I treasure the things that make me laugh out loud — David Sedaris is one, Blazing Saddles is another. Achewood is not only one of the few comic strips that makes me laugh out loud on a regular basis, but it does even more: It regularly baffles, inspires and amazes me.
It’s just possible that Chris Onstad is the Wes Anderson of comic artists, and to peek inside Onstad’s brain would be like spending a day at the Friar’s Club with the illegitimate son of Charlie Chaplin and Lenny Bruce. That’s the cleverest thing I’ll come up with, so the review is going to be all downhill from here, but keep reading, because Achewood is amazing.
Ray Smuckles is doin’ this. You may not want to know what “this” is.
The cast consists of a motley assortment of stuffed animals and cats; the stuffed animals seem to live at the author’s house, the cats have their own pads. The self-hating, tech-geek cat recently moved out of his grandmother’s trailer and into the pool house of his best friend, the hedonistic, wealthy-because-he-sold-his-soul-to-the-devil cat (Roast Beef and Ray Smuckles, respectively).
All of the characters have bizzarre attributes that serve to make them either endearing or irritating, but somehow make them more believeable. Ray’s specialty seems to be starting businesses with half-baked business plans, hiring his buddies to develop the products, then quickly firing them when things turn sour. He’s also very adept at throwing theme parties — he’s quite the foodie — and writes an advice column. He’s incredibly ego-centric, but, by virtue of his fabulous wealth, he’s also very generous when it comes to his friends.
The Roomba Players (Teodor and Roast Beef) act out a scene from The Empire Strikes Back.
Roast Beef suffers from some form of social anxiety disorder. His confidence in his own abilities, be they social or technical, ebb and flow from cautious optimism to outright despair. He owns a collection of t-shirts with self-deprecating slogans such as “I am the guy who sucks,” and “God dammit what am I going to do about my problems?” Not surprisingly he has committment issues; his current girlfriend (whom he met in heaven) is a bartender who, at one point, made money by eating Subway sandwiches in front of a web cam (she was going through some Hard Times).
The emotional high point of the strip is a young otter named Phillippe. He is the eternal child, seeing the world through a naivité so extreme he once married a flower because he was told that by touching it he had made it pregnant.
The otter is wearing the fake bottom his mother sent him.
He is devastated when he finds out his new bride is an annual and will die when winter comes. His mother occasionally sends him gifts of the oddest nature, including Tommy the Tummy, the I Am Cabable Of Wonderful Things doll, and, my personal favorite, the Walk-Around Butt. He is incredibly sensitive, and wrapped up his successful campaign for the presidency by giving up the office in order to save Micky Mouse’s life. (The Phillippe for America storyline produced what must be one of the filthiest comic strips ever. You’ve been warned.)
To top it all off, every Achewood strip comes with a hidden bonus in the form of an alt tag — hover your cursor over the strip, if you don’t know what I mean. The alt tags are often hilarious in their own right, and sometimes add yet another level of bizarreness to an already surreal experience.
Onstad has a way with words that sometimes boggles the mind. He can turn a phrase that you’ve never heard before, but makes you instantly wonder why it isn’t part of the general lexicon.
Achewood. Read it. Don’t get frustrated if you don’t get it right off the bat — it’s about as accessible as Camus, but go ahead and fake it ’til you make it, you won’t be disappointed.