I’ve seen a lot of folks recommend the online comic Achewood by Chris Onstad so I thought I’d give it a try.
Some twenty strips later and…why do I want to read this again? I don’t find the drawing at all interesting or compelling. I’m not in principle opposed to the amorphous mammal-blob school of cutesy drawing (I like Jay Ryan) but Onstad seems determined to do it in as boring a way as possible. His linework is blankly unvaried; he does nothing composition wise; the expressions are so repetitive that it makes his work look like clip-art. It reminds me of Dilbert…though I may actually like Dilbert better. Those strips are really viscerally ugly; Achewood doesn’t even manage that. It’s just boring. And holy crap is the bland computer font for the lettering annoying.
And, yeah, the gags don’t do anything for me either. This one, for example, got a lot of positive comments:
So getting drunk is funny. That’s brilliant, I guess. And being mistaken for gay is really funny too. And poignant. Don’t forget poignant.
Or there’s:this
Sorry, but “Sex Funeral” is a pretty piss-poor band name (the real band the Crucifucks is, for example, in the same vein except it’s actually clever.)
I think part of the appeal is supposed to be the not-funniness of it; the lameness of the jokes is itself a joke, in that ironic we’re-hipper-than-humor way. For non-humor humor to work, though, it needs to be weirder, and, yes, more earnest. Charles Schulz for example; Spike standing in front of a giant waterfall, for example, or Sally declaring she will triumph over her lazy eye; those are funny because there’s really nothing nothing nothing going on; they’re completely flat and ridiculous and at a 90 degree angle to what would usually be considered amusing. This stuff — drunkenness and dumb band names — it’s basic class clown boilerplate. It’s not unusual or unexpected to hear someone try to pass that off as a joke; it’s the sort of thing you’d hear at an amateur stand-up night. And, indeed, Onstad’s stuff in general reminds me of mediocre stand-up; mild smut, mild shock value, lame cultural references (let’s make fun of Flavor Flav!) — it’s really tedious.
Dirk says I’ve got to read six months of archived Achewood strips if I’m going to love it. Alas, I’ve got to get *a lot* more enjoyment out of individual strips if I’m going to read a book’s worth of this crap. In fact, so far, the magic seems to be working in reverse; the more strips I look at the more it pisses me off.
Update:..and that’s Onstad, not Onstaad. Corrected now. Duh.
Update 2: I’d urge folks to scroll down through comments. Tucker Stone and Bill Randall offer much more educated takes on the strip, and several others point out some of their favorite moments. All of which allows my loathing to take on a more complex, more meaningful shape….
Sorry to hear it. I thought the Playgirl strip was funny. It’s funny because the kid was so nervous he didn’t look at what he was grabbing and unexpectedly ended up finding an ally in the shopclerk. Also there’s the third-panel gag of how people often make up their own interpretation of things like shoplifting laws.
Not that this strip is anywhere near the perfection of Barnaby, but the simple geometries of the characters make me think of Barnaby, and I would argue that this strip, like Barnaby, uses the Futura-lookin’ font very well.
Also, if you are completely repulsed by the strip you won’t care about this, but Chris Onstad has managed to create an interesting universe of blogs, cookbooks, and journals written by the characters, as well as some very clever t-shirts. If you can find them, he also occasionally does larger, full-color strips that use more complex compositional devices (mostly cribbed from Chris Ware) but of course it’s still Chris Onstad, so you probably don’t care…
You may find that the most popular webcomics are not always the best. I’ve never managed to get into Achewood or any number of the “top” webcomics out there.
Hey CSSO. I got the joke in the Playgirl one. I just think it’s irritating, cliched, and borderline offensive — reminiscent, not coincidentally, of the ways in which Chris Ware’s fetishization of his character’s own poignant pitifulness fills me with bile.
By the by, do you want to provide links to some of the things you’re talking about? I am probably too lazy/uninterested to go looking for that content myself, but I’d probably at least give it a look if I could just click through….
Hey Derik. I’ll try looking at some of the less well-known ones…I’ve just heard a lot of good about Achewood from people I respect, so I thought I’d give it a whirl….
Check out dinosaur comics at http://www.qwantz.com/ . It’s the same art every day…only the dialogue changes. It’s pretty funny, esp. the first few strips one reads. I read a whole book of them and was pretty entertained. Obviously the art is just crappy clip art, but of course, that’s part of the joke.
Noah, I think there’s a lot to criticize about Achewood but I'm getting very little from this. Have you read a whole story arc, or just a couple strips from 8 years ago? Dirk's right about the 6 months, not because it grows on you, but because the gags are so based in character & dialogue that it takes that long to get acclimated.
