In his trainwreck of an interview in the A.V. Club, the first words Dave Sim uses to describe his graphic work, Cerebus, are “the longest sustained narrative in human history.” While that’s indicative of Sim’s pompous attitude, it also speaks to the size of his accomplishment. Of all the things you’d expect to tell a coherent story over thirty years, a serial comic about a barbarian aardvark is not one of them. The feat seems more impressive because of the mundanity of its protagonist. That the comic book medium could tell such a story is impressive; that an aardvark could tell such a story is almost inconceivable.
I feel the same way looking back on Chris Onstad’s Achewood, the beloved webcomic that kicked off ten years ago this month and came to a sputtering end earlier this year. Telling an interesting story is hard enough to do that one would think it’s enough. Telling an interesting story that’s also full of belly laughs is noteworthy. Telling an interesting story full of belly laughs in an irregular webcomic is an Olympian feat. But telling an interesting story, laughs, webcomic, etc, with talking cats and stuffed animals in the Southern California suburbs as protagonists is absurd. It’s incomprehensible that someone could succeed so well with such material. Picture Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier in 1954 by running a mile in 71 seconds, while drunk. Or Dock Ellis pitching a no-hitter on LSD, which has the added virtue of having actually happened and would doubtless appeal to Onstad, the genius behind Stoned Lightning.
Picking apart Onstad’s masterwork is a daunting task. Achewood itself is hard to grapple with, due in part to its absurd voice, the webcomic genre (relatively scant of critical texts so far) and the shift in focus over its run. So this analysis will be broad by necessity. Bear with me, as I hope it’s worth the ride.
ACHEWOOD AS SHE IS SPOKE
With a story that spans ten years, a cast of dozens of characters and hundreds of strips, where does a newcomer start with Achewood? Opinions vary. Completists may want to start from the very beginning, but be warned that the first six months of strips have only a modest relation to what came later. “The Party” is the first story arc in the drop-down menu available on the front page, but that skips some details that newcomers might find interesting – Teodor’s relationship with the mythical Penny, the introduction of Ray, etc. I can’t stand people who praise a series but insist I have to invest 40 hours into it to “really get it,” but there’s a lot of ground to cover with Achewood.
But at the same time, Achewood might not be your thing. I remember being one of the few people in my circle of friends – maybe the only one – who liked Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead. Zippy’s non sequitur juxtapositions of consumer culture and obscure literary references tickled my absurdist funny bone. Achewood speaks in a similar voice, blending street culture, middle American suburbia, historical trivia and talking cats in a wild, challenging ride.
My recommendation has always been to start at May 2004 in the archives and read the entire month. It’s 20 strips, so you can bang through it in less than half an hour. That month, for whatever cosmic reason, is a good blend of approachable gags, bleak humor and context-free absurdity. It’s a good microcosm of the comic as a whole. If after 20 entries you don’t find yourself curious for more, you can abandon the series without guilt.
Plus, if nothing else, starting there will introduce isosceles lock into your vocabulary.
If you’ve never read Achewood, nip off to May 2004 and give Onstad a try. If you have, it’s worth a return visit to refresh yourself on his style. I’ll wait for you here.
HELLA YELLIN’ ABOUT THE SEX
Achewood excelled in two avenues, the first of which was depicting the untouchable oddness of middle American consumer / suburban culture.
The great expansion into the North American continent has produced a lot of weird artifacts, like cheap motels, vast suburban plots and chain restaurants. These all come from the two conflicting impulses that drove America in the mid-20th century, freedom and property: the nomad’s desire to pack up and go anywhere and the yeoman’s desire to settle down and own land. Thus you get one-story houses with tiny parcels of lawn and vast freeways connecting outings that sound exotic – theme parks, tourist trap museums – but really aren’t.
California exemplifies this unique flavor of America as much as anywhere else. While most of the world visualizes Hollywood or San Francisco when they think of SoCal, there’s a vast stretch that could only be distinguished from the wealthier suburbs of the Heartland by its year-round balminess. This is the Inland Empire, the suburban sprawl between Riverside and San Bernadino. Achewood takes place in a mythical underground community of talking animals that mirrors this slice of America.
[Update: Several commenters informed me of something I would have noticed had I done my due diligence before hitting “Post”: that the Achewood “overground” is based on Palo Alto, CA, which would make it distinctly NorCal. To which: hm. Well, yes. I don’t think it invalidates the later parts of the thesis, and I still think the “underground” has this distinctly Chino feel to it. But I acknowledge the correction.]
Achewood’s focus is consumer culture – a society as defined by the goods and services it buys and the institutions that produce them. Early on in the timeline, Ray acquires tremendous wealth by selling his soul to the Devil and becoming a record producer. He uses this newfound wealth not to build a palatial estate or acquire fine works of art, but instead to buy things like …
34 Sony AIBOs (remember those?).
Or a dancing Santa.
