From "The Great Outdoor Fight," published by Dark Horse Comics, Inc.

Cats behaving badly

"Achewood," Chris Onstad's hilarious online comic strip, translates perfectly into a book about male friendship and testosterone overload.

By Douglas Wolk

Read more: Books, Douglas Wolk, Comics, graphic novels, comic books, Animals, Reviews, Book reviews

Oct. 3, 2008 | The funniest comic strip currently running doesn't appear in any newspapers. Until very recently, Chris Onstad's 7-year-old "Achewood" -- a warped fantasia about a bunch of anthropomorphic animals getting into trouble -- was almost entirely an online phenomenon. Onstad has self-published nine collections of the strip, but "The Great Outdoor Fight," a hardcover edition of a story line from 2006, is the first "Achewood" book to be widely distributed, and it suggests that the native format of the American daily strip is shifting, very quickly, from newspapers to the Internet.

Online comic strips are barely out of their infancy. There has been a lot of theoretical discussion of the ways cartooning on the Internet might take advantage of not being printed on paper, from motion enhancement to the "infinite canvas" of the computer screen, but relatively few Web comics are both technologically innovative and worth seeking out. Most of the best online cartoonists' work, in fact, still looks a lot like newspaper strips, in much the same way that early TV shows tended to be very much like successful radio shows but with pictures. "Achewood" is no exception. In some ways, it's formally conservative; Onstad's minimalist artwork has a lot in common with strips from "Garfield" to "Life in Hell" to "Dilbert," all of which are designed to get their visuals across even when they're squished down to the postage-stamp dimensions at which most papers run their funnies.

But it's impossible to imagine "Achewood" running next to "Blondie" and "The Family Circus," for reasons that have to do with both its form and its content. Onstad is in a position where he can do anything he wants with it. If a strip's not ready to go on a particular day, he skips a day; individual strips can be as short or long as they need to be. His characters can curse up a storm. He can mess with the tone of "Achewood" any time he feels like it (and the strip's rare failures are mostly ambitious experiments rather than going-through-the-motions gags). He isn't beholden to a syndicate, or to daily newspapers' need to worry about offending their audience, or to anyone except himself. "Achewood" couldn't possibly have evolved without the Web -- not because of its "infinite canvas" but because of its infinite possibilities.

The flip side to comic strips' liberation from print is that the most successful Web comics -- "PvP," "Diesel Sweeties," "Wondermark" -- often turn into print books eventually, and some work better than others when they're transferred to wood pulp. "Achewood" makes the transition to print miraculously well. "The Great Outdoor Fight," in particular, works as a stand-alone story; Onstad doesn't bother to explain who any of his characters are, but their personalities and relationships are obvious from the get-go.

The core of this volume is the friendship between Ray Smuckles, a wealthy, reckless cat, and his best friend, a brilliant but withdrawn cat who goes by the nickname Roast Beef. Art about male friendship is a tricky thing to pull off, and very often contextualizes it in violence -- a tradition that Onstad pushes to its parodic limits. "The Great Outdoor Fight," as its title suggests, is also all about dudes wailing on each other: The GOF is a long-standing annual event ("3 days. 3 acres. 3,000 men"), in which guys pummel each other until only one is left standing, and that final combatant becomes a cultural hero.

As usual with Onstad's stories -- and even, sometimes, his individual strips -- "The Great Outdoor Fight" starts nowhere near where it ends. Todd, a stuttering cokehead squirrel, hits up Ray for venture capital to create a series of anatomically incorrect attachments for cellphones, which somehow leads to a visit from Ray's mom, who drinks a little too much Chablis and lets it slip that the father Ray barely knew won the Great Outdoor Fight in 1973. Ramses Luther Smuckles, as it turns out, was a pioneering fighter -- as Roast Beef puts it, "He was like the Thomas Edison of handing a dude his ass!" -- who fought under the name Rodney Leonard Stubbs ("The Man With the Blood on His Hands"). And although he never quite says so, Ray is clearly desperate for some kind of connection with his father.

So Ray qualifies himself for the fight by devious methods, signs himself up as "Son of Rodney" and joins forces with Roast Beef, who knows much more about the GOF's history and traditions. Between Beef's strategic insights and Ray's inherited gift for mayhem, they manage to demolish most of the competition, although Ray has second thoughts once he has blood on his own hands. But only one man can win the Great Outdoor Fight, and Ray realizes he may have to thoroughly kick his best friend's ass -- the rules, in fact, say he has to "beat him 'til he can't crawl, see, or cry" -- since the last two men standing have only an hour to settle their conflict until the organizers run them over with Jeeps.

Summarized like that, "The Great Outdoor Fight" doesn't sound nearly as funny as it is. But that's part of why it works as well as it does: Onstad wisely builds a rock-solid dramatic structure beneath the story's flurry of absurdity. That's an impressive trick, since he's also clearly winging it -- he has claimed that he never plans his story arcs ahead of time, and has also noted that he "had no idea what the Great Outdoor Fight was before like the eighth panel of nine in the strip right before it became something."

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