Roast Beef Kazenzakis, Observed, December 2011.

As Told by C. Onstad.

The rain spat and drizzled without conviction as Roast Beef sat at his workstation. The sky was twenty percent gray and the window was open wide, letting the chilly evening air blow over his mouse hand. He liked it this way.

He checked a few math websites to make sure he still had his game about him, then felt the first stirrings of hunger. Molly wouldn’t be home until later; he considered a solo trip to get won ton soup. Maybe a cigarette if no one was watching. He fished around in the back of his desk drawer and found the old pack of Nat Shermans, which yielded a solitary cigarette of extremely high quality. He himself never spent nine dollars on luxury cigarettes; these had been left outside after a party at Ray’s. The second-to-last one had been smoked alone in the narrow space between the pool house and the neighbor’s fence; he’d immediately gone inside to wash his hands, brush his teeth, and gargle afterwards. Instead of drying with a wash cloth, he had used paper towels which he threw away in Ray’s trash can, along with his toothbrush. Molly had been staying overnight at a girlfriend’s house, watching Steel Magnolias and getting chatty on Campari, but no precaution was too great.

He walked with his contraband for a while before lighting it with a pack of matches he had found on the mantle, and was pleased that it only took one strike; she would never notice the match missing. He tucked the lid of the matchbook into the ring which held his keys so that he wouldn’t forget to replace it on returning home, and considered getting some handi-wipes from the corner store to clean the smoke off his hands. They had wipes at the bodega for customers who bought the heat lamp fried chicken and jo-jo potatoes; perhaps a snack of these things would help erase the odor which would dwell deep within him.

As he turned the corner to enter a dark, wooded section of the park, he saw a familiar silhouette in the tall grass which grew between the pines. It was Ray, and he was swishing a golf club around in the rough, looking for something. He glanced up and smiled when he saw his friend.

“Yo Beef!” Ray exclaimed, taking a nip from a hip flask he’d secured inside his puffy winter jacket. He was wearing a Tam o’ Shanter in garish road work safety colors.

Beef steeled himself and resolved not to toss his cigarette aside; he allowed himself this one small pleasure.

“Oh uh hey Ray what you got goin’ on down there.”

Ray pointed at Beef’s cigarette. “That’s a secret,” he said in a knowing confidence, free of judgment. It was a strong understanding between men.

“Thanks dogg, I got night feet pretty bad and needed a mile.”

“You seen a bonchity-bonch Titleist anywhere up ins? I straight-up shanked this damn new hybrid sand wedge and the thing got a wild hare up its ass. I never even saw it.”

“Well uh I’ll help you poke around for a bit. How come you hittin’ balls in the park anyway though, Seven Pines gettin' like aerated or such?”

“Urban golf, dude! It’s hella great practice for the short game, all with crazy lies and slopes. You ever putt down a slide? Bank one off a plywood fire engine? Teach a child to sing? Thrills, man! I’m makin’ the game feel ALIVE again!”

“Ain’t police down on you makin’ a ruckus all with clubs and balls flyin’ everywhere?”

“Police? Nah, dogg! Plus, there ain’t signs against golf. Just alcohol.” Ray took another swift nip and slid the flask back into his jacket pocket.

“Well uh I mean ain’t it just common sense that hard little balls that could go in any direction real fast might not be too welcome in a public area…I mean they got like kids and way litigious moms and stuff in parks.”

“Well, all the better they ain’t someplace else, then,” Ray said distractedly, picking at his teeth with a wooden tee. He had found his ball behind a large garbage bag that looked to be filled with filthy towels, discount popcorn bags, orange peels, and sticky emptied cans of Monster energy drink. “Heads up!”

A choppy three-quarter swing sent the cold little orb off through some trees, and Roast Beef carefully tracked its arc, noting the approximate amount of energy the vector contained and roughly calculating how far it was likely to travel on its path of woodland surface ricochets. He pulled on his cigarette and told himself he had one more good puff left, then surveyed the area for cedar branches or pine needles with which to camouflage the scent on his hands. Ray made off into the underbrush, and he followed close behind.

Their journey led them to the banks of the creek, where they were plussed to find old Cornelius angling in a slowly purling pool of thick brown water. Beef stamped out his cigarette before the old man could see him.

“Yo, Connie!” Ray beamed. “You see my damn Titleist chompin’ round in this rough?” He hacked and spat.