Or copies of Best of Hot Tub Brawls (warning: NSFW, dog penis).
There’s an obvious lesson about how money can’t buy class, but there’s a subtler message about how commercial marketing has taught us to define our desires through impulses. An object is introduced to us for the first time (a robot dog, a DVD of men fighting in a hot tub). We go from having no desire for such a thing to wanting to acquire it, depending on how it’s presented and our sense of our own resources.
Strip away the limit of resources, as happens to Ray, and suddenly everything is available. But Ray still doesn’t know what to want. All he knows to want is what’s marketed to him: hence, the 34 Sony AIBOs. The most initiative he can muster is to venture to eBay and type in “WHAT’S THE BEST THING YOU GOT,” which unlocks a world of opportunity.
(It also leads to one of my favorite and most reusable Achewood quotes: “Nothing else I could say would make more sense given what I own and what I am doing at this moment.“)
Achewood comments not just on the excesses of consumer culture, but also the uniquely weird aspects. Sometimes it’s in a wistful tone, such as the Chain of Behavior cards that entitle you to play mini-golf with a real metal putter. Sometimes it’s with only mildly heightened absurdity, as in the Fiesta Max chain restaurant.
But the tone isn’t always satirical. As with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, sometimes a person who gets everything they always wanted can live happily ever after. And for a person of low ways, such as the perpetually downcast Roast Beef, the right gift at the right time can be all it takes to turn things around.
(This is also one of the classic examples of Onstad offhandedly introducing a piece of pop culture that doesn’t exist but sounds like it should. Of course there was a 1981 movie called Peel-Out Summer, centering around three teenage boys on the brink of college and manhood, peeling out in their ‘65 Ford Galaxie. You can almost picture it in your mind, can’t you?)
This isn’t the only time a cultural artifact directs Roast Beef on some great adventure. There’s the Volvo of Despair, or the time Ray lures Roast Beef back from the moon by making a mockup of the bar from Cheers. And Beef’s always down for a Jack and Diane party. The shared experience of entertainment and commerce may seem a little tawdry at times, but it has the power to uplift as well.
YOU GOT TO COMMISSION THAT WE PERFORM THE MURDER ACT ON YOU
Achewood has never been afraid to jump from satire straight into absurdity, though. When Onstad couldn’t find an existing cultural artifact to borrow or exaggerate, he would invent something out of whole cloth.
The crew’s misadventures with Mexican magical realism are perhaps the best example (NSFW; cat penis).
The layers of absurdity in this little plot are rich and rewarding. Briefly:
1. Teodor has a camera that alters the image of anyone it photographs …
2. … to reveal how they really feel about themselves …
3. … which it can do because it was made in Mexico …
4. … and is thus imbued with Mexican magical realism …
5. … a property that not only exists, but is documented enough for Ray to know about it …
6. … as exemplified by an RV he bought which rained on the inside, constantly.
And this isn’t just a throwaway plot. It leads to one of the bigger character developments in the early series – Pat coming out of the closet – and is responsible for Ray’s ultimate triumph over his rival, Bensington Butters (storyline begins here).
This is one of Onstad’s biggest strengths – not just introducing an element of absurdity, but taking it to its logical conclusion and revisiting it later. After Ray sells his soul for wealth and power, he finds himself in hell (about a year later). He meets Robert Johnson and seems to have an okay time, being too shallow for the existential tortures of the soul. But eventually the banality of hell catches up with him and Roast Beef has to come save him. They soon escape, using a method that’s too delightful to spoil.
Nor is this Beef’s only trip to the afterlife, as he dies on three other occasions (always from being shot) and is sent to heaven. On the first two trips he meets the only girl who ever likes him, Molly, who died several centuries earlier. Their weird courtship continues on Beef’s successive trips to heaven and even after Beef returns to Earth, since she’s able to ship him a nice shirt. But his third trip to heaven ends in disappointment, as he finds that heaven has burned down.
(Don’t worry – it ends well)
As Beef and Molly’s relationship continues to develop into one of the stronger arcs of the series, Onstad doesn’t downplay the weirdness of how they met. When Beef eventually asks Molly to marry him, he gets to meet her family, an extensive clan of Welsh cats who hearken back to the Puritan era. They arrive by a spectral train, since they’re dead (like Molly was, in heaven, remember?) and depart the same way. Why? Why not? How else would a family of dead Welsh cats travel to and fro?
Creating compelling nonsense takes skill. Creating compelling nonsense and then making it seem logical takes art.
Onstad’s real gift, though, was blending these two voices together: a pitch-perfect rendition of middle American consumer culture with a descant of absurdity. In doing so, he brought new attention to both: the absurdity of culture, the culture of the absurd. Take an element of recognizable consumer culture (the questionable cleanliness of taco trucks), heighten to an absurd extreme (Ray’s chain of hermetically sanitized taco carts) and then take it to its logical conclusion (Lyle attracts a clientele of perverts by writing disgusting things about the taco cart).
