![]() ![]() That’s actually part of the central mantra that lurks around Fictional Father, which follows the hapless Caleb Wyatt as he tries to find some peace with his life but can’t, partly thanks to his famous cartoonist father and partly thanks to his own inability to follow through or make the right decision or just settle. He doesn’t try to be anyone else, he just tries to be himself. ![]() It’s a peculiar niche, to be sure, but it’s one that Ollmann has mastered in such a way that anything he puts out is worth grabbing. There is also an aspect to Ollmann’s work that makes the stories seem autobiographical even though they’re not and even though the main characters tend to have some physical resemblance to the cartoonist who creates them even though they’re not him, not even remotely. The Joe Ollmann space, I guess, which loosely consists of a sprawling story of domestic drama portrayed through a dark sense of humor that is sometimes negative and even outright hostile, always centering on a white male, usually middle-aged or thereabouts, with traits and actions that make him anything from best not to get too involved with to entirely reprehensible, and almost always the cause of his own problem. In the world of comics, I’ve always felt like Joe Ollmann inhabited his own space, but I’m not sure I can cohesively define what that space is. ![]()
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