The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Achewood => Achewood => Topic started by: dejavroom on October 02, 2007, 09:20:21 am
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Permalink! (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=10022007)
So no flaming gayness in Teódor's future, eh (although he does seem to be taking better care of himself in his late years...).
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Does he die jogging?
Also, Ray looks really sweet in the 2039 one. Roast Beefs gave me a little chuckle I guess, besides that mainly laughed because I interpreted the question I asked to be a yes.
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I wonder if 2031 Philippe's look of troubled bemusement is a result of trying to understand why Teodor isn't around anymore.
Actually, speaking of Philippe, he looks disturbingly smug in his last panel... as though he has finally rid his world of all the Problems adults have and is now free to make jelly beans however he pleases.
I never did trust that otter.
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I can't tell if that's Molly or Beef. Either is just weird (after all that, what could possibly make Molly leave? And Beef... well, doesn't strike me as the transgendered sort, born semi-intersexed or no.)
And Philippe... God, Philippe is five. It is sad to think that all of the guest strips about Philippe being old are off the mark, because Philippe is five.
NOT SHOWN: Pat defeated in re-election bid (R-CA), LN 'experimenting' in college and settling down with Chuckle Bot, Nice Pete smoking a whole mess of meth and dying eighty years old at the typewriter, Doc Andretti's Magreux Dog wearing his Nobel prize for cybernetic ears, Todd's scheme to shake down the Dude and Catastrophe for protection money going horribly awry, Lyle earning tenure.
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Vlad smiling knowingly at a stack of grainy photos of Todd, cashing his weekly blackmail check from Corny.
Envelope, finally pulling up his Re-Elect Pat sign, noticing a suspicious smell - almost like rotten squirrel - and getting his trowel.
Blister chillin' with Mao back in heaven.
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This strip totally pays off yesterday. Oh Onstad, forgive my hubris for doubting thee.
Also, it's Molly. She leaves, Beef dies. That's how it goes.
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Oh shit, i didn't even recognize Ray;s ears cut off. Took me a while of wondering why his head looked different in the lecture pic to figure out what was really easy to figure out by looking at either side of that.
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I can't tell if that's Molly or Beef. Either is just weird (after all that, what could possibly make Molly leave? And Beef... well, doesn't strike me as the transgendered sort, born semi-intersexed or no.)
And Philippe... God, Philippe is five. It is sad to think that all of the guest strips about Philippe being old are off the mark, because Philippe is five.
NOT SHOWN: Pat defeated in re-election bid (R-CA), LN 'experimenting' in college and settling down with Chuckle Bot, Nice Pete smoking a whole mess of meth and dying eighty years old at the typewriter, Doc Andretti's Magreux Dog wearing his Nobel prize for cybernetic ears, Todd's scheme to shake down the Dude and Catastrophe for protection money going horribly awry, Lyle earning tenure.
It is Molly... see how her nose is white and very different from Beef's? What is she doing, identifying his body? Or is she in the hospital with him as he dies of heart failure?
This strip totally pays off yesterday. Oh Onstad, forgive my hubris for doubting thee.
Also, it's Molly. She leaves, Beef dies. That's how it goes.
Dammit, once again... I say snarky things about a strip, and the next day I'm proven totally wrong as I'm handed incredible, crazy-fuckin'-genius-hilarious entertainment by Mr. Onstad.
It looks like Beef goes a similar route to Rustmouth, except he gives in to alcohol and pills and dies an early death. I love how Ray got some sort of crazy accident that leaves him earless... and then Teodor gets obese, loses the weight, and then dies early anyway. El Diabetes is just too much for his system. And Philippe...well, he's so much younger than everyone else in the strip, plus he's the Eternal Child archetype anyway. Great, great strip. I lol'ed.
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It is Molly... see how her nose is white and very different from Beef's? What is she doing, identifying his body? Or is she in the hospital with him as he dies of heart failure?