But if you don't think getting drunk is (or at might can be) funny, is it just a temperamental mismatch from the start? I mean, I hate xkcd, but I’m a poor match for punchlines like “chmod” and “perl.”
Hey Bill. I tried to read a whole arc, but was so irritated after a handful that I gave up. Maybe if someone were paying me I’d make it through more, but for pleasure…eh.
Drunkenness can be funny, sure. It can lead to slapstick or surreal humor or to a number of things, I guess. The humor here just seems to be a flat “being drunk is funny” though, and that, as I said, pretty much strikes me as stand-up. Which, alas, repels me.
There seems to be an insular, smug hipness in Achewood, and a self-conscious preciousness, that, yes, I really don’t like. There are some things that I can look at and say, yeah, not for me, but no offense (a good bit of yaoi is like that). Achewood irritates me because I think it’s bad, not because I think it isn’t aimed at me.
I’ve seen those dinosaur comics before and really enjoyed them, Eric. But Bill…yeah, xkcd doesn’t look very good.
Noah Berlatsky, Appointed Slaughterer of Sacred Cows
Aw, that’s too bad. I find some of your criticism to be totally expected–Achewood’s art will never be the draw, and the lettering does have a tendency to be irritating–but some of it I find a little bewildering. Calling the band “Sex Funeral” seems sort of clear to me–Ray wouldn’t call the band that. Neither would Roast Beef or Phillipe. But yeah, Lyle would. It wouldn’t make sense for Lyle to call a band something that’s really clever–he’s a barely-functioning binge drinker. They can be funny, yeah–but not really clever. Actually, if you pull back a little, I think you’re irritated and blaming the creator for something that is internal to the strip’s characters–the lame references especially are part and parcel of who Roast Beef and Ray are. I think a big part of the humor comes from the basic repetition of the simple fact that Ray’s entire personality is weirdly matched with this almost magical ability to be wildly successful at everything he does. Sure, there’s lots of characters (people too) who have an amateur stand up schtick mixed with tired hip-hop references, but how many of them are living a life of constant success?
I’m not really sure where your “hipper than humor” thing comes from. I feel like you’re reaching to find a reason why you didn’t laugh at it, when the honest truth is that you didn’t laugh because you didn’t think it was funny. “hipper” seems to imply (to my understanding) that it’s not going for the laugh–and I from my own experience (with the all-stoned softball arc, or the great outdoor fight, or Subway wars) Achewood is always going for the laugh.
At the same time, I think comedy is harder thing to gauge sometimes. A lot of big time stuff that’s really important and critically loved doesn’t appeal to me at all. I have the tendency, specifically with humor, to feel like standing up for something that actually does make me laugh, mostly because I don’t get the opportunity with other stuff.
Well, I’m allergic to stand-up, or any comedy with no stance but ridicule (Family Guy, etc). That’s hipster humor– detached, shallow, and ironic– right? I don’t get it here so much.
Mostly, it’s how Palo Alto it all is. Armpit of a town, but infected with millions of silicon dollars, so now it has Karl Lagerfield, fake sushi bars, and mass denial that it’s still an armpit. I don’t know that Onstad thinks it’s an armpit (he still lives there, I believe), but his satire of it’s dead-on. No matter how much money you have, part of you still wants to huff gas fumes from a sock: so there’s the nebulously rich idiot Ray with nebulously inbred Nice Pete, perfect for each other and the white liberal who feels bad about success, which seem to me half of Achewood’s core audience (its NPR appearances, etc).
The other half is people like a couple of my old students, who just liked it for the cussing.
Family Guy just about makes me want to kill myself in about 15 different ways. Good points all around Bill.
Tucker Stone: Ray wouldn’t call the band that. Neither would Roast Beef or Phillipe. But yeah, Lyle would. It wouldn’t make sense for Lyle to call a band something that’s really clever–he’s a barely-functioning binge drinker.
This touches on why I read the strip: I’m in awe of Onstad’s skill at creating characters. Each Achewood character has a voice so much their own that any random paragraph of dialogue, stripped from context, would be immediately recogizable as belonging to that one particular character.
Achewood also has an undercurrent of sadness running through it, so if poignant pitifulness isn’t your thing then this may never be the strip for you no matter how much you read. “Poignant” is key, though–we’re supposed to empathize. Onstad wouldn’t be as good as he is at writing these characters if he wanted the audience to feel superior.
I think my favorite funny moment was the strip where we discovered Phillippe’s idea of God resembled his dentist. I have an odd sense of humor, though.
