Lev Grossman's Intro to Achewood

Hello, Author's Tier!

My friend Lev Grossman, brilliant author of The Magicians trilogy, as well as the new and stupendous (I've actually read it) Arthurian novel The Bright Sword, as well as the film The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, wrote the following intro to the legendarily dead Achewood Oni Press anthology series. To have the man who is quoted about Vonnegut on Vonnegut's own Wikipedia page also pen an appreciation of your work is just about as tops as career and personal fulfillment gets. (His intro was penned before the Patreon relaunch, if some of the verb tenses throw you.) I am considering adding this to the main website itself.

Without further hagiographic suck-off, I give you, by his own kind and recent permission, Lev's intro.

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My all-time favorite Achewood storyline is probably the one where Roast Beef—a cat who is depressed—steals a rocket ship and flies to the moon. The rocket was built by Pat—another cat, who is irritable—but Beef takes it anyway. He really, really needs to get to the moon. 

The moon is a calm, empty place. You can be alone there. Roast Beef doodles the word JAVA in the moon-dust with his paw; his thought-bubble reads “I could think about computer programming forever up here.” Also, as Roast Beef points out, the moon is 239,000 miles away from The Cure, a band that sucks, though probably Beef is just saying that to further mess with Pat. (In case you’re feeling bad for Pat, he’s kind of an asshole and will much later, in an unrelated incident, shoot Beef in a Subway.)

Roast Beef does eventually come home, but only because his friend Ray tells him he has a porno. He doesn’t actually have a porno, he just said that to trick Roast Beef into coming home, but he makes it up to him by turning his house into Cheers. Sam the bartender is played by a teddy bear named Téodor. The end!

Achewood—written and drawn by Chris Onstad—is a comic strip and therefore necessarily confined to little square panels, which themselves make up brief discrete episodes, and its principal players are mostly talking stuffed animals and robots. But like other giants of the medium—Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, XKCD—it ranges far outside the traditionally narrow emotional and formal scope of a conventional strip. There is nothing cute or cartoonish about its dramatic scenarios. Pat’s peevish anger at Roast Beef feels real. Roast Beef’s sadness and longing for solitude are real. You feel the real joy that Beef gets from Cheers (which is the only TV show you can get on the moon), and the abiding but always complicated love between him and Ray, who is in so many ways his opposite: wealthy, extroverted, rude, indomitable. (They orbit each other eternally, black hole and red giant.) Achewood gives us anger, love, horror, rage, shame, disappointment, grief, the agonies of growing up, the travails of marriage and middle age, and the encroaching shadows of death, all while never ceasing to be funny.

Even as I write about it I’m grappling with the fact that Achewood resists attempts to describe it or even find its borders. It ran for 16 years and around 1,800 strips, and overflows into, among other things, a cookbook, an advice column, a couple of novels, a dozen blogs and Roast Beef’s zine (Man Why You Even Got to Do a Thing). As with a lot of webcomics its individual strips stretch elastically from three panels to eight or twelve or more. Roast Beef’s wedding sprawls across forty-seven gloriously wordless boxes. Achewood contains multitudes.

It’s one of those vast artistic entities in which unwary critics get lost or walk in circles—for example I’ve already realized that the moon-Beef arc isn’t my favorite Achewood storyline at all, my favorite is the one where Ray dies from eating too many Tofutti-Cuties and goes to hell and meets Robert Johnson. Except no—how am I forgetting this— it’s the one where Ray and Roast Beef enter the Great Outdoor Fight! “Three days! Three acres! Three THOUSAND men! Only one will win THE GREAT OUTDOOR FIGHT!”)

Achewood stretches back in time, too – everything in it comes trailing clouds of history and mythology. It is known, for example, that in 1973 the Great Outdoor Fight was won by Ray’s father, Ramses Luther Smuckles, a mysterious hyper-masculine figure who casts a long dark Oedipal shadow over Ray’s otherwise sunny existence. Achewood also has its own cosmology, which features a heaven where you get a bar-style soda gun and a nice futon. (Heaven eventually burns down and becomes a charred ghost town, haunted by sinister vagrants.) Hell is accessible via any bathroom stall at a Friendly’s, it doesn’t matter which, and when you get there they give you a 1982 Subaru Brat. (The alt text whispers: “It has the rear-facing seats in the bed STOCK.”) 

Onstad builds his characters on a level of psychological detail so fine that they asymptotically approach the complexity of real people, to the point where fragments of their conversation have a way of escaping from their native panels and colonizing one’s real life. Every time I use a five-gold-star vocabulary word—like say for example “asymptotically”—I hear a ghostly Roast Beef ask, did they teach you that word at Talk Like a Dick school? In moments of shame I sometimes comfort myself with Ray’s stoned wisdom being in trouble is a fake idea. (Ray is one of the few modern masters of the aphorism.) When in pain I often think, in the words of Vlad the robot: To love, to hurt! Is life! Is way of world! I rarely attempt to make any kind of fried breakfast food without admonishing myself the way Roast Beef does when making hash browns: You know you got to make them into a pleasing cake you KNOW this.

(Ray sometimes addresses people as chochacho , which is a made-up word, but it sounds real. I used it in a novel once and nobody noticed, not even the copy-editor, who’s paid to notice things like that.)

Critics of Achewood point to the fact that it’s a very male world, which is undeniably true: of the dozen or so major characters in Achewood only one is a woman—Molly Sanders, an itinerant waitress who was born in 17th-century Wales (long story) and who eventually marries Roast Beef. This might bother me more if it weren’t for the fact that the maleness is the point—Achewood is in many ways about masculinity, with all its attendant violence, depression, insecurity, cruelty, chest-pounding, alcoholism, hysterical consumerism, Oedipal rage, penis-obsession and suicidal ideation. It’s a toxic labyrinth that the characters are constantly looking for a way out of. 

Sometimes they even find it. At the end of the Great Outdoor Fight, Ray and Beef, as the last two men standing, are expected to beat each other down. Instead they demolish the arena and ride off into the sunset. They rewrite the rules. Our every move is the new tradition.

You wouldn’t want to live in Achewood. Onstad spares his characters none of the pain and misfortune and inner torment and physical indignity from which cartoon characters are usually exempt. But he gives them extraordinary gifts too: each of them is in his or her own way deeply eloquent, and for all their suffering they have powers far beyond the run of your common talking stuffed animal or robot. Even when they die they still come back—even Todd, a squirrel with a stutter, whose little body got peeled on by some teenagers. Even Roast Beef, who’s sometimes so depressed he can’t summon the will to enter a grocery store, or finish biting all the way through a piece of toast. 

Maybe the message here is that they can’t escape life, or each other, or us, and it’s all just one of those Sartrean hell deals. But I don’t think so. I think it’s something about resilience—persistence in the face of the full complement of slings and arrows. The denizens of Achewood aren’t doomed to live. It’s just that they refuse to give up. 

—Lev Grossman