I think she's leaving him because of his drug problem. She looks pissed. And apparently she was the last thing keeping him alive.
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I just noticed Roast Beef is the only dead one without a grave. I guess that's suitably depressing, not to mention the inverse void box.
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OMG, this is depressing. I want to go back to bed and crawl under a blanket for the rest of the day. Thanks, Mr Onstad.
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HELL of glad to see Beef smoking cigarettes again.
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OMG, this is depressing. I want to go back to bed and crawl under a blanket for the rest of the day. Thanks, Mr Onstad.
same reaction here. I dont need my morning funny to remind me of my mortality and struggle.
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I dont need my morning funny to remind me of my mortality and struggle.
OK, I'll say it before anyone else does: Then why the hell do we read Achewood?
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Achewood doesnt usually have 3 dead characters, a divorce, alcoholism, obesity, ear loss, and a lonely otter all in one strip without a single line of speak.
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I think Beef offs himself, he's the only one without a grave (No, that doesn't *necessarily* makes sense, but that's how I roll).
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Think of the good times! Philippe apparently gets to go back to France! Ray visits a haunted house! Teodor gets a music player with cordless headphones!
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Dear Onstad:
I liked Roast Beef's extrapolated life the first time around back when it was called JOHNNY CASH
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ear loss
nooooooooooooooooooooooo
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I read this strip slowly in columns, top to bottom and left to right.
Then I play "Breathe Me" by Sia.
Ray is Nate (player, breast man), Teodor is David (gay), Philippe is Claire (because he lives), and Beef is Ruth (got depression).
Also, ain't no substitute for smokin' and drinkin', even in the bright future of 2026.
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booze and pills are one way of making your sick with major depression brain shut the hell up for a few weeks at a time
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Philippe seems to be pretty happy in that last panel. Either he forgets quickly, or he's remarkably sanguine about being a terrible cursed immortal.
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Philippe seems to be pretty happy in that last panel. Either he forgets quickly, or he's remarkably sanguine about being a terrible cursed immortal.
Heh!! Tiny can to you, my good lady.
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See, I was thinking Beef didn't die, he was just swallowed/crushed by circumstances. Like a fate worse than death - going on breathing, but just... like lying there.
Also, does the candelabra play into Ray's ear loss?
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See, I was thinking Beef didn't die, he was just swallowed/crushed by circumstances. Like a fate worse than death - going on breathing, but just... like lying there.
Also, does the candelabra play into Ray's ear loss?
it looks like it caused the fire that burnt off his ears.
in a weird way I hope Achewood lasts long enough to where Onstad feels compelled to include these changes in the storyline (like Teodor's dying the first time).
edit: also, Beef's squares gradually fading to black are a nice touch.
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it looks like it caused the fire that burnt off his ears.
in a weird way I hope Achewood lasts long enough to where Onstad feels compelled to include these changes in the storyline (like Teodor's dying the first time).
edit: also, Beef's squares gradually fading to black are a nice touch.
I dunno, Ray was pictured with the candelabra four years prior to his ear-losing accident. Whatever Ray got into, it must have been bad. Who knows how it happened, but if he had been burned, don't you think Onstad would have rendered him with a few more grossly disfiguring injuries, a la Zell and Cory?
I agree...this glimpse into the Achewood future was totally compelling. I would love to peek into Onstad's brain to see the full storyline from alpha to omega. It would be really cool to see some of these events hinted at in future storylines. They're so surprising because as far as I can tell, nothing has been hinted of these to date.
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It is Molly... see how her nose is white and very different from Beef's? What is she doing, identifying his body? Or is she in the hospital with him as he dies of heart failure?
Roast Beef dies in 2039. His drug habit has left him so destitute that Molly must stand in for the sassy black lady (http://achewood.com/index.php?date=11052004) at his funeral.
