knew I had to draw more of the world, so that the next book would be more global. It's funny because the drawings in the strip are about drawing on site, about recording what I see, yet they were never supposed to be about the specific place. I was always interested in how the specific can also be the general, and so when people started playing the 'where is that scene from?' game, I understood, but didn't worry about it. Then I began traveling; Europe, South America, Asia, other cities in the US, looking to depict the reality of scenes as well as framing them so that they could potentially be anywhere. You see, I'm more concerned with the mood of the scene, compositional balance, light and shadow, than I am what specific street is being drawn, yet it's important to me to practice this in more cities of the world rather than to stay at home.
Because of travel, or the work growing in scope, or whatever the reason, certain strips have taken on larger meanings for me. I've always put everything I can into each piece, which has been challenging when publishing weekly, but some pieces can take months or years to complete. Some because they're large, and others because they just take a long time to make sense to me, and I want to share a bit about the where and why or whatever of some of these pieces. So now, on the All Over Coffee homepage, I will sometimes post information and notes about that week's strip. This won't be true for all pieces, which doesn't mean those mean any less to me, it's just that not all pieces have extra stories to share. These notes will be archived on the AOC homepage, and occasionally I'll post older pieces that I'd like to share something about as well.