Yes, I definitely think the frat-boy irony comparison was a bit off base. Frat boys don’t really do poignance. I think, reconsidering, that Achewood is much more “This American Life”; there’s irony there, but shot through with smug poignance and smugger quirkiness.
Like “This American Life” (and as Bill and Tucker both half suggest) I get a sense of slumming. And that makes more sense of the ways in which it reminds me of Chris Ware as well.
I have to say too…the art is really a hurdle. The designs are so unmemorable that it’s really difficult to tell one character from another. It just seems like bad cartooning as well as bad art.
But despite all that, and eager as I am to adopt the sacred cow killing mantle that David lays before me…I think I’d have to read more and be a lot more knowledgeable about the strip before I came anywhere near a kill. I mean, maybe I winged it a bit or something.
Noah Berlatsky, Winger of Sacred Cows?
That doesn’t really sound especially impressive, I must admit….
What’s the critique of “stand-up” here…do you mean stand-up comedy as some kind of standard genre? Or are you referring to something else entirely? Surely stand-up comedy, like any other art form has more than one mode of practice. Steve Martin’s stand up always struck me as just the funniest thing going—nothing like Jerry Seinfeld, for instance, or Bill Cosby (who are also funny, of course). I don’t see how Achewood is like any of these figures from the stand-up canon. Maybe I just don’t understand what you’re talking about…
The guy who did Barnaby also did the greatest children’s books going, btw, “Harold and the Purple Crayon”–the original books (of which I think there are only 4 or 5) are just awesome. Avoid those not actually by Crockett Johnson
Harold and the Purple Crayon is great, I agree. The videos are nice too.
I think when I think standard stand-up I think more Jerry Seinfeld — who I don’t think is funny at all, I fear.
Eric, I think of the hacks now on Comedy Central, like Dane Cook, whose birth is a proof God hates me and wants me to be sad. Standup seems broadly more cruel & cynical than in Martin's heyday.
Wesley, I agree that he's freakishly good at voicing his characters– they're mostly two-dimensional, but the dialogue would work as radio plays. But I no longer buy that it's poignant. Sad, cruel, depressing, sure, but it's hardly in service of some great humanism.
Noah, slumming's a good word for it. I laughed twice at today’s strip, but the art is frankly hideous. However– because it's cut-&-paste, the characters stay on model. That's a leg up on most webcomics. (Have you ever seen his paintings? Hooboy.)
I liked the Commodore storyline… it starts here & goes for maybe six installments.
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=09162008
Hey Alan C. Thanks for the link. That does seem like a good place to try to get one’s mind around Achewood.
And it confirmed pretty solidly that, yes, I hate this strip. I was too quick to dismiss the frat boy irony meme; this could have been an outtake from Animal House or something. Except that John Belushi is good at physical humor, and Achewood is not.
Yeah; the nervous winking misogyny; the too clever by half cultural references (“you know wikipedia”), the nervous winking adolescent attitude towards sexuality, the whole bad sitcom zany zany set-up — that was repulsive.
This is the critically acclaimed darling, and yet Bloom County gets sneered at. I officially don’t get it.
Why so down on nervous winking?
Seriously, there’s a reason everyone keeps telling you it’s an acquired taste.
Noah is wrong. Achewood is very funny. He just gets more out of hating it than any appreciation he might have.
I mean, what is the problem, really? It employs irony?
It’s “offensive” to think that being mistaken for a gay in that situation might be uncomfortable?
And this is somehow similar to Chris Ware “fetishizing” the pitiful qualities of his characters?
Where is the “smugness”, exactly?
Bullshit.
Oh come on. I’m never wrong.
The best compromise of all is to accept that both “Achewood” and “Bloom County” are mediocre. The intensity of devotion for these one-note strips is an endless puzzlement.
Chester Gould is wrong. Bloom County is very funny. He just gets more out of hating it than any appreciation he might have. Don’t be a hater!
Seriously, though..I’ve always thought Bloom County was a pretty magical strip. Yes, the art isn’t great (I mean, it looks great next to Achewood, but…) But Breathed had a real gift for verbal rhythms and surreal situations. I liked his use of politics as just one of a number of nutty gags, as well; he wasn’t a political cartoonist, but various newsmakers wandered in and out of the strip in a way that was very satisfying and (I thought) unique (Bill the Cat’s fling with Jeanne Kirkpatrick; the Basselope missile delivery system, etc.)
Yeah. I still love Bloom County.
The joke in the drinking strip isn’t “haha drunk”, it’s the jarring jump from their naïve exploration to a weirdly specific type of drunkeness – what police? why would he be scared of them?