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teodor goes from ted kennedy to banana republic blowjob
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I dunno, Ray was pictured with the candelabra four years prior to his ear-losing accident. Whatever Ray got into, it must have been bad. Who knows how it happened, but if he had been burned, don't you think Onstad would have rendered him with a few more grossly disfiguring injuries, a la Zell and Cory?
it's Ray, so you know if he catches fire that he'll have the money and/or luck to come out of it comparatively unscathed.
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Okay, I'll ask it, no one else is dark-hearted enough:
Did Teodor get back in shape in his declining year or was he just, uhm, dying of cancer?
Phillipe lives forever because Phillipe is everything that is innocent and hopeful within us.
Everything that is innocent and hopeful within us is too stupid to know that it's supposed to grow old and die.
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Yeah, my first thought was cancer, too, but he's got the exact same body as Magical Realism Teodor. Look, he's even holding his arms (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=07282006) in the same position!
For that matter, 2019 Philippe comes from here (http://achewood.com/index.php?date=06232005) and 2031 Philippe comes from here (http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04032006). Those are the only ones I can find that I don't remember having seen more than once before anyway.
I wonder how Onstad files all his character and object art? Does he have some kind of utility that lets him browse through a library of previously-used art, and then drag and drop things into the comic panels directly? Or are they just stored in separate directories? However he does it, he must have a hell of a system worked out for it to be any more convenient than just drawing everything by hand. Or perhaps it isn't, and he does it purely for stylistic reasons? I've never been down on the quality of art in Achewood strips anyway, but I'd never looked at it from that perspective before.
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Oh its definitely a statement about the futility of exercise as a means to prolong life. He goes along getting fatter and fatter, then whips himself into shape all self-congratulatory and dies young anyway. Like Jim Fixx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Fixx).
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Oh its definitely a statement about the futility of exercise as a means to prolong life. He goes along getting fatter and fatter, then whips himself into shape all self-congratulatory and dies young anyway. Like Jim Fixx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Fixx).
Yeah, did you see the iPod strapped to his arm in the last "fat" panel? He's trying to work it off, finally achieves that svelte figure, and then dies.
However, I'd still like to have a svelte figure, even if I only get to prize it and strut my skinny ass around for a few days or weeks before my untimely Jim Fixx-esque demise. Also, it bears mentioning that Fixx died of heart disease that was unavoidable - all the other men in his family had died from it as well. It's not like all that running around killed him. Sitting on your ass and letting your arteries coagulate, muscles atrophy, and bones weaken is gonna kill you much faster.
One of my good friends in Alaska, Cheryl, went from overweight to grossly obese after a terrible betrayal and divorce. Once she was diagnosed as a diabetic, she went through massive lifestyle changes. She radically changed her diet to eating whole and unprocessed foods, and worked out like a champ six days a week. She felt and looked amazing.
Then she had a heart attack. It ran in her family.
When she saw the cardiologist, she was angry. She said, "What the fuck did I do all this diet and exercise for? It did not change a damned thing!" The cardiologist begged to differ. He showed her scans of her heart.
"Cheryl, do you see all these tiny vessels that surround your heart? Those are brand-new cardiac blood vessels that your body created because of all the strenuous cardiac exercise you were doing. When you were working out so hard, your body needed more oxygen, and so it made a new network of blood vessels." Then he pointed to the damaged area on her heart. He further explained, "Cheryl, when you had that heart attack, there was still blood that was able to move around your heart BECAUSE OF THOSE BLOOD VESSELS YOU BUILT FROM EXERCISE. There is damage on your heart, but I can tell you with 100% certainty that if you had not been exercising, you would have died from this heart attack. I am one hundred percent certain of that."
Needless to say, Cheryl got back on the diet and exercise wagon as soon as her doctors told her it was okay, and worked with a physical therapist to make sure that she did everything safely.
