The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts

6. Too Much Commerce Man? Shannon Wheeler and the Ironies of the “Rebel Cell”

90 CHAPTER SIX Too Much Commerce Man? Shannon Wheeler and the Ironies of the “Rebel Cell” —JAMES LYONS You made a lot of money from your commercial. You lucked out with your gimmicky character. —(Wheeler 1999, 113) “Coffee,” Rossini told me, “is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time to write an opera.” —(Balzac 1996, 273) In the end pages of Wake Up and Smell the Cartoons of Shannon Wheeler (1996), a collection of the comics artist’s early work, Wheeler provides a short professional biography that is worth quoting in full: Shannon Wheeler’s cartoons first appeared in college newspapers and obscure publications throughout the country. Shannon graduated from UC Berkeley’s architecture department in 1989. After a couple of years of angst ridden meaningless retail work, Wheeler re-located to Austin, Texas, where he continued to work retail jobs. It was during this time that he hooked up with Blackbird Comics, who published his first collection of cartoons: Children With Glue. It was while trying to find a promotion for that book that Wheeler created Too Much Coffee Man. SHANNON WHEELER AND THE IRONIES OF THE “REBEL CELL” 91 Starting as photocopied mini-comics Too Much Coffee Man eventually evolved into full color comics, a weekly strip, t-shirts, mugs, and even an animated television commercial. Too Much Coffee Man has become an industry unto itself. Along the way Wheeler collected an Eisner award for best new comic, a Hatch award for best animated commercial, and a Harvey nomination for most promising new talent, as well as several other nominations and awards. Shannon Wheeler’s cartoons now appear in college newspapers and obscure publications throughout the country (1996, n.p.). While the descriptive trajectory of Wheeler’s career is clearly tongue-incheek , it nevertheless offers something revealing about the nature of success as a professional comics artist. In its evocation of circularity—all that output and acclaim serves merely to position Wheeler pretty much where he was when he started—the artist necessarily underplays the amount of talent and dedication required simply to stay the course and earn a decent living from his work. Fittingly, the Too Much Coffee Man (hereafter TMCM) character that has proved so successful for Wheeler was by his own admission born of expediency, and has achieved a level of popularity that has made subsequent non-TMCM work a somewhat difficult commercial undertaking. As Wheeler commented in a 2007 interview, “I tried to do other comic books, and the numbers were 50-percent. I don’t know if it’s the fan base— I tend to think it’s the store owners that see it as something new and cut orders” (2007a). Wheeler’s magazine, launched in 2001 and suspended in 2006, persisted with the title TMCM, despite the fact that most of its content was a diverse range of material from Wheeler and other contributors such as Craig Thompson, Jeffrey Brown, and Jhonen Vasquez, a decision which allowed him to use the distribution deal set up with Diamond for the TMCM character, as well as draw on its continuing popularity. The circumstances Wheeler found himself in were by no means unique; other comics creators, as well as numerous authors, musicians, and film directors have struggled with the consequences of an unexpectedly successful creation that sets up commercial and artistic expectations about subsequent work, and which can be hard to shake. Two things, however, make the case of WheelerandTMCMparticularlyinteresting.ThefirstisthatWheeler’sTMCM character, during the course of his comic lifespan, began to reflect increasingly , and in intriguing ways, on the complexities and ironies of his popularity and the impact of this on the life and career of Wheeler. The second is 92 JAMES LYONS the trajectory the TMCM character made outside comics, which saw Wheeler disenchanted by his experience of attempting to use TMCM as the basis for a Comedy Central network cartoon series, but then subsequently adapt him for the world’s first-ever opera based on a comic strip, which debuted at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts in 2006. Taken together, these events make TMCM a revealing study of the complex symbiosis of commercial and creative impulses involved in alternative comic production. GETTING HIGH ON CAFFEINE: THE RISE OF TMCM We rejected the “Sexy Woman” cover, even though it had greater “Market...