Achewood

0037 - Year In Review (May) - 12 consecutive days of strips!

Day 5/12. 

0036 - Year In Review (April) - 12 consecutive days of strips!

Day 4/12. 

0035 - Year In Review (March) - 12 consecutive days of strips!

Day 3/12. 

0034 - Year In Review (February) - 12 consecutive days of strips!

Day 2/12. 

0033 - 12 consecutive days of Old-School strips! Year In Review #1

To show my sincere gratitude for your support, every day for the next twelve days, Achewood's Year In Review series will post a new Oldest-School-Style strip! We'll resume the tale of Tina and Téodor on January 5, 2024. Happy holidays, and thank you for enabling me to bring Achewood back to life!

A Holiday Visit Home

The second of two holiday missives which you will receive from Peter H. "Nice Pete" Cropes this year. Read along as a nostalgic itch takes him on an impromptu tour of one of the many places his family took refuge in his early years.

A rough draft of this piece originally appeared in the Fanflow on December 27, 2009, but it has been so heavily updated as to carry an entirely different import, pathos, and portrayal of — yet again — alcoholic depravity. 

Time Capsules (pdf)

In this new bit of writing posted exclusively for the Author's Tier, I examine the phenomenon of the time capsule as it is practiced in our culture.  

0032 - The Account, Pt. 3

SPOILER ALERT: Tina's Awareness of Different Garnish Styles. The presence and style of garnish silently communicates specific information, and here Tina demonstrates a surprising appreciation for this rarefied dialect. Her easy use of the term "captain-cut" for Vandyke lemons (lemons cut in half with a zigzag pattern, ideal for single-handed squeezing over seafood) suggests a long familiarity with higher-end fried seafood restaurants, which typically serve a "Captain's Platter," or variety sampler; producing the Vandyke pattern in citrus is a labor-intensive affair unlikely to be lavished upon fast-casual patrons. 

Although today's lazy scholars have yet to connect the words "Vandyke" and "lemon" in any sort of satisfying etymology, we would be remiss not to note the tempestuous relationship between 17th-century Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck and his mistress Margaret Lemon, who, according to the surviving gossip, once attempted to bite off his thumb. The zigzag pattern may symbolize the dental incisions of his injury. 

Some have compared the zigzag cut of this lemon garnish to the small, triangular "Van Dyke" beard historically worn by untrustworthy men, but to recognize this etymology would be to validate and take into lading this disreputable perversion of grooming, and we cannot in good faith do that. 

It is currently unclear whether Tina appreciates the function of parsley in the larger conversation of garniture; future restaurant meal scenes in which she participates may produce this information.   

Discount code for 15% off at Achewood! Holiday shop closes Sunday.

The Achewood Holiday Pop-Up Shop is closing for the season on Sunday at midnight, so please order asap in order to secure your holiday gifts before they go away! Enter code HUUUGS at checkout for 15% off your order. This discount will combine with the FREE shipping on orders $80 and over! (USA only.) Orders placed by Sunday will arrive to USA addresses well ahead of December 24.

I'm sending this code to Patreon subscribers several hours ahead of sending it to the rest of the mailing lists and social media accounts, so please shop soon to ensure your favorite items are still in stock. Thank you!

Thanksgiving 2023, Depeche Mode

Author's Tier members, you have spoken, and Even More Content it is! Today's update is from the two biggest events of the last week of November: Thanksgiving, and a Depeche Mode concert. I don't need to tell you which had better food. 

Thanksgiving was very special to me this year because it was our first holiday as a new family: Lauren, my fiancé, and Hayden, with whom I have not had a proper holiday in several years. I was astounded that he elected to join us at a friend's home with a dozen adult strangers and a motley knot of four year-olds, but there he was, game to hang and DJ at the record player all evening. The apple does not fall far from the tree: assigning myself a job is how I manage the discomfort of going to parties as well. (I also attribute his willingness to participate in this event in no small part to the fact that Lauren is a genuine and lovely person.) 

Depeche Mode. Our good friend Uncle Tony works as a synth engineer with Martin Gore—one-half of the remaining duo—and through the grace of these bonds we were gifted floor seats for their Portland show. (We were, "see-the-pores close.") After their opening act Some Guys With Gross Beards finished up, the old coots treated us to two hours of sacred hits and ass-wiggles.  

This concert concluded a barn-burner of a year in which we also saw The Cure, The Zombies, The Church, Justin Hayward (Moody Blues), and Love and Rockets. Hayden actually traveled the west coast to see L&R six different times, but I can only handle so much atmospheric 12-string guitar. 

There is more information in the photo captions, for you completists out there. Thank you for reading my diary. 

C 

Author's Tier Poll: Content Frequency!

