Hey, I just realized I never told the story of how I started reading Achewood. I'm gonna go for a convoluted butterfly effect-style narrative. Hold on to your hats.
When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite computer games was
Ken's Labyrinth, a first-person shooter that was essentially a cross between Wolfenstein 3D and Pee-Wee's Playhouse. My mom had picked up the shareware copy in the clearance bin at OfficeMax, and when I beat the first episode I convinced my parents to send off for the registered version (this was back when you still had to order software through the mail and wait six weeks for a parcel full of floppy disks to arrive). It was a fantastic game, and the background music from the different levels was basically the soundtrack to my life throughout the rest of the '90s.
Fast forward several years, to the salad days of the Internet. Still enamored of this game, I did a search on AltaVista to see if there were any websites about it. There wasn't much there at all, but I did find some references to other games by
Ken's publisher, Epic MegaGames, in particular the company's first release, ZZT. An old ASCII-based Rogue-type game, it was already nearly a decade old and long obsolete, but it had a world editor, and that was enough to get me hooked. I later found a forum at
Z2 for ZZT game designers. For a while I flirted with the idea of joining, but as I never actually finished making any of the games I started that never happened. There were some banner adds on the site, though, some of which advertised some comic called "Achewood." I never clicked on any of them (MegaTokyo having soured me on webcomics back in my preteen years), but a seed had found purchase in my brain that would not sprout until many years later.
During my freshman year in college, there was a guy on my hall (whom I don't think I ever actually met) who printed out various Achewood and Dinosaur Comics strips and put them up outside his door. I recognized this comic as something obscure from my childhood, and out of curiosity I would read whatever strips he had put up whenever I was nearby. It was amusing enough that I continued reading them, but not enough so that I had any desire to follow the thing online.
Then one day, this anonymous dude put up a copy of
this strip. I had no idea who any of the characters were, or what on earth they were doing, but I immediately cottoned on to the fact that Ray was acting the same way I do sometimes on a Saturday night, when the madness strikes. They were only going to a friend's house to retrieve a cookbook, but in my/Ray's mind it was obviously a Grand Adventure. Ray was a dude of passion, a dude who believes in living dangerously. I had to read more of this. I went and looked the comic up online, and before long I was poring through the archives. The rest, as they say, is history.
I wrote all this at this at five in the morning and then dozed off; reading over it now, I realize that there's a lot of exposition for a story that's basically just "I saw a strip I liked stuck to the wall outside someone's dorm room." Damned if I'm not going to post it anyway now, though. Also, while writing this post I have crossed the 24-hour threshold for time wasted on this board. I'm surprised it took me this long.
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Topic: Can someone tell me why The Tenmen is funny? (Read 22973 times)