Achewood

Serializer, The Model Train (2 versions), 2002

In this primordial—nay, primitive—strip, a very rough sketch of the Roast Beef prototype inadvertently communicates to Vlad that he has nearly zero exposure to women. In return, Vlad says something that has not aged well. I am vastly certain that if I were to rewrite this strip today, Vlad would reflect on how th...

I Hate Long-Ass Recipes: The Smash Burger

Kenji López-Alt's smash burger recipe on Serious Eats is four written pages long. It is six hundred words longer than the Declaration of Independence (1,959 to 1,320), and has fourteen photographs (including a helpful one of the outside of a building where hamburgers are cooked). The entire webpage clocks in at 3.3MB, w...

The Raising of the Onstad Deckola, 2024

The evening before my parents, Lauren, and I descended upon Hayden's farm to build a new pergola out of the old fort, I sensed complications arising. Everyone in the group, it seemed, had their own carpentry background — some professional, but most autodidact — and the gutters of Babel soon overran with incompatible visio...

0057 — Philippe Gets Lyle a Present

Shirt lines that didn't make the cut:

*

I AM LYLE

I SMELL LIKE

I WENT JOGGING WITH ONION SLICES IN MY ARMPITS 

and 

YARD TOOLS

*

I already have GRASS

and GAS

So gimme your (LAWNMOWER?, SORRY, NOT SURE WHAT THIS ONE MEANS)

*

I’M A PERFECT MIXT...

A Hot Mug of Soup (short story)

In this brand-new story, Ray takes Cornelius on a drive to the ophthalmologist, but, as these things go, that is the least of what occurs.

(As an aside to all this, I'm still looking for a way to format these such that the PDF conversion process doesn't turn them into gappy slop, so if you notice any formatting erro...

Internal E-mail Regarding Local Dance Troupe

A brief e-mail exchange between Lauren and me, as we sat in our respective offices Monday morning. 

Perhaps you would enjoy captioning it, as well? 

Notes & Outtakes from 0056 (Pentagon Disagreement)

Curious to hear from you chochachos of the Author's Tier about your specific feelings on these panels. I couldn't ask you this until now because my parents were staying with us, but tonight my parents are 300 miles away in Yreka, trying to eat food at a Black Bear Diner, and I don't have to hear about how much saturated fat i...

0056 - Ray and Cornelius Disagree About The Pentagon

I have spent the past week entertaining my parents, who are visiting from out of town. We are the sort of family who hold seven concurrent conversations despite there being only three people in the room. It is a special kind of multiplexing which can drive others mad. I can handle it, because I grew up in it, but it has the u...

Fall of Fort Onstad, 2010-2024

In 2010, back when I was still married and we all lived at the old house together, my wife and kid went on a trip to see her family in California. While they were gone, I thought it would be an act of classical fatherhood to build a playhouse for my child, and surprise them when they returned. 

I wasn't in particul...

0055 - panel edits, original script

This strip was remarkable to me because the original script took about ten minutes to write, and changed very little through the production stage. (This happens maybe once every thousand strips.) I vacillated a bit on the seventh panel — I always find a way to waste an extra hour or two — but ended up staying wi...

0055 - TV Phone Calls

I add to this list: Oncoming drivers whom you move aside to let pass on a narrow street yet fail to wave. People who bring dogs into coffee shops and don't notice your glaring. Ship captains who gaze inscrutably into the distance instead of saying, "The sea is me soul's final keep, the briney me sheet as I sleep."

What ...

Philippe's Complete Twitter Archive

Sure, you could have just gone to Twitter and read all this, but I doubt many people are going there to look for Philippe Twitter content anymore (his last post was eleven years ago), so I, in the spirit of both fun sharing and completeness, present his total output here. As you might imagine, it's fairly light reading. I'd a...

Monster Truck Weekend

A friend once took his young boy to witness an exposition of monster trucks — for the boy’s sake, not his own — and returned home a full-throated proselyte of the spectacle. So complete was his joy at the performance of these machines that in his breathless recap, I do not believe he mentioned the boy.

The me...

0054 - Lyle's New Vase

The "Truth Vase" is defined as any item in a house over which two inhabitants disagree, but whose content or form cannot be explicitly denied as actual. What's your Truth Vase? 

Author Q&A Thread #2 - open to non-subscribers!

