The Dude Has No Mercy

Raymond Quentin Smuckles from Achewood, courtesy of Chris Onstad

As is sometimes said,

Achewood

is the new

Simpsons

. The level of storytelling and the quality of the humor are pretty much unparalleled. It’s never clichéd, stupid, or a rip-off, which makes it pretty much the opposite of every other web comic, which usually reward stupidity and a lack of imagination. For years I’ve wondered how Chris Onstad is able to be so consistently funny and how he is able to understand so many different, varied characters. It was a dream come true to finally get to ask him my burning, burning questions.

Vice : How are you able to create such a diverse cast of characters and understand them so thoroughly?

Chris Onstad:

Look, we all know people. Think about the weirdest dude you know. The dude who wouldn’t go to graduation because he wanted to stay in the parking lot and hand out fake Round Table Pizza coupons. We all know good people like that. We know how it sounds when they speak. All I do is mimic or parrot. Nobody would ever say that I am empathetic or a good husband, but I don’t miss a beat when it comes to rubbernecking the strange. Last night I was out having a smoke and I saw some chick doing Wii Fit in her front window. I walked over and had a look to see if she was topless. She wasn’t, and somebody shut the drapes, but that kind of story shows you my dedication to checking things out.

Which character do you relate to the most?

I did a signing in Seattle, you know, standing at the counter with the line and all that. This one withdrawn guy had me sign his book, matter-of-fact, and when he was leaving and I was looking at the back of his head, he turned and said, “You’re Téodor, aren’t you?” I looked right at his eyes, and in my heart I knew that I was being honest when I gave him a thumbs-up. Plain and in between, but never excellent.

Roast Beef’s tragic childhood feels like it has to be based on yours. Did you grow up like Roast Beef?

No, no. Not mainly. We have all been sad about our lots in life, but I was never without a net. I knew Beefs, but I was not Beef. Mostly. In the main.

Did your mom leave you at a laundromat on Christmas Eve?

This last Christmas my family and I were in the middle of moving out of Silicon Valley, and our dryer broke. We had to hit a laundromat on the 23rd of December, with our little three-year-old girl, in this wealthy town where we lived. Our life was in a big state of flux and uncertainty, and I was hugely depressed, and it was a “there but for the grace of God go I” moment. All my daughter wanted to do was dance and look at herself in the big reflective front windows on the darkened street, and I felt like an utter failure as a father, standing there among the machines, even though this beautiful child saw nothing other than the big expanse of white tiles where she could dance in her new red shoes.

Did you get caught trying to steal Playboys from Waldenbooks?

No, not even once. We did it all, my crew and I. Kimberly Conrad.

Penthouse

, even. We were the New White Boys of Stealing.

Did your wang ever fall out your shorts while riding your homemade skateboard down stairs?

No, never. It has happened to others, though, and occasionally in front of me. I like to think that it has happened to you, perhaps hundreds of times. Perhaps at every corner you turn, and perhaps even when you unsuspectingly open the refrigerator.

Did your parents keep you in a bread bag as a baby?

No, I had a room with a bed and Raggedy Ann and Andy sheets, which I am pretty sure were homemade, because the border where the top of the sheet met the bottom of the sheet was kind of this big white soft rope thing.

Do you have parents?

My father is Daniel; my mother is Edna. (If I was Fake Black Edith Wharton, I would call my book that.)

Is Charley dead or in the past?

Neither. It’s really complicated. It’s more complicated than

Lost

, but with animals pissing in toilets. Sorry to use that phrase in an otherwise good interview.

How are you so good at avoiding clichés and being original?

I have a hair-trigger cliché-meter that actually even goes off wrong at normal times. I can’t stand the idea of recycling a joke or using a formula. This is my thing.

Achewood

is my thing in this life so far. I can’t be lazy about the content. It’s for posterity, my flag for the ages, the tent post I pitched in my 20s and 30s. I’d rather take six years off than have a familiar gag. There are some tools, like Mexican magic realism, which I work into the strip over time, but that’s hardly lazy. Those are generative devices, not punch lines or crutches. What I want to do is write characters as honestly as possible, like they’re a friend of yours, or a strange neighbor you can’t shake the fascination with.

I like the wheels I have spinning now. I once read where Roald Dahl described stories as spinning gears fitting in with one another, engaging the transmission as needed. A good fictionwriting teacher will tell you, “What is most private is most public.” If you spill your guts but give it a fictitious byline, that’s good entertainment.

Achewood

is a lot of gut-spilling. There are many stretches that are hard for me to read, for personal reasons, because I know the real motivations behind the characters’ hardships. I hate that, but I love that. I love that I had the balls to put my broken heart or ruined life out there when I was unhappy.

Does story continuity ever bug you? Like, you wake up at night thinking, “What about that thing that happened?”

Readers take care of that. Continuity’s a big issue after eight years, and I make the occasional mistake or misstep, but I keep pretty vigilant now that we have Trekkies of our own. Continuity errors drive me bat-shit insane, so I proofread and research like a skinny Radcliffe girl. It’s one of the reasons I can’t write as wide-rangingly and freely as I used to: My characters have eight years’ worth of personality traits, claims, and prejudices to keep straight. I wish there were some kind of software that’d help me keep them in check.

When you coin phrases, does seeing those phrases outside of Achewood fill you with a mixture of pride and dread not unlike giving birth to a son?

Here and there, I’ll think I get a whiff of

Achewood

patois fed back from the strip, but I don’t have, like, Matt Lauer on DVR saying, “I tucked my cronked friend’s rad chilies into a toilet-thesis tube last night. Keep on rocking, Matt Lauer” as a way of signing off.

I made a flyer for a gay party that incorporated the phrase “Let’s show this room how gay it can get!”

I don’t think there is any higher praise I can get than when readers tell me I write gay men or women well. To me, that is a true achievement, because I am a white man from the woods who cries whenever a Reagan stamp is canceled (a percentage of this sentence is a lie).

A lot of Achewood stuff riffs on the olde-tymey. Are you yourself into olde-tymery?

If you don’t dress up in a white suit and read

Letters from the Earth

in a hot Mississippi room full of varnished-oak lecterns once in a while, then, my friend, I don’t even know why we did this thing in the first place.

What were you doing before you made Achewood?

I had some good roots down in putting fonts on business cards, and I could whip up a mean HTML table with a tab index, but I wasn’t playing hard at the front of my game. Silicon Valley gave me the pinch in ’02 and it’s been the internet version of hawking flowers in taquerias ever since.

What’s up with expanding the brand?

That sounds like what Martha Stewart would say to me, if an assistant of hers took me into her bedroom at 3:30 AM, right before she woke up, and the assistant said, “Chris does a comic strip. Here are the vitals.” She would say that as she reached for the folder.