The creator of Achewood quit yet again this week, so I thought this would be as good a time as any to tell you about it.
It is difficult to summarize Achewood in an automatically compelling way. You can say what Achewood is only in the same way you can say that Jaws is a movie about a shark. The description leaves something out, and that “something” is actually “everything”.
Achewood was named the #1 Graphic Novel of 2007 by Time Magazine. I included that sentence so that you would know that other, more normal people like it, and to imbue the rest of what I’m going to say with some credibility by association.
Achewood is a webcomic about talking stuffed animals and cats. But what it really is, is a masterful exercise in absurdist and observational humor, unmatched wordsmithing, and delicate character-driven storytelling. Truthfully, Achewood is my favorite thing. This thing you’re reading right now is not a review. I am not capable of objectivity on this topic. This is a love letter and an impassioned pitch for you to go check it out.
This is also my chance to talk about the journey of being an Achewood fan and what exactly it’s meant to me. The creator, Chris Onstad, is exactly the kind of genius artistic visionary who cannot rein in his own creative powers, who can’t live without expressing himself. The result is that Achewood is not just a webcomic, but is also an advice column written in the voice of one character, a group of blogs written in the voices of twelve other characters, an actual cookbook, a ‘zine series, and a popular song by MC Frontalot.
Alongside the humor, Onstad puts so much humanity and pain into Achewood’s characters that the strip can feel autobiographical in the best possible way. The storyline jarringly dives into a ditch sometime in 2010, culminating in the first “indefinite hiatus”, because for Onstad, that year was a trainwreck of divorce and depression. The man was working with the raw materials of his own life.
Perhaps the best endorsement I can give is that during one of the lowest moments of my life, at a moment when I was as miserable and pathetic and hopeless as I’ve ever been, I went to Achewood.com, picked a random strip, and just started reading. Within ten minutes, I was laughing out loud.
Whether or not this week’s announcement marks a permanent end, Achewood will remain online and free, and if you’ve never checked it out before, start here, and know that I envy you.
