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The Woodchipper by Joe Ollmann, published by Drawn and Quarterly, collects five graphic short stories telling everyday tales with drama and the kinds of twists that make even mundane life interesting.
In the comic introduction to The Woodchipper, Ollmann presents himself as a comic character. He reviews what he presumes is the case on BookTok, the corner of the TikTok community focused on books, in a tongue-in-cheek critique: namely, the difficulty in publishing comic short stories even though people love them.
Ollman points to his own lifelong love of short story writers like Shirley Jackson, O. Henry, and H.H. Munro ( who went by the pen name Saki, as many short story enthusiasts know). Ultimately, Ollmann decided that “whether short stories are hot or not, short stories were what I felt like doing, so I did.”
Just as his stories come with twists, so does the introduction, as he himself made the scripted TikTok videos and simply loves comics that much.
In The Woodchipper Ollman creates realistic stories, some with a touch of magic to their realism, all holding twists to prompt a little awe in readers. The title piece tells the narrator’s story in flashbacks much like a noir. He has ended up in a cheap motel with a suite of nutritional supplements after “nothing happened.”
Again and again the narrator talks about the “nothing” of dealing with the dumb new kid at work who constantly got into accidents leaning into the industrial woodchipper to get the phone he had dropped just as the narrator was about to press the button. The story shows the struggle of overcoming “nothing” since there had not been any injuries, but it still weighs heavily upon him by coming so close that PTSD haunts him with what could have been.
Ollmann’s other stories in The Woodchipper tackle similar near-to-real-life situations. “Nestled All Snug” is a Christmas story in which a woman becomes trapped in the bathroom after a stack of books falls and tries to avoid thinking of it as some holiday message rather than just a happenstance. “Meat” presents a woman unsure how to find her place in the world amid family pressure to find a husband when she does not want to be with anyone and working corporate security to survive without buying into their unethical business.
“The Late Checkout” also has a protagonist trying to find his place, but his five-year plan inspired by a rental investment seminar seems to go awry at every turn. Finally, “The Thought that Counts…” has a man hosting his wife’s birthday party navigating the complexities of colliding social worlds as her fellow professors come into their home.
All of the stories in The Woodchipper are told in nine panels per page in a three-by-three grid. The repeated layout serves as a sort of metronome, spelling out a beat while the colorful art and expressive characters live out the melody. This ties well with the everyday settings of the stories, setting up the common to be examined more closely, where they can reveal the moments of theater and magic that make the kinds of engaging, shocking stories we can imagine happening to everyone.
