Happy Stories About Well-Adjusted People

Covering characters as diverse as a down-on-his-luck ventriloquist, an overweight office worker struggling to find acceptance, and a heartbroken punk teen on a faltering strawberry farm, this compendium of previously published short stories explores almost every kind of hurt a human can endure, with compassion, real insight, unexpected humor, and an eye for detail. Ollmann's greatest strength is in combining a literary sensibility with the full range of storytelling tricks available to a cartoonist, crafting panels that blend prose narration, dialog, and illustration to reveal incredible depths of character. While some of his stories, especially early in the volume, come off as self-consciously literary—exercises in unreliable narration and frustratingly vague endings—Ollmann seems to relax and mature as he goes along, peaking with the novella-length "Hanging Over," a wrenching and raw tale about a man struggling with the realities of his mother's failing health and caring for his developmentally challenged brother.