Interview with Chris Onstad

Ray, the martini swilling cat who has a penchant for banana hammocks in Achewood.

Creator of the Achewood Comic Strip Talks Online Publishing

Chris Onstad is a Stanford graduate who fell into his online comic strip quite by accident, having started his road to conventionalism with a job as a graphic designer, but during down time at work he began to scribble and the scribbles eventually became the popular cult comic strip Achewood.

I finished a page of 10 of my first strips and put it online around 2 a.m., September 11, 2001. So as you can imagine, six or seven hours later no one was going to read my comic strip because that was the day the World Trade Center fell. It was a pretty inauspicious beginning.

Two or three weeks later, we published the site and I publicized it on The Comics Journal, went to different comics community message boards and took out an ad here and there. I didn't try very hard to push it because at that point I wasn't trying to make a career of Achewood.

Achewood as an Online-only Comic

I started the comic online since there's no way to print unless you're picked up by somebody, and there's no way to be picked up by somebody if you've only got three comic strips in your portfolio. I see print as an enormous barrier of entry to artists who would otherwise make great work. I wasn't making great work at first, but I was able to publish online because it was free and easy. Now I've been able to create stuff that people really like, whereas otherwise, I would have been discouraged and quit five years ago.

Where the Achewood Ideas Come From

What I hope happens every day that I'm supposed to write a strip, is that when I'm out on a walk or driving, I'll see something that will trigger a funny phrase or image in my head. The best strips are written in three minutes. If I can get it all to come together, I can make a great, funny one-off strip, but oftentimes I'm embroiled in a longer story arc. I'll have to sit down and work on it for five or six hours, and that's laborious writing. I like the strips that happen the fastest. For the 18 seconds it takes someone to read it, I've probably put nine hours into it.

If I don't have any ideas for a strip, I'll tap around in Microsoft Word for a while and cast around for old ideas I've jotted down. Once I've got about 90 per cent of a strip written, I'll go to Adobe Illustrator, which is the program I use to draw it, and I'll block the action out frame by frame. I'll find character illustrations in other strips that mimic what I want, like gestures or outfits I need, and copy those in and adjust them to fit the strip. That whole process takes another few hours. Then there are the bubbles and background shading.

The fact that it takes so long is why I'm never ahead. Newspaper cartoonists are usually about a month ahead. The curse of publishing on the Internet is that you don't really have to do anything ahead of schedule. You just post the comic; there's no one else you have to go through. So I've never really been more than a day or two ahead of the strip.

I think in Achewood you'll find the characters represent general personality archetypes fairly well. You could probably say the characters in Achewood are built around six people I know. I enjoy writing Ray, Roast Beef and Teodor the most, because they're the largest aspects of my own personality.

Growing Achewood's Following

The popularity of Achewood is mostly underground. I've got a small readership, and here and there I find people with the same mindset. It's really not mass appealing; it's still basically undiscovered. People who like it consider it their own undiscovered thing, and that makes them feel cool about it.

The interesting thing about the way the Internet has shaped up is that I don't need to have an enormous Achewood collection in Barnes and Noble to be a success. On the Internet, I can monetize in so many different ways. We have a shop where you can buy books, T-shirts, accessories, paintings, etc. There's close to 100 different items that we sell.

I would certainly like to see myself branching out into other media and also with other projects. Today I was working on a screenplay. I would also love to write novels. Play music. I'm not just going to cartoon. I like to do too many other things.

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