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

For your consideration.

Two quick items of note this week!

The first photograph comes from Matt, who claims to have upgraded from the Ford Taurus pictured here:


And the second lovely little tidbit comes from newlyweds Ty and Bev, who had a one-of-a-kind pair of cake toppers constructed:


Let's wish them all a lot of luck, especially Matt, as he recovers from Taurus ownership, and as ever, send in any and all photographs that you deem germane and amusing.

Hello and There Have You Been!

It struck me that I haven't been making much of an appearance in the old "public figurena" lately, and that it was high time we checked in with one another. I know that you know that I'm not much for this kind of thing, so I'll keep this brief and to the point. I will also ramble, and go on at length, and take many breaks to view Internet pornography about maids.

1. "Hey, did you quit or something?"
I've been posting the four weekly Achewood strips in the morning lately, and this has caused some confusion. It upsets routines. It drives people in Australia up the wall, because their "morning" is actually something like sixteen hours later, and their coffee has long since gotten cold, and they've drummed their fingers to the bone. It's hard to please a twenty-four hour world, people. So, why the different posting schedule? Well, I've been doing the strips at night, often very late at night. Sometimes I finish them so late that my synapses are actually sitting in a pile next to my mousepad, and I don't have the use of them. I've found that I like to look over the strip when I wake up, gently burnish it here and there, and then send it on its way. Why don't I work a day in advance, you ask? Well, that's kind of like asking me why I'm a boy. God put what he did where he did, and now I'm prone to thinking of Chuck Norris every few days. I make no apologies. I doubt Chuck would either.

2. The Child.
A little while back I got all high on my abilities and had a child. I posted updates about her life, and then I stopped doing that when she got to be about two and a half. She's three now, and I can't say that she's let up much. We went to Disneyland recently, and late one night when I was on a bipedal errand I fetched some cereal milk and bottled water from a liquor store a block past our hotel. Plumbing around for a personal nadir, I ducked into a Del Taco for a cheeseburger and a side of fries. The food was disgusting. The patty was a disc of paste like you might peel off a roll of waxed paper. The fries were crinkle-cut relics from a joyless factory thousands of miles distant, their crenulated surface informed by food styling trends set in the early '80s. I was glad she was not there to witness as her father stuffed three dollars worth of expedient gunk into an sticky, overflowing trash bin and wandered back out into the night.

3. The Great Outdoor Fight book
This is a big one. We've had it in the works for a while...roughly since before YouTube and Facebook emerged to remind us all that we should have learned how to write computer programs. Dark Horse will release this hardcover in the fall, and it will be on Amazon as a pre-order starting sometime in mid-April. What I recommend is getting a case for your trunk, so that you can make friends wherever you go, and also keep a stack in the front hall for departing guests. It might also be prudent to keep a few dozen in a large bowl in your office or waiting room.

4. The 2nd Achewood Cookbook
It's an open secret that Achewood sells a cookbook, and in the five years since its release I've been testing, learning, tasting, and documenting my further experiments in the kitchen. It's just a gigantic mess of a Microsoft Word file at the moment, but I hope to have it dressed up and pretty by summer. Whereas the first book is full of basics (who else will tell you how to really cook rice and hot dogs?), this one is more advanced, more sophisticated, and assumes that the reader has a cutting board.

That's about it for now...I need to go draw gorillas with somebody.