mrshl | blog

Recently I started taking a closer look at the comments section of Achewood. If you didn’t know Achewood even had a comments section, don’t feel bad. There’s only a small, uninviting "discuss" button on the front page to clue you in. But if you click "discuss" (or directly on on the strip), you enter into Acheworld: a social network of sorts for Achewood fans built mostly around the opportunity to rate each strip and editorialize upon its various merits or meanings.

Once you start reading, it becomes clear that some people love Achewood a whole lot more than you do. Is it entertaining? It can be, but it’s mostly annoying. Because I’m 33, it’s been tempting to assume that all Achewood readers are polite, soft-headed lawyers each of whom has attained my years.

In fact, it looks like most Achewooders are college and high-school aged dorks trying to show off. There’s a built-in merit system that tends to encourage the kids to expand every Achewood strip into a zany meta-exercise written in faux-Onstadian deadpan style. The more calibrated and "hilarious" your comment, the more "chubbies" you are likely to get. If you say something to offend the herd, you get "lamed" and your comment ends up like this:

Lord of the Flies style, a leader has naturally appeared among them. Dude’s screen-name is SpinyNorman, and I’m not sure if he’s the best or the worst. However, the community provides an objective measure. He’s made 1221 comments, and received 4073 chubbies against 242 lames. Those are Tom Brady-like numbers. Here’s a sampling of his chubby-ness in response to this strip:

To contribute, about ten years ago they made a program that analyzed all of Mozart’s symphonies and much of his other written music and "fabricated" another symphony of his, the 42nd. They played it for two groups of people - those who knew it was made by a machine and those who thought it was straight up Mozart. Those who thought it was Mozart thought it sounded wonderful. Those who thought it was a machine thought it was pure shit.

There was probably a third group who thought they should be sitting around listening to Boy George instead of machine-made Mozart. That group was ignored. Until today.

Yeah, that’s pretty funny. But then you realize that the strip already made this identical joke, and you’re just laughing at what’s filtered through the prism. This crap both writes and reads itself. To really understand how annoying and exhilarating the comments can be, I suggest you check-out Onstad’s finest Rorschach test yet, this strip and this one from March 21 & 22, then delve into the comments of the second strip.

The best is unfun’s straightforward interpretation:

As far as I can tell: there was going to be a Roast Beef prostitute strip similar to the Ray one, but the Achewood machine malfunctioned, so Beef just looks around aimlessly and whatever small animal he was supposed to bang is horribly deformed. The person who operates the Achewood machine decides to blame the error on poor Indian manufacturing.

But SpinyNorman shows up too:

Man, what would Nice Pete’s look like.

I think it would just be him sitting on a wooden stool in a cinderblock room holding a stick over an oil can fire, dangling a spider over the greedy flames from the end of the branch and watching its legs collapse like broken fingers.

Then he hears a voice say, "Pete? Pete? I’m a prostitute."

He looks up and the moon’s out the window, crossing the old broken fence making its shattered segments look like the spine of some ancient decayed creature lying askew in the weedy fields. It comes and stands beneath the tree and says, "Womanflesh. Bitchflesh."

And Pete tosses the stick in the fire and walks to the door and he looks at the moon and he sees a face in it, swollen and dumb and luminescent, and Pete says, "I bet you smell like honey. I bet you smell like honey, sweet and fragrant."

And the moon says, "Waters deeps. Waterings it deepenings. Down to where tree-limbs dig down and eaterings things all dead inside."
And Pete says, "I’m going to water it. I got to water it. I’m gonna."

And then the gray rain starts.

See what I mean? If you’re a regular reader of Achewood, you’ll understand me when I say SpinyNorman wouldn’t know Nice Pete if Nice Pete killed and ate him. But the kids are having fun. And I guess that’s what matters.