October 2004

Grandpa Sucks Up to His Favorite Comic Strip, Achewood

Those of you who don't read the small print may have missed a recent addition to the web's best daily comic. Blogs have been created for each character (or, by each character, I suppose. It's hard to tell who's in charge out there some days.) They are freakin' amazing, and rad, too. Very rad.

Chris Onstad, Achewood's creator, is using the blogs to develop story lines for the strip, and to generate more complex personalities for each character. Also, the blogs cultivate a load of character building within the Achewood universe as the primary stories flourish on the home page.

When Onstad first unveiled the blogs, I thought "Wow! What if Peanuts had them from the beginning?" Sure, that would have been cool, but Peanuts was a different kind of comic. Honestly, something like Doonsbery or Pogo would have been able to use such a technology to achieve more out of the strips than other daily publications could. Charlie Brown did not lead the wild life of Ray Smuckles (the millionaire cat). Ray has parties and ridiculous beer brewing experiments, and such exploits cannot fit into the daily comic without pushing out every other character.

I've always suspected that comic strip characters live a normal existence off of the printed page, and for the characters of Achewood, it's true. Roast Beef and his girlfriend, Molly, are bickering about getting their own apartment; Philippe is running for President; Ray and Teodore are starting a boutique beer company; and, Mr. Bear is in Russia looking for the love of his life. These everyday goings on would never fit into the daily comic format, nor should they. We don't want Achewood to become Mary Worth, do you?

Seriously, this is huge. In the past five years or so, web-only daily comics have replaced the need for the crappy daily comics that besmirch almost every paper in the country. With the advent of character blogs, these dailies have an opportunity to not only exceed their old-fashioned brothers, but also create a stronger connection with their readers in a shorter amount of time.

Of course, this will only work for the best authors, and Achewood's Chris Onstad is one of them.