Are you getting enough bang for your buck in this, my VIP tier? (Or too much bang? Perhaps not enough bang?) Help me calibrate this tier to bring you optimal reading and parasocial* delight! Please vote, and if so moved, embroider your response in the comments.

I ask because, as a former subscriber to The New Yorker, I found myself overwhelmed by the teetering pile of magazines that steadily grew at the side of my living room chair, and ended up canceling my subscription**. I would not like us to have this kind of relationship.

Personally, I would like to post even more exclusive content in this tier—from little "social media"-style updates to full-on original short stories—but I am still feeling my way forward in this grand experiment. As a "usual-style human," it can be hard to accept that people actually want to see a picture of you and your kid decked out for Depeche Mode, or of a car you found difficult to believe, or to read a story you wrote about a Dickensian cricket who became the psychology part of a young boy. 

Thank you so much for sounding off. Huuugs!

—C

*If you see me around town, please do say hello. I always like when that happens. I am experienced in creating pleasant closure in these situations, so do not feel like it will go on awkwardly long and that it will be your fault. Even if I am eating a salad, I would like to meet you. 

**Also, the quality of the Shouts & Murmurs section had started to sicken me. 

A Childhood Christmas in Nacre Shoals, W. Va.

The first of two holiday missives which you will receive from Peter H. "Nice Pete" Cropes this year. Read along and enjoy this heart-warming coming of age story, set deep in the impoverished but hopeful past of our reflective protagonist. 

A rough draft of this piece originally appeared in the Fanflow on December 10, 2009, but it has been so heavily updated as to carry an entirely different import, pathos, and portrayal of alcoholic depravity. 

0031 - The Account, Pt. 2

Have you ever worked for a marketing firm, digital agency, ad agency, branding group, design house, copywriting shop, or the like? Let's trade war stories in the comments this week. 

In 1995 I secured an unpaid summer internship at a San Francisco boutique ad firm named—in a bit of on-the-nose foreshadowing*—Bertram Wooster Advertising. Their claim to fame was that they had just lost the Round Table Pizza account. I worked with an asshole named Christopher who drove a convertible Saab and had all the nuance and originality of a beery Arizona frat boy. The triumphal moment of my tenure there was designing a t-shirt for an event where local architects made elaborate pet houses for charity. I believe a project titled "4leg Cassini" won.   

*On the nose because PG Wodehouse would become a favorite author a few years later, but no particular thanks to this gig. 

0030 - The Account, Pt. 1

In which Téodor — incorrectly pronounced "TEE-uh-door" by some, but pronounced correctly by others as "TAY-uh-door" — is shown in his element: scrambling to finally get a job on the actual day that rent is due. Never mind that most jobs don't start paying for two weeks. 

While we're on the subject of pronunciation, a refresher on the most commonly mispronounced character names:

• Philippe: "f'LEAP," not "fuh-LEAP-pay."
• Emeril LeGoinegasque: "EM-uh-rill," not "em-REE-el." Last name standard pronunciation.
• Ray: THE MIGHTY WALNUT, INFINITY, I LOVE THE HILLS AND THE PONDS (blue strobe light, increasing frequency)

So, I recently said I probably wouldn't start another storyline again so soon. Well, this semi-autobiographical tale has been kicking around in my head for years, and it kept nagging at me, so  Oppenheimer Roomba Cinema is going to have to wait a month or so. (The Roomba Cinema in question deals with the telling reality of how a movie about the pinnacle of mankind's self-annihilation placed a distant second in box office response to a movie about some toys that meet Will Ferrell.)

Coming up soon in the In-Universe tier: the first of two childhood holiday stories from Nice Pete, detailing a heart-warming coming of age. Posting 12/1. This announcement does not preclude me from posting other things there before that. Author's Tier will be getting another short story from my current works, and part 3 of the Netflix / Achewood saga. 

Thanksgiving Missive and Past-Blast (Serializer).

I probably give a silent thanks to you, dear supporter on Patreon, every day of the week, if not multiple times throughout each day. I give thanks when I wake, and sit with my coffee in the morning silence, and notice that my base anxiety has palpably diminished with the ongoing success of this project. I give thanks when I go install a new water heater on my kid's trailer out on the farm where he works, and don't have to fret quite so deeply over the price of the unit (or the price of PEX tools). I give thanks when I drive over to Maison Extremely Fixer-Upper that Lauren and I are gutting and restoring, to pull nails and staples from a hundred-and-ten-year-old staircase for six hours, or melt ancient tar-backed linoleum off of once-beautiful hardwood floors with a 1200-degree heat gun and a 4-amp oscillating blade. (In that last example, I am grateful that at 7pm I will get to go write and draw for five hours; I am grateful that I can genuinely look forward to this coveted end-of-day ritual.) 