Every year she has to go back for comprehensive lab work and stress tests to view her heart. After one year had elapsed, the technician looked at her scans, puzzled. "When did you say you had your heart attack?? Because your heart has totally regenerated itself. There is no more dead tissue on your heart. Most patients who've had such a massive heart attack as yours, they continue to show damage to the heart. Your heart is perfect."
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I think you'd be lucky as fuck to see these "previews" actually happening... He's taking major piss (Ray's ears...), that's all.
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(by the way, did you catch that banner add with the text: "6th anniversary promotion - "free shirt! with any order of $50 or more"?" He did a thing with Teódor and the word "Achewood" that's really cute, the devil...)
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[off]
(by the way, did you catch that banner add with the text: "6th anniversary promotion - "free shirt! with any order of $50 or more"?" He did a thing with Teódor and the word "Achewood" that's really cute, the devil...)
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There's a thread about that (http://touamb.com/index.php/topic,3984.0.html).
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Huh, apparently certain stuffed animals and cats don't get hairstyles until they are of a certain age. Maybe Roast Beef didn't really die but rather terminated all biological processes including thought and just left the cybernetic AIBO parts to do their thing.
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Roast Beef definitely went onto something different/worse than death.
Also, he probably just got a wig as part of his "thing" as a singer.
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Huh, apparently certain stuffed animals and cats don't get hairstyles until they are of a certain age. Maybe Roast Beef didn't really die but rather terminated all biological processes including thought and just left the cybernetic AIBO parts to do their thing.
I was always under the assumption that most of them just kept it short ... I know Beef has alluded to it in his blog, and most of the flashback strips show him with a mop of curly hair (or the one where he had Enya hair). likewise, Teodor with the Archie hair or the parted hair (at the party).
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I was always under the assumption that most of them just kept it short ... I know Beef has alluded to it in his blog, and most of the flashback strips show him with a mop of curly hair (or the one where he had Enya hair). likewise, Teodor with the Archie hair or the parted hair (at the party).
What does Beef Enya hair look like? I'm drawing a blank...The stuff he painted on with black shoe polish during the Volvo of Despair arc?
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http://achewood.com/index.php?date=04222002
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Also, he probably just got a wig as part of his "thing" as a singer.
I'm going to agree with mrdna1 that it's down to fastidious grooming, but the thought that Roast Beef got so depressed that he started wearing a balding wig is certainly appealing.
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Beef is not singing, he's whistling.
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Molly turns out the lights. That is when beef dies, no need for a casket to say it.
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Because this strip ran Tuesday I don't get a Birthday Strip today.
Then again, I'm not sure I'd want a strip dealing with aging and eventual mortality to be my birthday strip.
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Achewood doesnt usually have 3 dead characters, a divorce, alcoholism, obesity, ear loss, and a lonely otter all in one strip without a single line of speak.
But sometimes it does, and that's why we read it.
I think that the most interesting thing about this strip is the gap between the last and the second to last panel. What happens in the intervening 13 years?
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rabidambulance:
Here's your link for a special birthday cartoon:
http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=0PBF22048BC-Today_is_my_Birthday.gif#23
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I would just like to say that Onstad has lost me as a reader, starting in 2031. That's gonna be one hell of a depressing strip to read.
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This comic terrified me. It reminded me of David Schwartz' "How Much Is A Million," a picture book of my childhood - I think it's pretty famous, maybe you've read it too. It's designed to teach children to comprehend huge numbers using concrete examples, and there's a particular sequence where all the characters (there were a bunch of children and a wizard, for some reason) are shown in the process of trying to count to some enormous number and aging and dying in the process. They show their progress over a period of several labeled years, and in each year they are older and more die until at last only tombstones are left.
It was my introduction to the concept of futility. It seems the book has stayed with me all these years, because when I saw today's strip I blurted "How Much Is A Million!" and I also totally lost sleep over it.
