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The Achewood Episteme

Chris Onstad's momentary diversion on the way to the grave

BY MARTIN MULKEEN

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comic from achewood

RAY SMUCKLES IS ACHEWOOD's pre-eminent good-time Charlie, a thong-sporting cat with a penchant for "getting twisty on a chilly stella [artois]" or eight. Roast Beef is his computer-programming emo counterpart-a lover of geometry and slogan t-shirts he is too self-conscious to wear. Teodor, a stuffed bear, is a hopeless internet romantic. Mr. Bear is Achewood's learned, literary elder statesman who writes children's books. Lyle, another substance-abusing cat, dreams of his own whiskey label and a world in which he could "wake up with the gin already in [him]." Phillipe is a five-year-old stuffed otter campaigning for the presidency while taking phone calls from his over-bearing mother. Todd is a squirrel given to snorting yay in his squirrel-sized van. They all live together in the bizarre world of Achewood.

Given the constraints imposed on syndicated comic strips that appear in major newspapers-general public appeal, accessibility, and linear, progressive narrative structures-and the fact that Chris Onstad's Achewood meets none of them, the strip's residence on the internet seems logical. Defying the necessary conditions for major newspaper syndication, it follows that one might turn to the internet for a medium free of content restriction. Achewood's unique brand of humor, however, defies all logic and resists all applications of conventional reason in its interpretation.

Chris Onstad started Achewood in the fall of 2001. A Stanford graduate and former editor of the university's 100-year-old humor magazine, The Stanford Chaparral, Onstad now makes a living writing and drawing his comic strip online.

Achewood's website contains no advertisements, and access to the strip archives is free. Onstad has made Achewood profitable through merchandizing-selling t-shirts, buttons, various accessories, and homemade books to a loyal and voracious fan base. Achewood has cultivated its following by submerging readers inside the community of its eclectic and endearing cast of characters. Blogs for each character, as well as one character's advice column, accompany the daily comic strip. Loading Achewood's web page feels more like logging onto a social network program than a quick excuse for a chuckle.

The Fourth Wall As Resilient Inflatable Boxing Clown

Achewood's confused hilarity stems from its fidelity to a dynamic and porous narrative skin. While character personas remain consistent, the reader's relationship to the characters is in a constant state of flux. Sometimes it matters that the characters are stuffed animals and must avoid interaction with humans, other times this makes no difference. Sometimes there is narration, other times not. The author, or at least a character named Onstad, has appeared in the strip several times before. Characters die, explore the afterlife, and come back to life later. Achewood's textual landscape fundamentally resists definition.

The central joke of Achewood comes at the expense of the traditional world of comic strips, in both form and content. Achewood often employs parody, and this parody comes in the form of a displacement and spoofing of classic tropes of the comic strip genre itself-the joke arrives only after an intentionally lackluster punch-line falls flat and an additional and unexpected panel surprises the reader with a final bizarre turn. A few strips even featured characters making disparaging prank phone calls to canonized genre personalities including Kathy, Garfield, and Marmaduke.

Achewood is often compared to Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes for its stuffed animal characters and similarly addictive qualities. Such a comparison underscores many of the most striking features of Onstad's work. Calvin and Hobbes posited the ambiguity of Hobbes' objective reality in fairly straightforward terms-he was alive for Calvin, but he was a stuffed animal in the eyes of others. Achewood's reality is not contingent upon the imagination, but instead has pure, aestheticized contingency and uncertainty at its core. In this sense one may read it as the archetype for the postmodern comic strip as contrasted to the Romantic effort of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes.

Both strips revel in the mundane nature of the American suburb, but while Calvin and Hobbes privileged the individual subject's imagination in a celebration of both natural and psychological worlds, Achewood refuses its readers both a stable set of structural limitations and a static vantage point from which to judge its action. In his imagination, Calvin traversed other galaxies as Space Man Spiff and devoured prey as a T-Rex in the Cretaceous period. Each panel of Achewood remains in constant renegotiation with the most basic rules of engagement.