The above image is from a prehistoric and unrelated version of Patreon, called Serializer.net. (I think it was first called WebComicsNation.) The late webcomics champion Joey Manley started it about a year after I began Achewood. It worked; people subscribed. The problem was, generating a second set of subscriber material that I thought was "as good or better than" the stuff on Achewood itself was impossible; I think I got about 86 pieces into it, but the last half, perhaps, were just scans of sketchbook doodles. The Assetbar/Fanflow subscriber service, which ran maybe 2008-2010 (?), proved the same point: it is not just impossible, but deeply unpleasant and confusing, to try to pour your love equally into two rivers. 

One of the upsides of the failed Oni anthology project was that nearly all of these Serializer pieces were located and rescued off an old hard drive (it had been placed behind a vase), so I can share them here again. Above is a particularly germane (actually, I learned that word before I went to Talk Like A Dick School, thank you) example of the early posts I made there.

Happy Thanksgiving to those who sidle up to the board and load their plates thrice with monochromatic food and twice with pies we love so much we eat them once a year; and many heartfelt thanks all the very same to those who don't do that, or who do do that, but don't do it because of the American holiday. I am truly thankful for you. 

CTO 

The Day Where Nothing Added Up

Man, today just really added up to nothing, and everything seemed annoying. This is very unusual; typically I love my days. I’m excited to wake up, I’m excited to go restore the old fixer-upper, I’m excited to come home exhausted and shower and cartoon in my lazy clothes with the drawstring pants, I’m excited to fall asleep so i can do it all over again.

But today all my little errands just seemed to steal my day in unproductive quarter-hours, which steadily compounded my irritability.

I went to Fred Meyer to look for a wine-chilling sleeve for my numb wrist and swollen hand, which have not enjoyed the last three months of nonstop vibrating power tools. But they had none — the housewares clerk said that sort of thing was “too fancy” for them.

I wanted to use the restroom at Fred Meyer, but a maniac had torn the door from its hinges, and two men were fixing it. Even the out-of-order-ness of the restroom was of a sort that seemed to say, “Chris, I’m obviously fucking with you. —The Universe.”

I set up some of my photo printers in my new basement studio at the fixer-upper, but didn’t want to face it if they still weren’t working right, so I went upstairs and te-attached a cabinet door. The tiniest thing I have accomplished in months, but my only accomplishment today.

I looked at my experiment with the self-leveling compound on the new kitchen floor: a disaster that would mean more power-tooling. I had no wine-chilling sleeve for my aching limb.

I looked down the aisle of ten thousand plumbing fittings at Lowe’s, bitterly thought, “You again, all you goddamn mother fuckers,” and realized I might be having some sub-acute illness or the like. It was time to call it.

So, I am in bed at 8pm doing one of my truly self-indulgent things: watching videos of wok cooking. Zig Zag the cat has come to sit on me.

I can feel it in my bones that tomorrow we will walk to Flour Market for rich coffees and Swedish almond pastries and everything will be beautiful again. But today was lost to some inscrutable internal recalibration upon whose root cause I could not put my (benumbed) finger. It was so unusual that sharing it with you felt like a nice idea. For some reason I thought you might find it intimate to read of my largely unrealized day. They’re out there, you know.

0029 - Back On His Bensington

In this strip we check back in with Bensington Butters, whom careful readers will recall is actually a man named Jimmie "Darnell" Hockawock, from Flokes County, Florida. Along with Ray and AKKOLADE, he is a "Brother in the Syndicate," a term for the members of a halfhearted group of musicians who do not like one another all that much, and meet at odd intervals in a Best Western conference room.

Spoiler alert ahead! Do not read the next paragraph before the comic, as it will spoil the punchline.

Seriously, spoiler alert ahead! Do not read the next paragraph before the comic, as it will spoil the punchline. 

"Sabbath titties" are mammary glands which do not produce milk after the birth of young; the reference is to a Jewish ban on doing work from Friday evening to Saturday evening. It is not a reference to the musical act Black Sabbath, or to 18th century French literalist Jacques Sabbattittie. "Sabbath titties" is in-universe slang; please do not go around using it and expecting to make great social inroads. (I felt obligated to place this definition here because ending a strip with a piece of virtually unknown and not-entirely-intuitable slang prevents the sensation of closure which is a critical hallmark of all the best fiction.) 

Sweat Gets In Your Eyes, Part Four (end)

At the conclusion of my mini-series on running: The Marathon! 

Young Peter H. Cropes: Military Intake Interview (pdf)

This piece started life in the Assetbar/Fanflow in November of 2009, but has been so heavily rewritten as to essentially be a new piece. 

New Orleans Photo Tour

Thank you to all you first-water Author’s Tier subscribers for the plethora of New Orleans recommendations. Lauren and I made use of many of your hot tips, but were forced by morbid curiosity and national obligation to take a late night stroll down Bourbon Street, during which we dodged jets of vomit and conga lines of cockroaches in tiny strands of beads. 