Cornelius eyed them with a barely perceptible measure of displeasure. Roast Beef sensed immediately that Ray’s ball had disturbed the water, sending any already-skittish aquatic life darting beneath distant logs and shadowy outcroppings. “Sssh,” he hissed at Ray. “You gonna scare the fish even more than the ball with all that yellin’.”

“My Titleist go in the water, Connie?” Ray asked, incredulous. “For real?”

Cornelius gave Ray a brief dose of eye contact which was not unlike solid public steel in its overall effect—in its effect on Roast Beef, the party of the third part, at any rate. Ray poked around in the reeds for a creel, hoping to compliment the old man on a productive evening of sport. Beef stiffened as muddy eddies languished out into the larger waters, now alerting even the most remedially sensate of fish to the dangers which came from shore.

Cornelius gnashed his teeth with a brief, compact efficiency and set his pole down on the shore next to where he sat. Within moments he had produced a small thermos of orange pekoe and a ham biscuit wrapped in waxed paper. As Ray rustled and kicked about in the underbrush, he continued to spread his modest repast out in silence. Though none of this production’s uncomfortable silence was for Roast Beef’s benefit, it was perhaps felt by him the most. He nervously smelled his hand to see how badly the tobacco had perfumed him. It was strong, but he didn’t dare stick it in the creek, as he thought he remembered that smell travels even more quickly through water, and he didn’t want to taint it for the fish. Tobacco is a very polarizing substance in nature, and generally indicates an imperfect environment, he reasoned.

“Strawberry, Strawberry, the dopeman’s ho,” Ray sang to himself as he fished for his ball. Beef silently told Ray not to run this song down around Cornelius, as it would no doubt offend his aged ears and sensibilities and make an already bad situation worse, but could not make himself verbalize the admonition. He merely stood and felt his blood pressure rise within him. Ray took another nip from his flask and then had a noisy coughing fit as the volatile, pocket-warmed liquor dissolved the mucus in his throat.

When his spasm had subsided, he offered the flask to Cornelius. Beef watched nervously; there were many signs posted against the consumption of alcohol, and if Cornelius’s fishing license were revoked there would be hell to pay. It was one of his last pleasures, along with agreeable temperatures and recording payments in his ledger.

“Yo, hit this, Connie,” Ray insisted. “You gonna get bored if you don’t, dogg.”

Cornelius stood his ground for a moment, and then, with an affable elevation of the shoulders, shrugged off his mantle of displeasure and accepted the offering.

“Es tut sie kein gutes in der Flasche,” he said. “It does you no good in the bottle.” He sipped genteelly from the brushed pewter, held the liquor on his tongue to evaluate its quality, and then swallowed without air. It was the practiced device of one who is used to accepting dubious snorts from strange vessels.

“Thank you, Raymond,” he said, passing back the flask. “I believe you will find that your gutty has come to rest beneath the taller of the two manzanitas just ‘round the bend.”

“Dang, Connie!” Ray chuckled. “You let me do all that splashin’ around in the water for nothin’?”

The warmth spreading across the inside of Cornelius’s chest extinguished a choice acerbic retort, and he merely mentioned that he had been looking for an excuse to break out his evening rations.

Ray clambered off over the uneven terrain in search of his quarry. Cornelius offered Roast Beef a hand-rolled from an old engraved case in his breast pocket.

“You will enjoy the flavor of a fresher tobacco on your evening stroll,” he said. “And if you wish to keep from scenting your hands, I find that gloves are a happy accoutrement.” Beef noticed that the old man was wearing black leather driving gloves. He accepted the cigarette, an anise-flavored hard candy, and a dab of vetiver oil which Cornelius instructed him to rub on the offending area.

A loud thud sounded from behind the trees. “Fuck me, man!” Ray yelled to no one, amid the sound of crackling twigs and the rustle of nylon clothing.

“Some are to be endured as we sally forth, arm in arm, unto the familiar embrace of death,” Cornelius said serenely as he surveyed the waters.

Roast Beef nodded, thanked him for the sundry goods and services, and made off for home. Perhaps he would take a shower and find some won ton soup, he thought. The chill was now bracing, and something hot would do him good.

Hiatus, Explained Tenderly and with a Great Gentleness.

[Editor's note: this is an emergency relocation of the original Fanflow release, as I did not realize those servers would be down for maintenance for the next day or so.]

Hello, friends and readers.

