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House of Java
by
Mark Murphy
A collection of short slice-of-life stories quietly but strongly etching various facets of our lives, without the cynicism. The House of Java is a coffee house where little flashes on all sorts of people that happen in for a cup. Reminiscent of the insightful work of Adrian Tomine.
Hardcover, 96 pages
Published
August 1st 2002
by NBM Publishing
(first published March 1998)
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Community Reviews
(showing 1-28 of 31)
A slim collection of short, slice-of-life comics -- not stories so much as little vignettes, mostly centered on a Seattle coffee shop and the people who frequent it. Interspersed within these vignettes are longer stories, some of which work better than others. The first of these long-form stories, "Rest Stop," seems decidedly out of place among the low-key everyday kinds of character-driven narratives that make up the rest of the book. "Rest Stop" feels as though it wanted to be a kind of psycho
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awesome storyteller. All I have to say to the guy ranting about people putting milk and sugar in black coffee..."Don't hate"
"Slices-of-life" is an accurate description of the contents of this book, as none of these "stories" have the cachet to accurately be called "stories." After finishing every one I would think, "Oh. That's it?" or "Who cares?" There is the nostalgic attraction of that "Post-Clerks twenty-something 90's white guy slacker talking about stuff" thing, but I wouldn't recommend this book to anybody. Read Christmas morning in the only coffee shop open in town, and left there.
When these stories were first coming out in the 1990s, I was surprised and impressed by the slice-of-life subject matter. Re-reading them today, though, I'm underwhelmed. The art is pretty good, if unrefined, but the stories are considerably more clunky than I remembered; the dialogue is largely flat, and the developments make economical use of the space allotted, yet never really resonate. It's pleasant enough, but one mostly gets the sense of an artist learning to be a writer, with both fumbli
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A set of stories, some set in a coffee house. The author presents us with simple stories about the interactions between people, some rude, some mundane.
Eh. This was OK, but it didn't blow me away.
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Mark Edward Murphy, graphic designer for childrens' entertainment company HIT Entertainment; 1st published work was a comic book on Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.
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