Liz Kaempf
Last month marked Dark Horse Comics’ release of Achewood Volume 2: Worst Song, Played On Ugliest Guitar. This is the second book printed creator and illustrator Chris Onstad’s online comic strip Achewood, the first being The Great Outdoor Fight. Achewood is the humorous pictorial of animals (and robots) living as humans do in an underground community.
This particular volume serves as not just a companion piece to the comics themselves, but also as a detailed history of the city of Achewood and all its quirky characters. Onstad gives long-time fans with new readers a look into the makings of such an elaborate place and embellished maps, as well as his own commentary that footnotes the bottom of the cartoons published within the book. He reveals censored conversations and even some of his own diluted thoughts. Some days, even he didn’t know what he was thinking when he was drawing the panels. Although, many times he simply comments on his inability to draw nice houses in his earlier strips.
Onstad retells the history of how some of his beloved residences came to live in Achewood in five nonlinear chapters. We learn how the young and innocent otter, Phillippe, arrives by mail, the particular sophistications of bears, Cornelius and Teodor and the crudeness of the tiger, Lyle. All of these characters take up residence at 62 Achewood, the Onstad home.
However, the conclusion of the ‘History of Achewood’ reveals that we will need to wait for a seperate volume to learn the origins of “The Cats, Roast Beef, Pat and Ray.” Anyone familiar with the Achewood Cats would know it is a volume not to be missed.
One specific piece of Volume 2 that astounded me was the introduction to the section “Before We Were Achewood – The Early Experiments.” Onstad says he includes his early drawings of our favorite animal friends “so that first-time readers will not flip to page 1, become white-hot furious at the hacky, impentetrable content, walk outside, and throw the book so high in the air that it never comes down again.”
Admittedly, when I first got my hands on this book, I couldn’t even begin to fathom what exactly I was getting myself into. The first comic I opened up to was a cat in a thong making a bear a martini.
I was roped in nonetheless.
Within the two hard covers of Worst Song, Played On Ugliest Guitar lies some of the many golden pieces of the internet cult-classic’s comic strips. Onstad cleverly adds the use of presidents and popular culinary icons in his work, as well as free marketing plugs for Ketel One Vodka. Many of the comic panels are just funny situations and conversations that go on between the members of the community. But sometimes, Onstad gets our heads out of our asses long enough to think about troubles in the real world.
Troubles such as the dreams and hardships of a lowly French fry, or the brain capacity of a squirrel that makes it impossible for him to recreate a thong for himself by memory. Or even the embarrassment of not knowing the difference between a martini with a twist and a martini with an olive. And to think, all this time I’ve been living in ignorance, unaware of the arduous day-to-day lifestyles of bears living underground in a human city!
Damn! Even a comic strip about God “toking”! Well, it’s true. Who is going to yell at God?
Worst Song, Played On Ugliest Guitar is just one of many volumes that gives readers a look into the mind of Achewood’s creator as well as the early beginnings of his furry brain children. Before Volume 2, I used to be a girl impressed by pretty boys lamenting lost love on grand pianos, unfamiliar with the lives of the inhabitants of such an underground city. But now? Well let’s just say I’d rather here the worst song sung by a horny cat than anything a college boy has to offer me.
By far, Chris Onstad is a master of the arts and Achewood Volume 2 allows fans one and all to bask in the humor of his genius without burning out their retinas to the emanating glow of the computer screen. And who knows? Maybe you’ll fall in love with an underage otter too.
