When Onstad started publishing, RSS wasn’t yet widely adopted. He produced work at an astonishing pace to get people in the habit of visiting his site. Besides, the standard for newspaper comics was daily publication. “What I didn’t realize at the time was that I wasn’t making a comic strip; I was writing the biggest graphic novel of all time,” he says in an email. “So I was killing myself to meet Garfield deadlines with Tolkien content.”

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“Every time I try to work with a larger entity, it’s just, it never pans out for me,” Onstad says. “And I’ve always had this sort of personal punk rock ethos and sensibility about just doing it my own goddamn way. I’ve had like two jobs for a total of 18 months in my whole life, outside of Achewood. Maybe it’s time to admit, like, This is who I am. And this is what I do.”
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“If you read the biographies of the great entrepreneurs, one thing they were never afraid to do is pick up the phone, right?” Onstad says. “Like that was Steve Jobs. That’s how Steve Jobs started.”