Interviewing Achewood

For eight years, Chris Onstad’s popular webcomic
Achewood has chronicled the adventures of an idiosyncratic posse
of talking bears, cats, mice, and otters. It’s no Redwall 2.0, though—one of the cats has a penchant for fur coats
and Ketel One, another is a hardcore gay vegan, and in the years since
the original one-joke, three-panel strip, Achewood has evolved
into a sprawling universe that plays by its own unconventional rules.
“We have Trekkies,” Onstad says of his fans, dedicated readers who
obsessively monitor the strip’s high-concept running gags and extensive
character back-stories.

Onstad is one of a handful of web cartoonists able to wrest a
full-time income from the internet. “Our living comes from the
subscriber service we run,” Onstad explains, through which about 1,000
subscribers pay $2.99 a month for premium content. “That’s the awesome
thing about the web. A small artist like myself can make it. I’m gonna
say something quotable: ‘I made it small. You can make it small and
survive.'”

Onstad and his family (he’s married, with a four-year-old daughter)
recently moved to Portland, an experience he describes as akin to
“jumping into a swimming pool after a shitty day.” “I don’t constantly
feel like there’s a gun to my head,” he says of working in Portland,
which he estimates is about one-third cheaper than his former hometown
in Silicon Valley. With the move comes a degree of financial (and
therefore, creative) liberty: “It’s not that the content will change,
it’s that my freedom about what medium to use is changing.” Not only
has the comic grown increasingly complex, ballooning from the
three-panel salad days to a recent 22-panel strip, but since moving to
Portland, Onstad has been able to explore his interest in longer-form
work. There are screenplays in the works, and “there’s a novel gonna be
coming,” he says.

“So much work goes into that four-second reading experience,” he
explains of why he’s branching out. “It’s so inefficient. I
didn’t think I wanted to be Charles Schulz and sit at my drafting table
and draw because I love to draw so fucking much, because I don’t. I
love to write. Imagine having to put all of your thoughts into six
squares.”

Onstad’s writing is highlighted to good effect in Dark Horse Comics’
recently released Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar, a
hardcover collection of early strips that marks the second
Achewood compilation from the local publisher (he’s
self-published a number of his own books). The book is supplemented
with commentary on each strip, as well as prose chapters introducing
the characters. The character introductions are the best part of the
book—Onstad himself says they’re his “favorite thing that [he’s]
done.”

In addition to Ugliest Guitar, Onstad’s finishing up a
cookbook—his second, in which every recipe is written from a
character’s point of view. While Onstad is quick to scorn the term
“foodie” (“You have money and you have a good short-term memory for
what you had for lunch”), he’s quite knowledgeable about food, and he’s
working with Ten 01 pastry chef Jeff McCarthy to develop recipes for
the new cookbook.

It’s obvious that Onstad isn’t your typical
move-to-Portland-to-join-the-comics-community creator. “I’m not a
comics person,” he tells me. “I’ve always thought that stuff was
juvenile.” And while the irony of that statement coming from a man who
makes his living drawing talking animals is presumably lost on no one,
Onstad seems comfortably poised to explore creative possibilities both
within Achewood and beyond.