Squanchin' Into May
Achewood returns, causing me to yet again reevaluate my life choices
Roundabout 9/11 times, a fella in NoCal named Chris Onstad started drawing a silly little comic about his cats and a few stuffed animals. Not much happened in the strip plot-wise, but the language was unlike anything I had ever come across. Chris has this way of describing the world unique to him and his characters. He posted several times a week, and as he did the storylines grew increasingly complex and rich. The characters developed nuance and deep emotional motivations and consequences. Some died and were reborn, some did not age, some were damaged and never recovered. The illustrations and design also improved, some of them rivaling Chris Ware and other comics innovators. It was brilliant, tortured, and downright weird.
I see myself in many of the Achewood characters: the self-obsessed and prissy Pat, the brilliant but clinically depressed Roast Beef, the clueless but charmed Ray, the perpetually grouchy Lyle, the competent yet naive Teodor, the forever-five Philippe, the serial murderer Nice Pete (who talks like what you might imagine a Faulkner character sounds like if you don’t read much Faulkner) and Cornelius, an old old very old man-bear.
There are too many others to recount here, but suffice to say they are all interesting and dryly hilarious. The commentaries on society are unsparing, and Onstad has a special distaste for Rachel Ray that rivals Tony Bourdain.
Todd the Squirrel, forever agent of psychopathic chaos, is one of my favorites. A Todd strip is always worth the time.
In late 2010, Achewood began a slow withdrawal from the world. It slowed to a trickle, then a dribble. In 2016 Chris committed to a year, then ceased drawing the strip altogether. In a farewell post to his fans, he said he wanted to focus on other things. He’d started Achewood in his mid-20s and, as a 41-year-old, wanted to do something else. He also said he’d probably be back.
Achewood was always a cult favorite, and this continued after Chris stopped drawing it. Facebook (especially the Achewood: A Momentary Diversion on the Road to the Grave group) kept the language alive, and Chris was still running the online Achewood store which produced bumper stickers, t-shirts, and glassware. He still did commission work and posted on Instagram, had funky side projects like his Portland soda company. He also wrote food articles for PNW magazines and newspapers and probably a shit-ton more stuff I don’t know about.
Achewood as a strip was pretty much gone, and we all mourned it. Then, earlier this month, Chris announced that he was restarting the strip on Patreon with new material every week, a host of extra stuff (such as blogs and zines) as well as the kind of direct personal interaction Instagram has trained us to expect.
People came flocking back, and I think Chris is finally able to make a living from his art without needing to constantly scramble for funding. He even trained an AI LLM on Ray Smuckles’ particular way of speaking in order to have a Raybot GPT (which is pretty fun, but doesn’t have the deep canonical knowledge of a superfan such as myself who knows that Ray had a grudge against Akkolade).
So what does all this have to do with me? Shoot, man. I don’t know. I was inspired by Chris Onstad. Maybe I was jealous of him as well. I’d been trying to be a professional cartoonist since 1992 with only indifferent success. I longed to have anything like the kind of readership Achewood had, to have Dark Horse publish one of my long-form works, or have people stand in line for a book signing. I toiled at comics for months on end, and nobody ever read them.
The closest I got was when Jim Redden published my strip RAIL in his alt-left newsweekly PDXS in the mid-90s, but when that paper ceased publication I pretty much did too. A few years later I became an animator / comics artist who always had a day job to pay the bills.
But writing and drawing comics is hard, draining work. I still do if from time to time, and have a few different titles, but mostly I spend my time writing stories and novels. Not much has been published by anyone but myself, which is discouraging.
Two years ago I started this Substack, but the past year or so I only add new stuff once or twice a month. I have tons of old material sitting in the can, but I am pretty unmotivated. I don’t see a hell of a lot of point in shouting into a void. I write a great deal, but most of what I do stays locked up. You can’t win if you don’t play, but you can’t lose either.
As for Substack, much of what I read on the platform is either really depressing (but not shocking) news from Heather Cox Richardson, Lucican Truscott, or Sy Hersh.
Sometimes I find interesting stuff about writing, but the emphasis of many of these newsletters focuses on “growth toward profitability” and other distasteful marketing ideas. I’m interested in the craft of writing for the sake of craft, but like most writers I also crave to be read.
So many of the ideas that rattle around my head come from things I’ve read (for example, every time I see a lock I think of the Hardy Boys adventure I read when I was nine that featured a locksmith who was so tired of seeing locks that he went to great pains to hide all the hardware in his own house, making all the doors like Chinese puzzle boxes where you had to push the carvings to one side or another in order to unlock the thing). I think of how much narrative fiction has affected me over the years, and it’s a humbling and often terrifying prospect to imagine I can attempt to do what, say, Andre Dubus did in his short stories.
I take all this seriously, which can be problem. The itch is always there, always, but it’s so very hard to keep at something. I can totally understand why Onstad quit the struggle for so long, and also understand why he came back.
So today I was commenting on the Achewood Patreon and realized that I hadn’t updated this newsletter in more than a month, so I wanted to throw some little paper boat into the river. This is it, pretty much off the cuff and only lightly edited.
Hopefully next time I’ll dump something more substantial than this blogger-type brain dump first draft garbage.
Thanks for reading anyway! I do appreciate it.
JC
“Growth toward profitability and other distasteful marketing ideas.” Nail on the head! They run up their numbers with bullshit click bait posts like that and then call themselves writers. Thanks for your post, JC. Don’t stop.