Caltrops - Mac Hall Complaints Department





	[quote name="mark"][I started this post a few hours ago, then forgot about it, saw <i>In The Loop</i> and came home, so I see people have made some of these same points. Oh well.] Achewood has always been incredibly uneven. It's been much much worse since around the wedding arc, but there are still great moments. Some of which appeared earlier in this very arc. But yeah, it's taken an awful turn and wasn't that good to begin with. It reminds me a lot of the Thomas Edison one in tone and boredom. The Chris Ware shit is awful. I think I'm the only person alive that doesn't like Chris Ware's stuff at all. Whatever, he isn't going to lose any sleep over it; he's a wildly successful cartoonist. But I think everyone can agree that Ware's work, as interpreted by Onstad, has nothing redeeming about it. Charts and patterns and whatever else that add up to vague ennui are boring at best. At worst, kind of insulting. And Cartilage Head? Terrible. The original CH arc was, at the time, a low point. Why did he need to come back? It's actually making the original arc worse. Onstad has drawn ~70 (73 if I counted right) strips so far this year. So he's averaging about 9 a month. I randomly chose a month from the past, October 2004, and there are 20 comics there. I really think one of the reasons Achewood is worse now is simply because he isn't producing enough story... and producing too much illustration. If you remember the old days, ~2002 or 2003 when he'd still post to that message board, it was clear that he was killing himself some nights to try to get a joke out... because he'd post the comic at 3am and complain in the forum about how drunk he was. And sometimes the midnight experiment would be a be really, brilliant work and other time it would suck. But he'd just keep hammering on it. Putting shit out. And I think for Onstad, like most artists, especially ones where the art is largely conceptual (no one reads Achewood for the quality of the illustrations) volume is what allows them to produce great work. A some point he started taking himself too seriously and decided he could only put out big, detailed, meaningful comics. He also says he never plans his stories ahead, which is not surprise to any long time reader. What's good, is that when he churns his way through them, they tend to be enjoyable and take on a certain level of dream-like logic. Sure, they never resolve nicely and he sets plot challenges that he, in fact, cannot get find a way to resolve (see: the end of the GOF, which is rushed and awkward). But when he just keeps writing through them, he generally avoids committing his worst sins: pretension and shitty pacing. CH's needlessly dark, pretentious murder preparation includes frame after frame of him cutting up paper and putting it in a glass. Who gives a shit? No one enjoyed this comic. And it probably took three days of work to prepare. Imagine how great Achewood would be if it had been run as a daily serial in newspapers? Onstad would have had to file every day. He'd have burned out, Bill Watterson style, but he'd have never written this plot arc.[/quote]