I’m not equipped to mount a large-scale defense of Achewood, but I’ll repeat the idea that it’s not going to work for many people jumping in at this point – I’d wait for Dark Horse’s Big Proper Collection of the first year (or whatever) for a proper appraisal. I get why they started with the Great Outdoor Fight, but I don’t think it’s by any means a surefire hit for the uninitiated. I’m a (lapsed) long-time reader, and it’s definitely not my favourite story.
The art… yeah, I definitely had trouble differentiating the characters to begin with – the abrupt introduction of the cats really threw me – but it works for me now, and he ends up doing some really funny stuff with it.
Like I say, it’s been a couple of years since I was really steeped in this stuff, but mysogyny, homophobia, fear-of-sex, I never got any of that from it. Except for the usual laugh-at-the-perpetrator way, which I don’t remember seeming disingenuous… it’s possible I’m blinded by a long-standing affection for the series. I’m pleased it’s doing as well as it is.
Yeah…I was ready to think more exposure might be the problem for me at first, but I don’t think that’s the case at this point. I mean, if everybody disliked it as much as I do at first reading, no one would ever get through an entire arc. And, obviously, it’s quite popular — Dirk said he’d never seen a negative review, I think. So it can’t be *that* inaccessible. I mean, this isn’t Habermass.
The problem with Achewood lately is that, while the characters used to have their own voices, Onstad’s started giving every single character these identical, rambling Dennis Miller monologues. It’s also settled into a very conservative sitcom formula; more adventurous storylines like the Outdoor Fight are nowhere to be seen.
This strip says it all: http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=10272008
It’s not only rooted in this bizarre, dysfunctional sentimentality (which is sort of like the opposite of comedy,) the characters both have the identical, reference-filled monologues going. If you read a few more strips before and after this one, you’ll see who the girl in this strip is: a young stripper whose intellectual and emotional depth is supposed to be self-evident because she’ll sleep with a guy several decades her elder. Onstad mainly writes two kinds of women: bad women are annoying, bitchy, and probably old. Good women are young, always think the men are funny, and always want to fuck.
All the girlfriends in Achewood are creepy.
I have enjoyed Achewood in the past and I hope Onstad doesn’t see all this recent success as a validation of his worst habits.
Wow, that one was Jeff Brown worthy. Urk.
Good call, JC. It's definitely a boys'-own universe. & He seems to cut off every potentially long story just when they get started.
Noah, did you just make a Jurgen Habermass reference? Damn!
I love Achewood, but I mostly disliked the first twenty strips you read, too. If I hadn’t continued at least into the introduction of Ray and Roast Beef, I definitely would think the strip were terrible.
http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=10272008
-Okay, that strip is terrible
I feel like I should enter this discussion, but it probably won’t do anybody any good. Oh well, what the hell:
I used to hate Achewood and not understand why everybody seemed to love it, but I think I eventually gave it enough of a chance for it to grow on me. The art also really turned me off for a while, but every so often, somebody would link to a strip that was pretty funny, and I finally read through something like a year’s worth of storylines, and now I’m onboard, mostly. I think what everybody’s saying is pretty much right, in that it’s good with character, and a lot of the humor comes from a sort of hipster offensiveness, sort of lowbrow striving toward the highbrow. Or maybe not, I dunno. I think Onstad also comes up with some pretty cleverly funny ideas, like disguising porn videos with covers and titles that nobody would ever want to watch, or giving a kid a surprise gift of not getting coked up on his birthday. Anyway, given the chance to get to know it, and get used to the awful drawings, there’s some really hilarious stuff there. But I don’t blame you for not wanting to try.
Still, I’m hardly an evangelist for the strip, and it’s not one that I would defend to my death or anything. Acquired taste? Sure, but also kind of a unique taste, to which some are probably allergic.
Eh, so that added nothing of worth. Sorry to waste everyone’s time.
For me, I don’t read it for the humor, I read it because Onstad is just so damn good at characterization. Achewood’s characters are so fleshed out and so full of real personality, I can’t help but to read it. Sometimes I think it’s *really* funny and sometimes I think it’s not. But I don’t think it’s everyone’s cup of tea, either.
Achewood is the greatest online comic in existence. The characterization is wonderful, the knack for middlebrow pop-culture humor, Onstad’s ability to pluck weird and plausible conversational moments out of the air, the absurdism, I love it all. Yes, it’s possible to pick a few lame ones out of the thousands. I also think that the first few months are not as good and I, myself, initially dismissed it as a lame “just trying to be offensive” strip on the basis of some of the early strips which some of my coworkers had posted in their cubicles. However, when I started reading the strip again, during the “Subway Wars” storyline, I absolutely fell in love with it.