Loyal fans and detractors alike may shudder at the postmodern label, but the strip certainly invites such a reading. Achewood's cast includes anthropomorphized stuffed animals, real animals, and robots, all of disparate ages and persuasions, side by side. Highbrow literary parody rubs shoulders with bathroom humor. The cast enjoys palatial southern California digs where money is no object. They consume popular human culture on the couch while gorging themselves on Jack Daniels.

Hella Zeitgeist

Informed by a uniquely Californian sensibility, a disposition that extends beyond ranch style houses and many characters' reliance on various incarnations of 'hella,' the humor of Achewood is situated inside the contemporary American zeitgeist. Roast Beef, one of two most prominent feline characters, embodies many of the qualities college-aged kids would deem definitively 'emo.' He is depressed. His speech bubbles appear in a diminutive font size to evoke his resigned ennui. Roast Beef finds joy in computer programming, collecting t-shirts he is too timid to wear, and little else. His character captures the mixture of playfulness, ambiguous irony, and melancholia that characterize the spirit of the Achewood community.

Achewood's fans find themselves at home among a familiar set of cultural codes. This entails a playful, at times sarcastic disposition on music, movies, and literature. "In the beginning," explains Onstad, "I wanted to create something that anyone could pick up and understand without having listened to, say, some obscure new wave band. Over time I've loosened up and will make a reference I like if it works." Despite an attention to esoteric and culturally specific humor, Achewood now boasts fans of all ages from all over the world.

Silicon Valley and dot-com boom spoofs abound. One story arc finds digital novice Ray Smuckles and code-savvy Roast Beef patenting and selling a spreadsheet program that "would tell a person when they needed to buy eggs or milk, based on how much eggs or milk they started with." Their business venture falls through when they lose their only client, their roommate, Phillipe, a five-year-old stuffed otter. Ray fires Roast Beef, the brains of the operation, and offers him a mix tape he made as severance pay. Roast Beef listens to the mix tape on his headphones later: "Dear Roast Beef, As you may have noticed this is not actually a mix tape. It is just me talking onto a regular tape. I could not figure out how to get the CDs to play onto the tape player. I am sorry about this Roast Beef."

The strip's humor is often couched in this off-kilter sense of despair. In a recurring gag, Phillipe questions Lie Bot, one of the strip's robot characters, "What is the saddest thing?" Phillipe's innocent countenance wells up with grief as Lie Bot responds, "the saddest thing is a little girl who is told by her own mother and father that she will never be pretty. And then they open the front door, and on the porch is a little white suitcase, with all of her things in it." Achewood lends sympathetic coos to the purity and innocence of childhood while simultaneously inviting sick, maniacal laughter at its inevitable destruction.

It's All Ups

Onstad insists that the online medium is not a steppingstone toward print, though Achewood is syndicated in some college newspapers. The internet is too attractive for the unlimited creative freedom it affords the artist. "I can do what I want," Onstad told the University of British Columbia's Ubyssey Magazine, "and I don't have some editor dumbing me down or cleaning me up to fit his or her idea of what a 'comic strip' should be so it can go in his paper. It's all ups, as far as I can see. Comics don't need newspapers anymore, which is great."

As for the bizarre, protean framework holding together the diverse, lovable bunch of Achewood residents, Onstad assured the Indy that this is unlikely to crystallize into a static, discernable entity. "Achewood is still pretty young on the geological timeline, and I still enjoy experimenting with the medium, so hopefully you'll see even more work to come which makes the strip difficult to characterize.The guiding principle is that if I genuinely like a piece, others will too." Indeed, to distill the multiplicity of story-telling techniques into a singular, easily accessible structure would compromise an essential quality of Achewood's success-its lack of any structural essence whatsoever. Otherwise, how could a discussion of God's pot use between two squirrels, one a drunk-driving cokehead, the other a ghost, run the day after a strip dedicated to guitar tablature?

Martin Mulkeen B'05 KNOWS THIS GUY WHO MADE OUT WITH DONNA

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