As you have likely noticed if you have any interest in Achewood, output has been next to nil for the last several months, and was slowing down before that. Here, let me explain. Have a seat wherever you like.

You see, whenever I sat down to write over the last year or so, I had a growing, nagging feeling that, after nine years, 1,700 strips, 1,000 character blog entries spanning twelve characters, thirty books, 700 subscriber pieces, the New Yorker pieces, tours, hundreds of interviews, terabytes of vitriolic hate mail (incoming), running a merchandise mini-empire, and just generally feeling under the gun to dance for the public, I was getting a little burned out.

Whenever I cracked my knuckles and attempted to start a fresh strip with an idea that had popped into my head that day, I’d get halfway through it and realize I’d already done that particular gag, say, six years ago. Frustrating. Had I run through everything that my finite brain knew to talk about? Couldn’t be...I’d boasted in earlier times that a good writer could write his way out of anything. What a cocksure young man I was. Maybe it’s time to recharge.

Another nagging idea which slowly grew from a whorl in the tub to a Pacific gyre was that, as I wrote piece after piece, it seemed like I was just imitating myself, if that makes any sense. I had always prided myself on not being formulaic (say, Monday jokes and lasagna jokes), so this presented a grave problem. I have always wanted Achewood to be something that didn’t exist before, including earlier versions of itself.

Like a sparrow birthing a clenched human fist, Achewood must be reborn in strange ways over time to achieve this ideal. This may mean the occasional hiatus, or span of dark strips that do not make you laugh. This may mean a week of heavily-Photoshopped scans of pencil sharpeners, or simply stenciling a “bobby” on my garage door in a cheap imitation of Banksy.

I know it’s irritating that I can keep no regular schedule; that’s what RSS is for. Also, whatever I put up on Achewood.com is free to the world, and I won’t entertain a bunch of entitled whining. Here’s a great essay by the wonderful Neil Gaiman on that subject. This essay is a gift to writers and artists everywhere.

I take inspiration for Achewood’s future from the great P.G. Wodehouse, who wrote with furious zip and consistent institutional tone literally until the day he died—aged 93, in an armchair, pipe in hand—next to a fresh manuscript. He wrote Jeeves and Wooster for longer than I’ve been alive, so that gives me some hope that I can drop back into the feeling of Roast Beef and Ray’s dynamic, or the sordid stories of the rest of the cast. I do love them; though I am a different man now than the kid I was when I invented them, perhaps they can “grow in the telling.”

I can enumerate a few more of the concerns I’ve had. If you’d like to skip to the end, though, and look at the picture I commissioned of the OH SHIT kitten finally falling from the branch, please hit the “End” key on your extended keyboard. But please, clear any children from the room first.

One thing that’s always made me a bit sad is how Internet presentation seems to devalue content. So much art, writing, and news is suddenly available to us that each piece seems nearly a throwaway, lost in the gullet of our now-insatiable appetite for information. Here in the future, everyone is famous for 15kb. Fifteen reTweets. Fifteen LOLs. Should I work fifteen hours on something that will take fifteen seconds to read? The answer is yes, of course, because I love what I do, but after nearly a decade one wonders if one couldn’t do more for people with that time. Create greater and lengthier entertainment. I’d like to focus more on prose; despite the heavy foot I seem to have planted in the comics world, perhaps I can balance both by shifting the weight a bit. Some might count themselves kings of infinite space when bounded in the nutshell of six panels, but personally I’m finding it a bit cramped.

I’m also trying to gently withdraw from life as a semi-public figure, impossible as that sounds given my medium. I just don’t feel suited to it. It’s very bad for your head (well, my head, anyway) to be intensely praised and intensely hated by a decade’s worth of strangers. I loved meeting the thousands of kind readers on my tours, but the stress of the constant travel, constant demand, and unstanchable 24-hour communications have me longing for a wingback chair, a quiet inbox, and perhaps a calming agent in some cut crystal. That said, you can follow me on Twitter!

In sum, I think Achewood will be back sooner than later. As will other projects, and the sun, and my solo album with Greg Lake (he’s on vocals and guitar). I’ve needed time to reflect on what all this is, but it’s been a good long time, hasn’t it? I still love the work when I look back over it, and don’t want to take it off the ventilator. Cross your fingers, do that RSS thing, and I hope to see you again before too long.

