There is a reason why Harvey Pekar was celebrated. It isn’t easy to do biographical comics without looking like a complete loser. Pekar had the ability to make you care about the minutiae of everyday life and show us the small successes that keep people moving on. But others didn’t know how to do it that well. It seemed for awhile that every biographical comic read like a bad parody of Peter Bagge. It was annoying to read about early 20s losers who were lost in their lives. And as I got older, it got harder and harder to read and care about it. Joe Ollmann decided to tackle another confusing period of time, the mid-life crisis, in his semi-autobiographical book Mid-Life. The book follows a pair of 30/40 year old people who are at a point in their lives where they can’t figure out which direction they want to jump.

John is a middle-aged magazine art director who is on his second marriage. He has two college aged daughters from his first marriage that he doesn’t see enough and an infant son from his second marriage. He’s getting frustrated with work and his marriage is in a bit of a rocky patch. The grind of work and baby wrangling mixed with too little sleep and not being able to spend quality time with his wife have made him a nervous wreck. Slowly he starts becoming fascinated with Sherri Smalls, a popular kid’s musician.

Sherri is  a little younger than John and her career is exploding, but not necessarily in the way she wants it to. Sherri and her ex Ric used to be part of a band (one that made music for adults), but somewhere along the line they got into the kid’s music business and it’s been extremely successful. So successful that a family network wants Sherri to create a kid’s show for them. Ric isn’t sure he wants to be entertaining kids and occasionally does something to try and screw it up (driving drunk while wearing his kid’s music outfit, hitting a kid that tried to bite him) and the network isn’t sure they want Ric on Sherri’s show. Sherri isn’t sure what she wants. Kid’s music has been good to her, but she doesn’t feel like a real musician and can’t quite let go of Ric, since he is a link to her past as that real musician.

John starts stalking Sherri (innocently at first since his son loves her music) and then heads out to New York to meet her. The meeting could be about a feature on her in his magazine or it could be more. Neither is quite sure what they want and their mid-life crisises come to a head during their meeting.

Alternating laughing and cringing, I loved the book. Ollmann does a great job writing about people who aren’t sure how they got there and less sure of where they want to go. His art is decent. He sticks mainly to foreground images with little to no background and a firm 9 panel page layout for the entire book. While the art doesn’t enhance the book, it doesn’t hurt it either.

The book is very wordy. Both John and Sherri have running internal monologues and there are times where the words take up a third of the panel in each panel of a page. It is a short, but dense 172 pages, but well worth the read. It’s funny and sweet and very different than any other graphic novel out there. Set aside a few hours and catch up with your own mid-life crisis. Recommended.