Whether it’s the beautiful-sad short stories in his Doug Wright Award-winning This Will All End in Tears in 2006, the blundering semi-autobiographical protagonist in his first graphic novel Mid-Life in 2011, or his 2017 biography of the notoriously self-destructive wild man William Seabrook, Joe can’t shake his affinity for the messy struggles of real people. In the 33 years since, Ollmann’s working-class origins have served as his creative gravity, grounding his best work in a palpable reality. It’s a pedigree that the cartoonist has worn on his ink-stained sleeve since he began his professional career in 1988 with the self-published Dirty Nails Comics (the title of which your Honor, I submit as Exhibit A). No, these are not lyrics from an obscure Merle Haggard song, but rather evidence of Joe Ollmann’s blue-collar bonafides. Born the youngest of six in the tenacious steel town of Hamilton Ontario (aka “The Hammer”), he was raised on a rural Christmas tree farm and at the age of 17 started working the night shift in a box factory to support his wife and young daughter. Let me tell you a little something about a guy named Joe.
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