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.

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