Thursday, March 28, 2024

Book Review: Fictional Father

Title: Fictional Father
Author: Joe Ollman
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Publication Date: 2021

Marshall McLuhan famously believed the importance of jokes lay in how they told us about our collective problems and grievances while providing a way for us to endure said grievance by laughing at the problems. As I read through Joe Ollman’s award-winning graphic novel Fictional Father, McLuhan’s observations about the dark side of humor kept looping back in my mind.  Before the age of social media, comic strips were as ubiquitous as memes for telling a joke laced with a healthy dose of cynicism. Even the most saccharine of strips or characters have an undercurrent of sorrow, anguish or regret. And it is this undercurrent that Ollman expertly uses to heartbreakting and hilarious effect in his latest work.

Fictional Father follows the story of Caleb Wyatt, a sad sack protagonist if ever there was one. A struggling painter, and recovering alcoholic, Wyatt seemingly spends his days wrestling with the existential gloom of a life spent as the dejected son of an iconic comic strip artist. Caleb’s father, Jimmi Wyatt, enjoys a celebrated life as the creator of the beloved comic strip Sonny Side Up. Chronicling the heartwarming adventures of a single father and fry cook Pappy and his only child Sonny, the strip is as celebrated as Peanuts or Dennis the Mennis yet casts a long shadow over Caleb’s life as an ironic symbol of his father’s real life spite and neglect.

Cover of Joe Ollman’s Fictional Father

Both painfully poignant and laugh out loud funny, Fictional Father is exceptionally polished as a graphic novel that tells an engaging story while using the medium of comic books to comment upon itself. As the son of an iconic cartoonist, Caleb is both worldly aware and obsessed with comics. As such, the graphic novel frames itself as a self-referential effort on Caleb’s part to tell us, as the reader, about his life with his father. His obsession is often tinged with a cynical understanding of how the humorous stories told by the creators of so many comics are vastly different from the often depressing lives they led away from the page. In doing so, Ollman in the voice of Caleb so deftly situates Fictional Father amongst the ranks of Dennis the Menace’s Hank Ketchum and Peanuts’ Charles Schultz that it was easy to forget that Wyatt and Sonny Side Up are entirely, well, fictional. After reading Fictional Father, I found it impossible not to Google the names of the same comic illustrators mentioned in the book to unveil the truth behind their strips.

There is a stark yet clear style to Ollman’s illustrations that lends itself well to Caleb’s unending cynicism. The majority of the book is arranged in 9 panel full colour pages illustrated in a crisp style that seems to suggest movement. Though visually arresting, Ollman truly shines in his first person description and dialogue through the eye of main character Caleb. As a protagonist, he is a study in stark contrasts. Both sympathetic and abrasive, we can’t help but root for him even as he engages in the most self-destructive and hurtful actions towards those who love him. The reasons, of course, are rooted in the oppressive shadow cast over him by his father and the strange fiction of Sonny Side Up. The toxic legacy of an absent or abusive father too married to his work is a familiar trope. But in literally drawing his inspiration from the world of comic strips, Ollman’s story feels fresh.

At this past year’s Hamilton Literary Awards, Ollman expressed both gratitude and shock at Fictional Father taking home the Best Fiction Award when up against what he called ‘normal’ books. But the graphic novel’s win is unsurprising when seen in the context of the universality of the story Ollman is telling and the dramatic efficiency in which we’re carried from one story beat to the next, sometimes in the span of a single panel or an individual thought or dialogue balloon. One of the best graphic novels I’ve read in recent years, Fictional Father is a story that will stay with me and be reread many, many times.

Stephen Near
Stephen Nearhttp://www.stephennear.com/
Stephen Near is a freelance writer and educator living in Hamilton. He is a graduate of York University (BFA), the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (B. Ed) and the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Guelph. He works at Mohawk and Humber College and is a member of the Playwright’s Guild of Canada and an alumnus of both the Sage Hill Writing Experience and the Banff Centre. Stephen's plays have been produced at the Hamilton Fringe Festival and Theatre Aquarius and he is completing his first fiction novel.

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