I realize that if you go strictly by online fandom’s reaction to the flick that I’m in the minority in my unabashed love for “Freddy VS Jason,” but my heart’s all aflutter over the news that “Freddy VS Jason VS Michael” is THIS CLOSE to becoming a reality. The full Bloody Disgusting interview isn’t online just yet, but they’ve already posted Robert Englund’s comment on the three way dance, as well as a possible Elm Street prequel. I’d be shocked if they both don’t get made since anything new that features the unholy trinity is pretty much money in the bank.

Elaine: What can you tell us about the rumored “Nightmare” prequel and “Freddy vs. Jason 2”?

RE: New Line is committed to making at least one more Freddy movie. They have commissioned both a prequel and “Freddy vs. Jason vs. Michael Myers”. No word on which one they will actually make or when.

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I knew that Amazon has been steadily adding features to their website, but I honestly had no idea that they were actually adding mini-interviews with authors to go along with their book pages. When a friend of mine told me this morning that he’d received Charles Burns’ “Black Hole” for Christmas, I looked it up real quick and found that there was a nice little interview to go along with the sales pitch. I kinda like this - hopefully we’ll be seeing more of this sort of marketing in the future.

Amazon.com: Cartoonists are about the only people today who are working like Dickens did: writing serials that appear piece-by-piece in public before the whole work is done. What’s it like to work in public like that, and for as long as a project like this takes?

Charles Burns: There were a number of reasons for serializing Black Hole. First of all, I wanted to put out a traditional comic book– I’d never really worked in that comic pamphlet format before and liked the idea of developing a long story in installments. There’s something very satisfying to me about a comic book as an object and I enjoyed using that format to slowly build my story. Serializing the story also allowed me to focus on shorter, more manageable portions; if I had to face creating a 368-page book all in one big lump, I don’t know if I’d have the perseverance and energy to pull it off.

Amazon.com: One thing that stuns me about this book is how consistent it is from start to finish. From the first frames to the last ones that you drew 10 years later, you held the same tone and style. It feels as though you had a complete vision for the book from the very beginning. Is that so? Or did things develop unexpectedly as you worked on it?

Burns: I guess there’s a consistency in Black Hole because of the way I work. I write and draw very slowly, always carefully examining every little detail to make sure it all fits together the way I want it to. When I started the story, I had it all charted out as far as the basic structure goes, but what made working on it interesting was finding new ways of telling the story that hadn’t occurred to me.

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Eric Powell is not only a talented writer, he’s also one of the top artists working in comcs today. I can say this not only with my personal opinions backing me up, but the fact that he’s won Eisners for the last two years as well. While his fanbase is expanding, it’s really a shame that “The Goon” isn’t a top ten title as far as sales are concerned. That doesn’t mean he’s gone unnoticed, however. Marvel hired him to produce the art and co-write one of their Monster one-shots last month, and “The Goon” just received the sweet hardcover collection treatment at Dark Horse. Looks like the mainstream media might be starting to jump on the Powell bandwagon as well with this fun little article.

A typical example of Powell just having fun can be seen in issue 12, when “The diabolical Dr. Alloy rises again!”

An army of robots attack, led by Dr. Alloy and his gold-plated head. As he gloats over the fearful citizens, Alloy chastises: “Neigh, little primitives! Neigh at the moon like your rulers wish you to! Stay a petty, superstitious, ignorant, fearful people! Don’t use the intellect that sets you apart from the common beast! … Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy’s Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn is superior to the leading brand on the market?!!!”

It’s like a B-movie colliding with the finest Mel Brooks comedy. And all the while, there’s a human-size lizard in butler attire running around, shouting in Spanish.

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While most people are obviously going to flash on “GI Joe” when they hear Ron Wagner’s name mentioned, to me he’ll always be the artist on the most underappreciated works of genius from the 80s, “NTH MAN: The Ultimate Ninja.” I kid you not - this series was pure Marvel insanity from the mind of Larry Hama, and to this day remains one of my favorite Marvel comics of all time. I have no idea what Wagner’s up to these days, but that didn’t stop his local paper from interviewing him recently. There’s not a whole lot of information in the piece, but there are a few interesting comments from Wagner.

In my third year of school, one of my teachers got me a job doing background art. Then I got out of school and had the luck of living next door to Gray Morrow, a comic book artist from the ’50s and ’60s. I learned how to drink scotch and shoot large handguns because that was what Gray enjoyed. He was drawing a Tarzan strip for a few newspapers and I assisted him. He was a great support because I would go into the city every week to show my portfolio and come back and say, “I don’t have any work.” “Ah, don’t worry, kid. Here, have a drink. Let’s go shoot some guns.” He was very cool.

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We’ve posted perviously about the whole comics on the PSP movement that’s currently in it’s early stages of development, and today we have an interview with Chad and Paco Allen, brothers and co-creators of “NYC2123,” the world’s first graphic novel developed specifically for reading on your PSP.

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KFR - Which came first - the PSP or your desire to create a comic book?

Chad: We’ve talked about doing a comic book or graphic novel together for a while. But we both have real jobs, so finding the time to do something on any significant scale was difficult, and we just never really got around to it. So I guess I would say that when the PSP came along it was kind of a catalyst. Paco got one and starting looking around for content, but he didn’t find much. We were both pretty excited about the possibility of creating content for a new medium that had yet to be fully explored, and I think that really provided the motivation to finally get working on something.

KFR - What made you choose the PSP as your main means of presentation rather than simply creating a webcomic or self-publishing a printed version of your story with a PSP formatted version as a secondary rather than primary goal?

