Four-Color Critiques #3: The Dude Is From Circumstances

Four-Color Critiques #3: The Dude Is From Circumstances

May 09

I remember an afternoon at my first job when I discovered the Dysfunctional Family Circus, a notorious early net project in which Family Circus strips were scanned and recaptioned in the most surreal, offensive, and hilarious manner imaginable.

I seriously spent hours (while at WORK, mind you, being paid poorly to attend) getting lost in the site–I had to read them all, that day, immediately. I laughed myself to tears in silence.

I had a similar experience more recently with Achewood. Busy as hell, totally uninterested in webcomics beyond Penny Arcade, and then out of nowhere–WHAM. I read about it over at J. Caleb Mozzocco’s site (if he was late to the party when he wrote about it, I’m SUPER FUCKING LATE myself). I started reading, and I never stopped. Hours upon days lost to reading and laughing myself to tears. In silence.

That’s the kind of experience Achewood is, to me–solitary, unique, and sort of astonishing.

I’m a comics guy–I mean, I like comics–but comic STRIPS have never really captured my imagination. Sure, I read plenty of Peanuts collections in my youth, and there was a period in my early teens when I was cutting the Batman comic strip out of my daily newspaper and pasting each edition into a series of photo albums, the kind with the sticky pages and the clear plastic to cover the pictures.

I have even less of an affinity for webcomics. I respect them, but they’re not for me. The stuff I’ve read falls into one of two camps: Geek humor of some description, often quite funny but very insular; and attempts to tell stories in short bursts, which are also often quite good, but are doled out in such tiny bites that I can’t really invest myself all the way. It’s probably more a failing on my part than on any of those strips that I’ve never gotten hooked before Achewood…

…and yet, there is something to be said for Achewood as maybe the first truly inviting webcomic creation. It’s not aimed at people who will “get” obscure references or relate to the shared environment of a common subculture. It’s aimed at everyone–or rather, everyone whose sense of humor and view of the world is equipped to accept it. It’s not populist entertainment; far from it. But you don’t have to be gamer, or a toy collector, or a computer programmer to follow it. Anyone can join, even if everyone won’t.

It’s not really just a great “webcomic,” either–there’s something about most major webcomics that is missing when you remove them from the context of their internet universe and try to bring them into the real world. These creations thrive within the nurturing cocoon of their website, their forums, their blogs, their merchandise, and so on. It’s like they’ve created their own complete society and need nothing else to subsist…

…but Achewood doesn’t either, not really. It needs only itself; it feeds off itself in ways that I’ve never seen a webcomic do (and that’s not to say they DON’T, just that I’ve never encountered it). As I understand it, comic strips are effective at two types of content: Gags and “continuities,” longform stories told in microscopic morsels. I’ve never understood the appeal of the latter, but I get the former–I hate to bring up a sitcom again cause I think I did that two weeks ago in my piece on Chronos, but damn, it’s what’s for dinner. Create your characters well enough–sketch out their innards and reveal their minds through their choices–and you can get a laugh just from a look, a shot, a handful of words. Fonzie enters; everyone claps.

That’s what Chris Onstad has been building with Achewood, and that is where he creates the strip today, in the rareified space where all the groundwork is laid and there’s nothing left to do but savor the characters and their world. I can’t think of another creator in my own limited experience who’s hit that level with as much detail, quirkiness, and purpose; Charles Schulz and Peanuts are the only other example that comes to mind…

…you sick of this device yet? I just now noticed it, and thought I’d try it out…

…not that other comic strips don’t have familiar characters and settings. But there’s a WEIGHT to Achewood; a WEIGHT to Peanuts. Back to continuity again, and the advantages of ongoing sequential storytelling over a long period of time–you have that well of knowledge and feeling to draw upon whenever you want to. Snoopy sitting on his dog house typing a story has a heft that Garfield or Marmaduke could never summon, just like Ray’s latest crazy scheme or Cornelius writing closed captioning for pornography are more than just dots on a plotline. They’re statements of character and theme, running gags, and comforting reassurances of the calming embrace of a larger fictional reality.

I’ve been scared to write about Achewood; I seem to be taking it personally. Not that I identify with a cat in a thong and his clinically depressed best friend. It’s the kind of art where my attachment is burrowed deep inside me, like I’m the only one in the world who understands it, and if I were to show it to you–if I were to show it to you and you were to shrug, or even worse, say “That sucks”–if that were to happen, it would hurt my feelings. I would be hurt.

I’m not sure why that is, exactly. There’s something about its history that is daunting and appealing at the same time, and once you know its beats and rests, you feel like you’re in on some big secret, even though the strip has thousands upon thousands of readers and a middle-class family is able to live comfortably off sales of its googaws. It may be just the humor that has that effect; the jokes aren’t inaccessible, but you have to listen close to catch the rhythm. It’s got this emotional component too, these touching moments that just shock the hell out of you, because scrawny cats and teddy bears drawn in a minimalist, repetitive style aren’t supposed to DO THAT. They’re not supposed to make you care, but they do, and if you followed their adventures, you might care, but maybe you wouldn’t. After all, Achewood’s not for everybody…

…Achewood is for me. For you too, perhaps, but most of all for me.