THE OLLIE COMICS – DIARY OF A FIRST-TIME DAD

by Felix Cheong

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when the stork arrives, it never comes with an instruction booklet. Yes, there are self-help books, the doomscroll of YouTube videos, and hand-me-down war stories—unsolicited, of course—from relatives and friends.

But nothing quite prepares you for that cute, squalling Mini-me that is now your responsibility, your center of gravity, your life. And naturally, you want to document every fleeting thing before it starts slip-slidin’ away. Looking at my stash of sepia-bitten photos of my son from thirty years ago, I can certainly identify with the sentiment.

That impulse gave rise to The Ollie Comics: Diary of a First-Time Dad, the second book by Drewscape, otherwise known as Singapore illustrator Andrew Tan. His short story, “Moving Forward,” from Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise (2012), was nominated for an Eisner.

At first glance, The Ollie Comics (Ollie is the nickname of his daughter, Olivia) looks modest enough. Comprising vignettes of no more than two pages each, it has the loose, immediate feel of an artist’s notebook.  The unevenness shows. Some entries are mere rough renderings, complete with dates and descriptive captions; others are more fully realized. Most carry the nervous energy of an artist fighting through fatigue to get the moment on paper before it disappears.

What makes The Ollie Comics interesting from a graphic medicine perspective is its refusal of medical drama. There is no mad scramble to A & E (accident and emergency), no life-threatening diagnosis hanging over the family. Instead, the book maps out the routine, less spectacular territory of caregiving: interrupted sleep, night feeds, the perils of diaper changing, and the strange process by which a father learns to read his child.

A baby, after all, comes without subtitles. Every cry has to be interpreted or pre-empted: hunger, tiredness, boredom or simply exercising her lungs. Parenthood thus becomes a mini-exercise in sleuthing, sussing out clues by trial and error.

What might interest Western readers is Tan’s chapter on his wife’s confinement period. This is a peculiar Chinese practice in which the new mother has to spend her first month virtually under house arrest, watched over by a confinement nanny (sometimes the mother or mother-in-law assumes the role) who cooks, brews healing soups, cleans the house and dispenses baby-care advice.

The book is far more entertaining than any self-help manual, thanks to Tan’s wry sense of humour, often delivered in just six or seven panels. As with any good comic strip, he sets up a situation, introduces the complication, then ends with an observation that is funny, sweet, or sometimes both.

For instance, in “Carry,” he gives the old chestnut “they grow up so fast” a fresh spin. Ollie, now about two years old, refuses to be carried. She wriggles out of Tan’s grasp and before he knows it, she is waddling along on her own. The vignette ends with a sigh and a recognition that his days of carrying his daughter like a baby are numbered.

“Restroom” tackles another predicament familiar to fathers bringing up daughters: where do you take a little girl when nature calls? Tan brings Ollie into the gents, only to discover her studying the urinals with curiosity. Monkey see, monkey do, and suddenly, Daddy has another problem on his hands.

As a manual on being and becoming a father, The Ollie Comics is rich in the texture of the everyday and the small joys of watching your child grow. By giving the particularities of his own experience life on the page, he has made them universal.

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Felix Cheong is a Singapore-based author who has published 33 books across different genres, including eleven graphic novels. He is the author of the graphic medicine books In the Year of the Virus – A Poignant Look Back at the Time When the World Was Affected by the Coronavirus (art by Eko) and A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria (illustrated by Ritwick Roy & Riddhi Trivedi). In January 2027, Felix will publish another graphic medicine book, Opium: A War Story (art by Cheah Sinann). It’s about opium addiction and two Singapore doctors who start an anti-opium movement in 1905.