And it reached its peak with one exceptional storyline.
The Great Outdoor Fight is one of the ten best works of American fiction of the first decade of the 21st Century. I’m not exaggerating when I say that. I’ll defend that claim against all comers.
I alluded earlier to Onstad’s ability to introduce a fictional pop culture artifact and convince you that it’s real. When I first started in on the Great Outdoor Fight storyline, I was half convinced it was an actual event. Doesn’t it sound plausible? Three thousand men piling into a three acre field somewhere outside Bakersfield to wail on each other. It’s not a grand melee from the age of chivalry. It’s a barroom brawl with refreshment tents outside. If any country could produce a weird, brutal display like that, America could.
Once he’s invented the concept, Onstad piles on additional bits of trivia, building a world in miniature. He does this through Roast Beef, who addresses Ray’s ignorance (and ours) with his typically monotone exposition.
And all this before the fight itself starts.
“The Great Outdoor Fight” contains every element of a classic American story in beautiful excess. It’s about violence and masculinity and pride. It’s about the rituals that surround a piece of culture, from the ancient traditions to modern accoutrements. It’s about a man’s search for his father and what it means to be a friend. But most importantly, it’s about shaking an institution from the ground up, in what is easily my favorite line from Achewood and the truest set of words to live by:
If you’ve read it, nothing more needs to be said; if you haven’t, nothing more should be. Start at the beginning and I’ll meet you back here.
THE END! NO MORAL
I know it’s cliche to talk about anything that happened after the World Trade Center attacks as a response to the World Trade Center attacks. And I promise not to do it for at least six weeks after this. But no one starts a webcomic one month after an unprecedented terrorist attack on American soil without at least thinking about the tragedy.
In the wake of the death, destruction and suffering of the Twin Towers’ collapse came the notion that “irony is dead.” Time Magazine was the first to spear irony’s corpse, declaring that:
In the age of irony, even the most serious things were not to be taken seriously. Movies featuring characters who “see dead people” or TV hosts who talk to the “other side” suggested that death was not to be seen as real. If one doubted its reality before last week, that is unlikely to happen again. Which brings us to the more amorphous zones of reality, such as grief and common sorrow. When the white dust settles, and the bereaved are alone in their houses, there will be nothing but grief around them, and nothing is more real than that. In short, people may at last be ready to say what they wholeheartedly believe. The kindness of people toward others in distress is real. There is nothing to see through in that. Honor and fair play? Real. And the preciousness of ordinary living is real as well–all to be taken seriously, perhaps, in a new and chastened time. The greatness of the country: real. The anger: real. The pain: too real.
Time (if not Time) has thankfully proven Roger Rosenblatt wrong (see: Arrested Development, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Daily Show, 30 Rock, The Office, Old School, etc). But in those first few weeks, when coverage of the attack was inescapable, you could very well believe it.
Onstad’s response (if it was meant to address this view) was to hop over irony into pure absurdity. His debut strip defied any attempt at the classic three-line comic strip style.
Yes, drum machines can be confounding. Why is Philippe standing on the instructions for the drum machine? No reason given. Five-year-olds just do odd things sometimes. Why not get him to move? Maybe because the simple pleasure a five-year-old gets from standing on an arbitrary thing is worth more than finding out how to play with our complex electronic toy right this second. Maybe because we get more satisfaction out of positioning ourselves in relation to products – wanting, owning, maintaining, discussing how utterly confounding they are – than we do out of using them as instruments to achieve our goals. Maybe because there’s a Taoist simplicity in saying the thing that you observe. Panel two: “Philippe is standing on it.” Panel three: Philippe is standing on it.
It’s not genius, not yet, anyway. But all of the later elements – Ray’s rise to power, Cartilage Head, dealing with Nice Pete, Roast Beef’s courtship of Molly, death, rebirth and ascension – can all be found there in germ form.
The most common reaction to the September 11th attacks is that the world no longer made sense. What Onstad’s telling us (whether as a reaction to 9/11 or no) is that yes, the world we live in is absurd, but there is yet succor in it.
In his 2009 interview with Vice Magazine, Onstad said, “This is my thing. Achewood is my thing in this life so far. I can’t be lazy about the content. It’s for posterity, my flag for the ages, the tent post I pitched in my 20s and 30s. I’d rather take six years off than have a familiar gag.” Two years later, after the output of new strips trickled to a halt, Onstad announced something to that effect. Doing this saddened his legions of loyal readers, but it in no way diminishes the strength of his prior content. Achewood remains both an example and a challenge of what the webcomic genre – and the sequential art medium, and storytelling in general – can be pushed to in one dude’s hands.
Take ‘er easy, hombre.