Completely apart from that it was, on its own merits, the most scarringly and deliberately depressing thing I read this week, and trust me when I say I had to read a lot of literary theory so there is competition. I truly, truly don't know which is worse: Ray lingering on and on and ON, Phillipe eternally five, the Johnny Cash Beef business (yes, totally also thought that) or the living horror that is Teodor's abrupt wasting-away (it's probably meant to be read as "he gets in shape and then bites it" but knowing he's about to die, his skinniness looks sort of horrifying anyway. Besides, I prefer the theory that he just suddenly gets cancer, because it would mean his dad was right to worry, and that's the kind of continuity I appreciate).
Anyway, somehow SO MUCH WORSE than "Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus."
EDIT: "Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus"
http://www.herkolson.com/names_r/robyn_hitchcock_songs/ye_sleeping_knights_of_jesus_lyrics.html
So I don't look all pompous with my music references that 100% of readers will not get instinctively. Plz check out the album this comes from, "I Often Dream of Trains;" it's due for a desperately overdue reissue soon on Yep Roc. I am not affiliated with Robyn Hitchcock or his vast publicity machine.
And yes, with the tune this is a quite upbeat little song. Only way to do something like that, isn't it?
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I try very hard to convince myself that the inevitability of death is nothing to be upset about; that without it life would be in some way meaningless and that it just means that I should make the most of the glorious period of sentience that the universe has so bizarrely granted me.
The trouble is that I live a life so ludicrously charmed that it is actually difficult to believe I could be plucked from it. This is not a state of affairs to complain about, I realise. It is one the world has a distinct right to be pissed off with.
I have to say, I've never found literary theory that depressing. Dull, certainly, and at times enragingly silly, but not depessing. But like I said, charmed life, next-to-impossible to depress. I'm sorry.
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I try very hard to convince myself that the inevitability of death is nothing to be upset about; that without it life would be in some way meaningless and that it just means that I should make the most of the glorious period of sentience that the universe has so bizarrely granted me.
The trouble is that I live a life so ludicrously charmed that it is actually difficult to believe I could be plucked from it. This is not a state of affairs to complain about, I realise. It is one the world has a distinct right to be pissed off with.
I have to say, I've never found literary theory that depressing. Dull, certainly, and at times enragingly silly, but not depessing. But like I said, charmed life, next-to-impossible to depress. I'm sorry.
Not at all, more power to you. ;D
See, I find it depressing precisely because all that vast brainpower's been turned to something so dull and silly. But it's the price I pay for becoming a grown-up academic, and as such prices go, I must admit it's absurdly low.
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Yep Roc is from Chapel Hill! My friend Bryan works for them.
wait, dying? what are y'all talking about?
la di da *skips off into distance*
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Yep Roc is from Chapel Hill! My friend Bryan works for them.
wait, dying? what are y'all talking about?
la di da *skips off into distance*
Tell your friend he can do no wrong, and totally works for the only label which might positively influence me to buy a CD based solely on their logo. Their taste is that aligned with mine; we are like bam, bam, bam.
Or don't, because I am a stranger on the Internet.
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yeah, um, I love the design of their albums so much.
Also, I don't know if he technically works for them anymore? he was an intern over the summer... but I think he might still work there?
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Oh, my God, now I'm remembering "How Much Is a Million?"
That shit was bleak. All the terrible potential of the "Milo climbs the infinite staircase" scene from The Phantom Tollbooth, implemented right there. The gravestones! Oh, Christ!
Thanks, isaacs_law. You're getting canned for reminding me of a basic part of childhood nihilism.
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Aw thanks! Glad to be of service.
Man, I'm getting established here with can rights and everything. I should get myself a gender.
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I try very hard to convince myself that the inevitability of death is nothing to be upset about; that without it life would be in some way meaningless and that it just means that I should make the most of the glorious period of sentience that the universe has so bizarrely granted me.
Add some incomprehensible flower-children metaphysics, floridly awful technobabble from 1973, Beethoven's 7th as a leitmotif, and Sean Connery in a loincloth and thigh high boots and you just explained Zardoz.