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[KeithHernandez]

I had to live with my parents for a semester of college, and I just started reading them, thought they were funny and kept at it.  Then I found this place, and a bunch of other internet gems.  Now, even though I am living away from my parents again, I keep up my internet habit.

[linnea]

I can't precisely recall, other than the fact that I was in college in late 2001 when I discovered the strip. I'd been into comics for a long time by that point, and finding them for free on the internet back in the mid-nineties with Netscape v.1.0 was like treasure. I must have followed a link from another webcomic...I think it was Jon Rosenberg's Goats or Dieselsweeties?

[littlefallsmets]

A good friend of mine from college told me about it and...

He just said "Mike, this is awesome but it's an acquired taste but seriously give it a shot from the start."

So I went back to the beginning and... I stared at the first strip for like five minutes.

"The otter is standing on the instructions. Huh. How is that a... punchline?"

I thought about it and thought about it and... couldn't figure it out. How is that a punchline?

So I challenged myself to read the strip until I understood what the fuck was going on in that strip.

And pretty soon I was hooked for life.

Now, whenever I have to get a gift for that friend, I buy him stuff from the Achewood store.

I've never bought anything for myself but they got my business one way or the other.

[Sub_Topical]

m. jantze's The Norm -> j. lileks -> Achewood

Kinda like that in May '02. Then:

Achewood -> Dumbrella -> TOUAMB

The Achewood -> Dumbrella link is where I made the move from reading to discussing comics.

Gee, thanks Achewood. Wanna get this sock monkey off my back already?

[Victoria Waterfield]

An already-into-Achewood friend of mine gave me one of the books to read, the one which begins with the Ray-travels-through-time-to-meet-Mark-Twain arc. Very soon I was on the website, reading the archive from the beginning, then again from the beginning when I discovered there was alt-text.

[Ernest Faulkner Hemingway]

I asked my mom where idiots were and my mom said your forum was for IDIOTS

[Ernest Faulkner Hemingway]

and in the end the love you like is equal to the love you bike

[Doc]

I don't know. I recall no life before Achewood.

Or at least an incorrect life that is no longer maintained.


I had a friend at uni and we knew each other's taste so we'd pass weird stuff back and forth that we knew we'd appreciate like brunching shuttlecocks, daily dinosaur comics, PBF and achewood. I am unsure if I showed him Achewood or if he showed me but let us say that is where it came from.

[wombat]

then again from the beginning when I discovered there was alt-text.

Ah, yes. Good times.

I know I also came here from Lileks, and I suspect that my experience was like LFM's in that I was determined to keep reading till I understood where the first strip I read was coming from. But it's all theoretical, I don't actually remember a life before Achewood at all.

[jaydub]

I was reading MacHall and Matt Boyd made a reference to the GOF and Achewood.  Since I liked what they were doing there (and had read them since...2002?), I followed the link to the March 21st strip, which I thought was interesting, but then stumbled across the alt text and thought - now that's something different.  Zipped back a few months and caught more of the flavour of the strip and what sealed it was Todd's joint venture with Ray into anatomical parts for cars.
A while later I clicked on Onstad's link to the Wikipedia page for Achewood, which features an External Link to TOUAMB.

[RMJ12345]

"The otter is standing on the instructions. Huh. How is that a... punchline?"

To be perfectly honest, that's one that I still don't get.

[littlefallsmets]

I came to the conclusion that... the joke is... ultimately, Phillipe is so innocent/dumb/happy that they don't know how to tell him that he's doing the wrong thing by standing on the manual. They are afraid it could really make him cry or fuck him up as an adult or something to ask him to move.

"He's five! What does he know for drum machines? He'll either think we're being mean or he'll feel stupid."

It was not worth risking that.

Ultimately, letting the otter remain undisturbed was worth being confounded by the drum machine.

The otter would move on his own accord, eventually, and the task would be accomplished without breaking his innocence.

Which, of course, is the exact kind of absurd thing a person who wants to be nice to a kid but has no idea actually how to deal with kids would think. Like it was one of those Seinfeldian exaggeration-of-a-real-life-misunderstanding things.

That was my conclusion at the time.

These days, I'm not sure if THAT'S the joke or the joke is that it's completely fuck*ng insane that a bunch of stuffed animals would be involved in trying to figure out a drum machine. Not just because they're stuffed animals but also because... like... unless you're actually in the music business, who the hell buys a drum machine?

And yet... lotsa people with disposable income and no actual path toward making music will buy a drum machine and then... invariably lose the instructions or get bored with it and now they are another goddamn shiftless noodler with a drum machine collecting dust in the goddamn closet. Just because they thought the machine would be cool to have around or would inspire them to actually make music or something.

So, the point would be, he's just racheting up the absurdity of it one more step. "Okay, it's pretty absurd when that guy who has Family Money and smokes a lot of weed buys a drum machine he's never gonna substantively use. Now, to make the point, lets have GODDAMN STUFFED ANIMALS do it. Cute ones. REALLY cute ones."

One of these two ideas is somewhere near the actual point.

I have no idea which, to this day. But... that's part of the hook of Achewood, I think. The Hookwood, as it were.

[Sub_Topical]

ILLEGAL GHOST BIKES

[Muse_Of_Fire]

I have always been kind of "meh" about webcomics. Most of them would have one or two that'd make me laugh, but overall they weren't consistently good enough for me to start following. My best friend (an imposing, violent Norseman) kept sending me links to specific Achewood strips and I'd always go, "What the heck is this?" Occasionally I'd chuckle, but I didn't get it at all. This was probably compounded by the fact that he'd send them to me randomly, so I didn't get any of the continuity or plot/character development that makes Achewood so spectacular.

Then he sent me Freezepop's "A Very Special Boy," and the song made me so happy (for a variety of reasons beyond simply the upbeat bubbly sound of the song itself), along with a little background explanation of who Philippe was and why the phrase "A Special Boy" was relevant, and the meaning of the "standing on the drum machine" lyric. So now all of a sudden Philippe was a character for me, with a whole background and fleshed-out personality and everything. I went back to the site and read the entire thing from the very beginning in a single weekend, and loved it more and more with each strip.

Achewood is the best part of my day, truly. I've skipped brushing my teeth more often than I've skipped Achewood.

I found this forum via the link that someone--I think it was Mets--posted on the Time blog article thing.

For me the first strip with the drum machine made perfect sense because I'd heard the Freezepop song first. But of course, that's completely circular: the strip made sense because of a song that mentioned the strip. However reflecting back, I don't think the first strip is necessarily meant to be funny. It's just meant to be. "Hello, everyone. Welcome to Achewood. This is how things are." That and I also sort of have this feeling that Onstad gets inspiration for a lot of the stories from what the actual stuffed animals are doing at his house. I mean, there's definitely an actual Philippe stuffed animal, at least--we've seen pictures of him from the Europe trip! So perhaps Onstad has a drum machine at home, for some reason, and the Philippe stuffed animal was on the instruction manual, having been set down there or something, and Onstad thought, "Heck, there's my first strip," and there you have it.

Not terribly imaginative or epic for the beginnings of something as, well, phenomenal (in the deepest sense of the word) as Achewood, but you know, greater things (oh who am I kidding? What could be greater than Achewood?) have come from humbler seeds.

I'unno.



And now, happiness abounds.

[V-Adore]

I got linked by Goats to Achewood, which was then on this strip. "But Ray! Cowboys!" begged for context, so I plowed into the archive, and... at some point it just worked, possibly via alchemy.

When I attempted to introduce the SO to the strip, the first one he claimed to really enjoy was "These knives!", which is about when I got hooked too. Who can resist these knives? My heart's explodin'!