Thank you,
Chris Onstad

PS: Subscriber content will continue to be updated. To try and keep my brain active I’ve been writing chapbooks, nearly 400 pages’ worth. I think that if you like the Achewood mentality and approach to things, you’ll enjoy these. They’re available here, and the first one is free to all. A new one will be posted in a few days’ time. There will also be my Achewood experiments, writings, and attempts at progress. If you’ve never been in the Fanflow, for $2.99 you get access to about three years’ worth of content you’ve never seen before. [As luck would have it, the Fanflow servers are down during the next day or so for maintenance—please check back!]

A Good Employee Is Available In This Land

Dear Friends of the Library,

As a Non-Recognized Nice California Company (NRNCC), we try to do what we can for the people who help us do what we do. When our Warehouse Guy's new job offer fell through recently, I told him I'd help get him in his search for a new gig.

His résumé follows. What it doesn't tell you is that he is a sterling individual, conscientious and proactive, a loyal fan of good work and hard comedy, and highly adaptable. Often was the night when it was him nagging me to get one more order filled. Also often was the night when he called me aside, in all seriousness, to watch a new Tim And Eric internet video, or something about "Bub Rubb." He can also hold forth extensively on the subject of baseball, though we did not use that part of him.

The résumé of a one Chris Crane, for your evaluation.

All he asks in return for his excellence is a position.

Talk to him, people. If your business needs a happy, bright, versatile chap who scored 1580 on his SAT and can meet any situation with a winning spirit and attention to detail, he is that man. I am happy to provide reference.

Thanks for your time,
Chris Onstad

Achewood State of the Union, 1/2009

Dear Friends of the Library,

They say that the devil you don't know is worse than the devil you do. In that same spirit, I posit that the Achewood State of the Union update which you can read is better than the one which you can't.

If you've been following Achewood in any capacity for the last year, you've noticed changes afoot. Most particularly, I'm sure you've noticed that the strip itself, always the flagship of the enterprise, has run less frequently.

I want to apologize for that. After seven full and happy years, though, production of the strip has had to find space for itself among other projects. Book development, animation development, and most recently, the rapid relocation of my little family to another state. That's the big killer. We lived in Silicon Valley until today. Until three weeks ago, we thought we were going to live here forever. It's a complicated story involving eminent domain, the stewardship of the American financial continuum, and a poisonous dog named Nasturtium. I'll tell you about it sometime.

There's no way for me to do good work while taking care of my family and all of our interests during this move. You would see scabrous comics—literally injurious to the eyes—anxiously uploaded from a laptop in a stall at the Mount Shasta Bathe-n-Shat. You would see strips about crying. You would see shakily-drawn strips about cantaloupes with wedges missing, in a half-hearted attempt to ape that whole Shel Silverstein thing. It would be wrong.

I expect this official strip hiatus will last about two weeks. I hate not being able to produce it for your entertainment, but I would hate more to rush the work and injure the archives for the sake of quantity. Thank you for your patience and dedication, and please find a home for us in your RSS feed aggregator.

Sincerely,
Chris Onstad

PS: All orders are being fulfilled, and there will still be Fanflow premium content during this time. Ain't nobody gonna get burned on this deal.

North American Achewood Tour Dates and Times.

Last updated 11/12/2008 10:50AM PDT

Los Angeles just announced! See below.

Gentle Reader and Friend of the Library,

Here are the dates on which you and I will meet, chat, and conduct friendship, as I come through your approximate area. I hope that the events, once over, will carry on long into the night, at a place that is not too far and has room for all. Except for when I have to be dragged off to a plane, my pen trailing a line down the carpet aisle and out the door.

In cases where your city does not yet have a venue/time listed, Dark Horse (my publisher) and I are working out the details with the shop and will update this information as soon as things are official.

- - -

PORTLAND, OR
Portland events poster!

Thursday, Oct 9
Floating World Comics, 6-8PM. Signing. BYOB.
20 NW 5th Ave #101

Friday, Oct 10
Skeleton Key Tattoo, 9PM-close. Free tats (limited spaces), kind of a loose general hang-out thing. I will sign anything you bring, but not with a tattoo gun. 1729 SE Hawthorne Blvd.

SEATTLE, WA
Saturday, Oct 11
Comics Dungeon, Inc. 2PM-4PM
250 NE 45th Street

ANN ARBOR, MI
Monday, Nov 3
Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S 5th Ave, Ann Arbor, MI, 7-8:30 (Q&A, brief signing), then afterparty/full-fledged signing at Vault of Midnight Comics, 219 S. Main St, Ann Arbor.

