A city worker is traumatized by a near accident and his life falls apart. A clerk gets trapped in her store’s bathroom over Christmas and fears she’ll never escape. A security guard investigates her employer’s unethical experiments.

Cartoonist Joe Ollmann tells these stories and more in his “distinctly set in Hamilton book” The Woodchipper.

The short story collection, which came out in January, focuses on characters at work and their relationships to their jobs.

“I’ve worked in a lot of different environments,” Ollmann told CBC Hamilton — from a box factory when he was a teen to corporate offices as a designer.

“Work is [where most of us] spend one-third of our day,” Ollman said. “It’s not a place where we mostly want to be. You’re forced to be in this place and interact with these people that you wouldn’t normally interact with. So it makes for a lot of possibly weird, uncomfortable situations.”

And as a “lifelong socialist,” Ollmann said he’s “very critical of capitalism and work ethics,” which also factor into his storytelling. 

Ollmann generally doesn’t like the idea of security guards, for example, who he described as the “foot soldiers of capitalism.”

That prompted him to come up with a security guard character he likes. In his story Meat, the security guard works at a slaughterhouse and forms an unlikely friendship with a vegetarian protester.

In contrast, Ollmann’s The Late Checkout centres on a selfish landlord trying to get rich off a short-term rental unit.

He’s “not very relatable but he’s kind of a sad, lonely, pathetic character,” Ollmann said. “A lot of my characters are pretty unpleasant [but] I try to find some bit of humanity in them.”

Stories set in Hamilton

In the introduction to The Woodchipper, Ollmann tells the reader short story collections are unpopular and hard to sell, but says he decided to make one anyway because he loves them. 

The collection has been well received, he said.

Patrick Fazari, a community librarian in Hamilton, says he appreciates Ollmann’s self-deprecating humour and the slice-of-life nature of The Woodchipper. 

Ollmann’s writing often deals with insecurity and anxiety in a relatable way, he said, and in The Woodchipper, the author creates the sort of stories that will make readers wonder what they’d do in the characters’ situations.

Ollman’s last book, Fictional Father, was the first comic to be a finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction.

While he jokes now about being an “award loser,” Ollmann said being a finalist was a big deal, as there’s still a resistance from many adults who incorrectly think of comic books as unserious or just for children. 

In addition to making comics, Ollmann works part-time at both the art gallery and Epic Books, where he also co-hosts a comics book club. It’s a hustle and some months are particularly hard, he said, but in the end he earns the money he needs to spend time focusing on comics.

“For me as a kid who worked in box factories and was a teenage dad, I’m living the dream drawing for money,” he said. “I feel incredibly lucky all the time. Every time I talk about comics I start crying because I love it.”

Ollmann will launch The Woodchipper locally at the Art Gallery of Hamilton on Feb. 21, in partnership with Epic Books.