Please post your questions for me within twenty-four hours of this Q&A going live! (I.e., between now and tomorrow, Thursday February 29, 11AM Pacific.) I will respond over the course of the following few days, but usually within the hour. Patreon will send you a message when I reply to you.

Questions can be about a...

Q&A #2: Weds 11am PST - open to non-subscribers!

The second Q&A will also be open to non-subscribers, in the hopes that it will get new people on board and enjoying the most recent year of Achewood. This is the best and most consistent material ever released under the masthead, and I would love for it to bring happiness and laughter to more lives.  

The last ...

Liquid Fire, Etc — News from Achewood Manor

Good Monday Morning, Valued Denizen of the Author’s Tier!

Here is some news of my week, which I present to you as valid entertainment.

1. An Exciting Medical Device!

Tonight I am installing a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) onto the side of my arm. I have no reason to do this other t...

0053 - Just a Little Comic About a Little Thought

This is just a little comic with a little idea in it. Lyle does not burst through the wall with a buzzsaw, raging about the inadequacy of the present. Maybe this comic is kind of peaceful. It is a snatched glimpse of a small moment. 

There will still be the usual new strip Friday. Today's comic is just a little one...

Rejected panels from “0052 - Roast Beef is Feeling Pretty Nice!”

In the cold light of morning, as the dew sticks to the neighbor's eaves and the hot joe sits silently in the mug beside you, some of the previous night's panels bring only shame.   

0052 - Roast Beef is Feeling Pretty Nice!

(Note: precisely one minute after this strip posts, six rejected panels from it will post in the In-Universe and Author's tiers.)

If our bodies can release amazing trippy chemicals as we're dying, then (a) why do they wait until then to do it, and (b) how did this ability evolve into be...

Serializer, 2002, 2nd-ever post

This is going back, back, back so far that the type is pixelated and their muzzles are, for some unknown reason, now rendering as blotchy color, as though they were slowly derezzing out of our universe entirely. (This was apparently before I knew about archiving the original high-res files in some way that could be searched f...

Roast Beef's Latest Junk Shop Find

Please enjoy the full transcript of this long-forgotten public service bulletin, recently discovered by Roast Beef Kazenzakis at a cavernous junk shop several miles out of town. 

0051 - Fuck You Friday

What's one unsettling or otherwise noteworthy detail you've discovered in an Airbnb? I once opened a jar of shampoo and caught Hugh Laurie's limp from House.

Brief Update from Savannah, GA

(Please see the photo captions for more-concise early thoughts on my visit here.)

With the exception of the local drivers, upon whose murderous pathologies I will expound elsewhere—perhaps before legislature—Savannah presents itself as modestly charming. 

My tourism needs are not...

After the Great Outdoor Fight: Salmonwood

We see Ray and Beef growing distant in the wake of the victory which redefined their lives. 

0050 - Epilogue; sneak peek at next week's strip

Next week we begin a run of Old School Classic standalone strips, set to run indefinitely. The story arcs are very pleasing to mull over and plot, but under the mop of my well-being I sense a hunger for the wham-bam of the spirited and irreverent basal ganglia of this excitable troupe. 

I'm also doing another Autho...

I just found the lost, first-ever Achewood painting, 2004

In the little house on Holly Street, before the baby and the book tours and the Oregon move and the rest of that rise and spectacular grind of a fall, I went to Michael’s Arts and Crafts and bought a couple tubes of cheap acrylic paint.

“I should learn how to paint. I’m an artist, after all, and I’ve seen that ...

Studio Sunday - canvas updates

My baking coach Neven brought over some fresh homemade bagels this morning (final photo), so we laid out the fish and brineys and did it up. Afterwards I spent a while in the studio taking a few passes at the latest canvases, and felt like it was time to share again.

Great Outdoor Fight animation sequence: Beef's trailer

**PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS INFORMATION OUTSIDE OF PATREON**

**I AM NOT SURE BUT I THINK I COULD GET COMPLETELY YELLED AT**

This is actually the storyboards for two sequences: 

1. Zooming in on Beef's childhood trailer with Gramma K, right up to his...

0049 - The Account, Pt. 8, 2-PAGE FINALE

That's right, this one's two pages long. Don't forget to read the second page, because that is where the finale is. If you just read the first page, it will seem like a pretty bad finale, or at least the kind of anti-finale that has been popular in Hollywood lately, ever since writers' parents stopped reading them Agatha Chri...