NORTH LOMBARD -- Here's how much Ximena Quiroz loves the insane cult-hit webcomic "Achewood": It's pushing 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and the 31-year-old tattoo artist is finishing the inks on an "Achewood" tat on Matthew Mercer's right shoulder at The Urban Soul.
The Urban Soul closed two hours ago. And Ximena (pronounced "he-MEN-uh") is offering her services free of charge.
In fact, she's offering free "Achewood" tattoos to anyone who wants them, for the rest of September.
"Ximena's a fan of the strip, and she had the clever idea to drum up business with this promotion," says "Achewood" creator Chris Onstad via e-mail. "From what I understand, it's a repeat-driven business. She sends me new photos every other day or so. We haven't got a red rotary telephone or anything, but it's keeping her busy. We have a high number of readers in Portland due to the large amounts of drugs that are constantly being consumed there."
Mercer is the sixth person to take Ximena up on her offer, and here's how much he loves "Achewood": He and his wife Sarah Day are en route from Boise to Vancouver, B.C., heading to Matthew's new job in computer networking. They took a one-night detour into Portland to meet Ximena after-hours.
"Achewood" tends to inspire this sort of behavior. If you've heard of it, you might want to skip down to the Q&A with Onstad after the jump. If you haven't, an attempt at explaining its appeal immediately follows.
Okay. If you haven't heard of "Achewood," here goes:
Imagine Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. Now. Empty it of all the adorable stuffed animals suffering from ennui, honey-cravings and blustery weather. Then re-populate it with stuffed animals suffering from clinical depression, drug cravings and blustery rageaholic vegans.
Oh, and make the Hundred Acre Wood a suburban California house.
That's "Achewood." Sort of.
It's a brilliant, strange little comic strip that debuted online (the only place it could exist, really) in 2001 and slowly built an audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Onstad now makes a living wage selling tie-in apparel, books, prints and accessories ranging from umbrellas to aprons to hot sauce.
The strip itself -- supplemented by a dozen text blogs written by various "Achewood" characters -- follows the travails of talking animals who live, die and resurrect in California. They are unlike any talking animals in comics. There's a cat named Ray who sold his soul to the devil, started a record company, and bought Airwolf on eBay. There's Ray's best friend Roast Beef, a depressed computer whiz who met his fiancZ Molly in the afterlife during one of his many near-death experiences. There are lying robots; a 5-year-old otter Onstad loves to punish; a dapper bear who writes romance novels and eloquent closed-captioning for the Spice Channel; a drunk tiger; and a reprobate squirrel who snorts cocaine and drives a tiny van.
The strip's inspired hard-R humor comes less from punchlines and more from Onstad's knack for plot twists, marrow-deep characterization and relentlessly inventive turns of phrase. "Achewood" isn't for everyone: You need to read a couple of weeks' worth of strips to fall into its rhythm, if you'll fall at all. I recommend starting with the "Roast Beef goes to the Moon" storyline or, even better, the wildly popular "Great Outdoor Fight" storyline -- a mini-saga (starting here) in which Ray and Roast Beef compete in a hilariously bloody, two-fisted tourney spanning "3 Days, 3 Acres and 3,000 Men" (with the "men" tending to be talking cats with tough-guy names like "The Latino Health Crisis.").
Matthew's tattoo depicts Roast Beef holding a baby onesie emblazoned with the words "Future Dead Person." (
the strip containing the image.) Matthew says he picked the design for its poetical statements about life and death. "Also," he says, "it was free this month."
Onstad offered further e-mail thoughts on this subject:
THE OREGONIAN: Will you be providing custom designs for free?
ONSTAD: I wish I had the time to provide original designs, but I don't. It's been a long-standing issue -- people write in asking if they can commission something, and I mull it over, but in the end I am never able to commit the time to what I think is the quality of work that they in turn should commit permanently to their skin.
I only ask that if people get Achewood tattoos, they have the artwork done such that if they get sick of Achewood somewhere down the road, the art can easily be converted into a respectable curled gecko or laughing shamrock.THE O: "Achewood" generates a lot of fan activity -- costume contests, rogue forums, a pillow fight in t-shirts, an amazing MC Frontalot song, and more than one wiki, including a fan-written "Great Outdoor Fight" history. But there's something so ... PERMANENT about ink. It's quite a few leagues beyond "Web 2.0," audience-participation-wise. Does that put any sort of pressure on you as a creator -- to keep doing the strip, say? Or do you just find the whole thing amusing?
ONSTAD: It doesn't put pressure on me. Achewood is six years' worth of material -- 1300 strips, easily a thousand written pages of character blogs, fifteen bound publications, and lord knows how many other related projects. If I were to kick off tomorrow, an Achewood tattoo would still reference a good-sized body of work to which I have committed pretty much the whole of my adult life. I'm proud of it. Many things which wind up in ink have had less successful runs than us.
THE O: I know one of the regular posters at The Official Unoffical Achewood Message Board has a rather nifty tattoo of your "rabbit ambulance" on his leg. (I'm guessing this has never happened to "Hi and Lois.") Any other fan tattoos of which you're aware? Are we at the point where a "most popular tattoo subject" is emerging?
ONSTAD: I haven't seen that. There are many tattooed fans, but there's no central repository for seeing their ink. Maybe after Ximena's promotion someone will come up with a way to do it, like start a public Flickr album.
THE O: Do you, yourself, have any tattoos? Would you ever get a tattoo of a beloved cartoon character?
ONSTAD: I appreciate a beautifully considered and executed tattoo as much as the next fellow, but it's not my thing. I had earrings in college, and for a while I hated the government, but that's about it. For now I'm content to sit around and scowl at the calorie information on packages of gouda.
THE O: Here's a fairly banal observation: It strikes me that a tattoo artist making this offer and the cartoonist himself helping get the word out and fans discussing designs and journalists contacting you in the space of a few days is something that could only happen with a webcomic. Are we, as a culture, past the point of reflection on how weird and accelerated this is?
ONSTAD: I think you could print "PAST THE POINT OF REFLECTION" on millions of terrycloth headbands, air-drop them over high school graduations, baseball games, Olive Gardens, and traffic jams, and have yourself a tidy little situation.
Want a free "Achewood" tattoo? You can contact Ximena at The Urban Soul (8416 N. Lombard, Portland; 503-419-9769).
-- Mike Russell: www.CulturePulp.com and CulturePulp@gmail.com
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