I’ve been meaning to wax evangelistic about Achewood for some time now. It is, by an urban kilometre, my favourite webcomic, and probably in my top 10 of favourite anything. Drawn and wrote by a feller named Chris Onstad, it concerns the life and times of a group of cats, stuffed toys, robots and an otter in a fictional Californian suburb.
There’s far more depth to the characters and the storylines than in most webcomics (so much so that Time magazine named Achewood their number one graphic novel of 2007). The writing throughout is livelier than a sack of eels at a ska concert, being a weird mix of white boy hip-hop, tortured poetics and old school English gentleman, and the plots are twisted genius. Witness: Ray Sells His Soul/Ray + Beef Road Trip, The Great Outdoor Fight and, most recently, Roast Beef’s greeting card business.
A+, and so on.
Elmore Leonard writes the most unobtrusive prose ever. It’s like you’re not even reading a book! It’s like there are suddenly words in your head and you don’t know how they got there.
I just finished Get Shorty, and I gotta tell you, it’s impressive stuff. The plot is fine and good but the real thrill is watching the characters interact – they all have their well-defined perspectives and areas of expertise that affect how they relate to each other and their environment in a believable way. The plot, and this is a hell of an achievement, seems to proceed naturally from the way the characters behave rather than from the author mapping it out.
Leonard reminds me somewhat of JD Salinger, in that they both manage to drop fully-rounded characters in your lap without breaking a sweat, using nothing but tiny quirks and distinctions of voice. (Salinger’s short stories are devilishly impressive in this respect.) Truly, men worth being jealous of. (Or… men of whom it is worth being jealous? Shit, Elmore Leonard wouldn’t have this problem.)
Very, very good. It’s incredibly focused – a simple setup, believably basic character motivations and very little exposition. This annoyed the crap out of me while I was watching it, because why doesn’t everyone write like that? Rule number one: only include what you need to include.
You can tell that the effort of avoiding the genre cliches got to the makers, because as soon as the end credits start rolling (which is the one and only time the film breaks character) the most epic, giant monster-est piece of music ever composed kicks in. It’s called “ROAR! (Cloverfield Overture)” and it lasts twelve minutes. It’s almost unbearably awesome.
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