I cut too much summertime bait as a child to enjoy most fish-based cuisine, but even the stupidest last-resort restaurant here features excellent seafood. I will contend that the average New Orleanian second grader, roused from deep afternoon slumber, could whip up a velvety wine-and-cream sauce or blackened drumfish.

Commentary continues in the photo captions. 

0028 - Bandwidth

I got to thinking about how much extra energy is expended streaming all this video for phone calls, and it stressed me out. It used to stress me out when a friend said they streamed Pandora music in their car all the way to my house. All those zillions of bytes, heating up and bothering all those copper electrons and switches and routers...how much activity can there be before the earth just blows up? 

And that is how you write Roast Beef: by copy-pasting from the primary buffer into the Adobe Illustrator boxes.

New Orleans

Chochachos of the First Water, do you have any recommendations for traveling in this great city? We will be heading there soon, and do not wish to simply scour the haunted alleyways for sightings of Emeril whispering furtively to Anne Rice (she has a tall velvet Dracula collar). Fine food of every stratum, as well as hats and mansions, are what I’m picturing. Thank you in advance, and photos for your enjoyment will forthcome.

Sweat Gets In Your Eyes, Part Three

Part three of four. Prelude to the ambivalence to the return to glory. 

Outtakes from "Ray and Pat in, Road Trip"

Every strip generates lines that don't fit the story, yet still cry out for any audience whatsoever before they sink beneath the waves. These are those lines. 

0027 - Ray and Pat in, "Road Trip," Pt. 11 (Ending.)

In this conclusion to the "Road Trip" story arc — which we began in the heat of summer and now end in chilling autumn — we learn a bit of the origin story of Ray and Pat's friendship. ("Why do they still keep him around, anyway," is often in the air.) There was a time when this bold young talent was a hot commodity in the social capital exchange of the schoolyard. But then it all went profoundly mediocre. 

Does it count if you're maturing but nobody's watching? Can sham drug retreats actually work? Is Pat actually becoming...better than his friends?!

I don't think I'll jump right into another big story arc for a while; the once-a-week format makes them last a long time, and there's so much else to do. Where are Emeril and Spongebath—are they at a tiki bar? Has Little Nephew fallen prey to yet another predatory generational fad? Is Cornelius going to say something pithy that captures he delicacy of an oft-unacknowledged rite-of-passage? 

Whatever comes, it will come here, where we are all together again, watching cats do too many drugs and try to bareback each other. Thank you for being here, for supporting Achewood. 

Ray Has the Munchies, "HARD-type." Téodor Helps. (pdf)

This isn't exactly a Fanflow archive piece, though it largely originated there, in November of 2009. Ray seems to have flensed his tale of starvation and adventure into sharper focus in the intervening years, and even posed for a reenactment photo. 

Lost Achewood: Recently discovered missing rows

Strip Title: "Small Times. A Look." Run date: January 15, 2010

As with most things of thirteen years past, I can't remember why I chose to remove the completed fourth row of this comic before running it. It feels perfectly on-voice, and even gives nice closure. Strange choices like this are a decent indicator of the pathologized headspaces one gets into when working alone on the same thing for a decade. Maybe I thought it was too gentle to be Achewood — not cutting enough, no edge, just a soft nostalgic voice-over thing by an aging guy who wishes he could still dress like the kids in Stand By Me. 

Below the omitted row is another row, which would have made the strip needlessly long, and needlessly libelous to Ozzy Osbourne. 

Below that is just a bunch of lines that didn't end up getting used. 

Sweat Gets In Your Eyes, Part Two

I will not bore or delay you with words here! Please read installment number two of my running stories! 

Sweat Gets In Your Eyes, Part One

0026 - Ray and Pat in, "Road Trip," Pt. 10

It would be difficult to accept how much unsuccessful slang I generated in order to create an original phrase that means "barebacking." (The line, "Answer him, you Barebackin’ Beagle! You Nut-Smugglin’ Snoopy! You Lie-Pipin’ Snoopy!" sits to the side of the artwork you see here.) "Skinnydippin' the salami" was as good as I could do, and now here it rests, along with Ramathustra Ron's special mushroom chair.*

Which mushroom-fueled sequence tends to come to mind first, when you recall your trippin' days? Type it up for us in the comments. Don't type about the time you walked past a big rock at the beach at night and could tell that it was 1932, because that one's all mine.  

*Several virtually un-sittable renditions of this chair also rest to the side of the artwork you see here. One of them actually has those two back slats connect on the front of the back rest. It was like if AI had to draw a chair. Hey, remember that stuff? 

**I also toyed with the idea of making the black Zenni/buttons blob you see coming together in the bottom row turn into Todd, but that's because I am high as hell.