TORONTO, CANADA
Tuesday, Nov 4
The Beguiling. Signing. 7PM-close.
601 Markham Street

CHICAGO, IL
Wednesday, Nov 5
Comix Revolution, Evanston. Signing. 4-7PM.
606 Davis St.

Thursday, Nov 6
Quimby's. 5-7PM. Signing.
1854 W. North Ave

BROOKLYN, NY
Friday, Nov 7
Rocketship. Signing. 7PM-close.
208 Smith St.

BOSTON, MA
Saturday, Nov 8
Million Year Picnic, Harvard Square, 2-4PM.
Afterparty with Freezepop, location TBA.

AUSTIN, TX
Saturday, December 6
Austin Books, 7-10PM - 5002 North Lamar Boulevard.

LOS ANGELES, CA
Friday, December 12th
Meltdown, 7pm to 10pm.
7522 Sunset Blvd @ N. Sierra Bonita


Our events throughout the northwest, midwest, and northeast have been blowouts, so bring your good-time game and get ready to stump me with Achewood trivia. I look forward to seeing you.

Gush-Love Hemisphere, and other B-Sides

I "blogged," (I'm going to stop putting that word in quotes someday, but not today) and you responded. Here is the tentative roster of cities we're pretty sure to hit in October — I can't name specific shops yet, but these are pretty nearly locks:

Los Angeles, CA
Portland, OR
Seattle, WA
Austin, TX
Chicago, IL
Ann Arbor, MI
Boston, MA
Brooklyn, NY
Toronto, ON

These will generally be in bookstores or prominent comics shops with lots of space and a history of having beer and wine during signings, to make the lines bearable. Dark Horse will be hammering out the details from here, but I do appreciate all the white guys with glasses who have been writing in with suggestions. In some cases we're scheduling a secondary event, which will be a more low-key meet-and-greet type thing, and less of a signing, although I'll be happy to sign "whatever" (ladies?).

Stay tuned as we firm up locations and dates. Thanks to all the shops who are offering to sponsor travel and/or hotels -- that definitely helps make things happen.

Achewood World Tour, Pt. 1

The pens sit on the shop's counter in the low morning light, drained of ink. A partially consumed rotisserie chicken stinks in its plastic supermarket carry-out dome, having been forgotten under the bar the night before. Thirty miles away, the official Achewood car sits in the official Achewood driveway, holding much less merchandise than it did when it last departed, and the official Achewood cartoonist is wondering how to politely suggest that his warehouse guy unpack and inventory all of it. The body is idle, but the mind races.

Last night marked the first public signing of the first proper Achewood book, and it was an event which wicked free vodka into its attendees at a medically significant pace. The Isotope, San Francisco's premier comics shop, kept the stuff flowing for a crowd of hundreds of young white men with glasses, and your humble narrator stood planted in place from 8:30PM until 1:30AM, greeting and signing his little body off. Despite the long line, the "vibe" was energetic and upbeat, and we'll have to do it again real soon, because it was like a wedding: everybody gets a second, but nobody gets a minute.

What do I remember of the event?

* There is a crazy guy named Don who lives in San Francisco. He wears a fez and black-tinted 1920s driving goggles, the circular kind with little leather panels on the side (such as Trent Reznor might wear if he were flying a biplane past a leather storm cloud covered in zippers). He has long hair and a handlebar mustache, but he does not seem dangerous...unless you are, say, a comic book that does not want to be read, because comic book, he's gonna read you.

* I also met this guy at one point. (I'm the white guy with glasses; he's the white guy with glasses to my right.)

* The only chest I got to sign was that of a white guy with glasses. Bevy of beautiful women in attendance, where were you on this one? F-minus, beautiful women. Get out of here.

I wasn't sure what to expect at the First Ever Achewood Book Signing and Party-Off, as I've been relatively inaccessible for most of my writing career (piano lessons). It was a treat, and as soon as we returned home I contacted my publisher with urgent plans to set up signings in the following major metropolitan areas:

Portland, OR
Los Angeles, CA
New York, NY
Boston, MA
Austin, TX

If you're local to any of those and would like to suggest a comic shop as a venue, or would like to suggest another city which could hold a signing, by all means contact me (Canada—what's up, girl?). I greatly enjoyed a night with you all, and would like to punctuate autumn with several more of the same.

/C
aka MC chris@achewood.com