Since 2001, cult comic favorite Achewood has built a six-figure international following. Intelligent, hilarious, and adult but not filthy, it’s the strip you’ll wish you’d discovered as an underappreciated fifteen-year-old.

Chris Onstad’s online comic Achewood frequently spends weeks and even months on wildly disjointed storylines, but few have captured fans’ imaginations as strongly as The Great Outdoor Fight, in which the comics’ two lead cats, Ray and Roast Beef, set out to conquer a legendary underground brawl. (Its slogan: “3 Days, 3 Acres, 3,000 Men.”) The collected The Great Outdoor Fight (Dark Horse) adds some additional fight mythology, plus an appendix and a glossary, but the main event is Onstad’s often hilariously inexpressive art and deadpan surrealism, as well as the way he gets readers to care about the meaning and the lore surrounding The Fight just by having his own characters believe in it so strongly. As dark and rude as Achewood can be at times, what makes the strip so enduring is how much effort the characters put into understanding and respecting the rules of hanging out and being a dude. Well, that and dialogue along the lines of “He was like the Thomas Edison of handing a dude his ass…”

Praise for Achewood:

• TIME Magazine’s #1 Graphic Novel of 2007.
• “…one of the best outcomes of this Internet blitz is the hilarious Web comic Achewood, by Chris Onstad.” – The New Yorker
• “Onstad is our greatest living cartoonist.” -Tony Millionaire (Maakies, Sock Monkey)
• “These things are hilarious! You have what the NY Times Book Review might call a ‘distinctive and most welcome voice’ in comics.” -Jim Woodring (Frank, Jim)
• “Achewood makes me laugh–in that confused, ‘what the hell was that??’ kind of way.” -Scott McCloud

http://www.achewood.com/

http://chrisonstad.blogspot.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Onstad

Appearances:

Comics Dungeon Oct. 11, 2008

Comics Dungeon Sept. 26, 2009