Chad: I think a big part of it was just our curiosity to see what we could come up with for this new format. We weren’t that interested in self-publishing a printed version because book distribution is still very much a top-down enterprise. If you don’t get a distribution deal, you don’t get on bookstore shelves, and nobody reads your book. It’s hard to say for sure what our readership is to date because other sites are now hosting copies of the files online, but I’d say that at least 7,500 people read Issue 1 within the first two weeks of its publication. There’s no way we could have attained that kind of readership with a self-published, printed book. Of course, we’re not making any money by giving away the content over the web, but that’s not why we’re doing this anyway.

Paco: A huge part of getting readership is about how people interact with content. If you don’t have a major distribution deal and marketing dollars behind your effort, you need to find a small but passionate audience that wants content more desperately than the guys standing around in comics shops do. The PSP has the perfect demographic for this kind of content. It’s really been a case of good timing.

KFR - Do you have plans to eventually collect NYC2123 into a printed graphic novel? Would you be remixing it as far as layout and art goes if you do take it to press?

Chad: We don’t currently have any plans to create a print version of NYC2123. If a publisher approached us about doing a print version, that would be awesome. But I don’t think that will happen, and I don’t see us self-funding a print publication. To answer the second part of the question, if this ever did go to press, then yes, I think we would want to take that opportunity to re-work the layout to fit that medium. The current version is obviously very specific to the PSP format and I don’t think it would translate well to the printed page without some serious remixing.

Paco: Serious remixing. I’d almost want to start from scratch to avoid forcing a very PSP specific design approach into a printed format.

KFR - You currently have raw source files available for remixing and mash-ups. Do you plan to host some of them yourself, or will you just be happy to allow them to thrive in the wild?

Chad: We’re fine with either. Currently there is a German translation that is hosted by someone else and that’s great. We’d also be happy to host translations and remixes as long as we can afford the bandwidth.

Paco: Hopefully this will get big enough that we can’t keep track of it all. It feels like its getting close to that point already. But we’ll always try to post fan-created works, link to translations, etc.

KFR - How do you work together to create the finished product? Does Chad write it and hand it off to Paco, or is it a more collaborative process?

Chad: It’s pretty collaborative. I write the story in a sort of modified-screenplay style, where I try to break things up into chunks that will fit in a single frame. Usually I write too much, so we go back through the script together and identify places where stuff needs to be edited down. And once Paco has seen the initial draft for an issue he usually has lots of good ideas for how to fill in gaps, add cool plot elements and so forth. He’s in San Francisco and I’m in New York, so all of this happens by e-mail, phone and instant messaging.

Paco: Which means a lot of scanning for me. Once the story is fairly locked-down I’ll do storyboards and design sketches for characters, vehicles, locations, etc and scan them to send to Chad. We’ll review the work, make tweaks to the story and then I’ll start shooting photographs. All of the character illustrations are based on real people, which means I need to cast everyone and then take photographs. These are combined with location photography and hand-drawn sketches and then used as the basis for the final digital illustration.

KFR - Cyberpunk and future apocalypse stories are two sci-fi concepts that you’ve combined to create the world of NYC2123.Are there any particular authors or stories that inspired you to write your story?

Chad: For the most part, the influences are the obvious ones. Gibson is obviously a huge source for everything in the cyberpunk genre, since he basically invented it. Stephenson is another pretty obvious influence. Actually, I’d say it’s probably generous of me to say that these guys are influences. It might be more accurate to say that I’m just ripping them off, and trying to add in few original ideas where I can. Films like “Blade Runner,” “THX 1138” and “Mad Max” also come to mind. A lot of people have alleged a similarity to “Escape From New York,” though frankly I don’t see much in common other than the fact that both stories take place in Manhattan. But it would be cool if Kurt Russell were in the film version of NYC2123.

Paco: We were raised on a healthy mix of PBS and science fiction. My dad watched everything from “Dr. Who” to “Silent Running” to “Alien”, “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, you name it. He also passed down a lot of books to Chad and I: the “DUNE” series, “Ringworld”, Asimov. Later in life I started reading quite a bit of Philip K. Dick, Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” … things that were a bit darker. I think this story is kind of a mash of a lot of different stories we’ve both enjoyed over the years.

KFR - Napster, Wal-Mart, Panasonic - you use a lot of real brand names in NYC2123, updating their products or functions to fit in with the future tech of the comic. Do you really feel that this is a possible direction these companies, and the world in general, is heading? Or is it just a future you’ve created to comment on their modern day practices and personas?

Chad: I think it’s a bit of both. Take the Wal-Mart example. On the one hand, it wouldn’t surprise me if 100 years from now Wal-Mart owned every corner store in the country, so I think it is a realistic extrapolation from present-day reality. On the other hand, it’s obviously a jab at Wal-Mart and a comment on what I view as a trend towards the homogenization of our culture and the increasing prevalence of monopolies or cartels in certain parts of our economy. And don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about Microsoft — all of the good Windows send-ups come in Issue 3.

Paco: If you look at many of the major global industries today, there are only a handful of companies that control the market. This is immediately apparent when it comes to consumer goods (things like automobiles, computers, packaged food) but what is much more disturbing is that the same trend exists within industries that control information and communication. Media consolidation, prescription drug patents, the convergence of news and entertainment – the direction we take on these issues today will have a major impact on how people live in the next few centuries.

KFR - Your website currently has the first issue available for downloading or online viewing, and placeholders for 5 more issues. Do you know how your story ends, or is this something that’s just unfolding on it’s own as you write and draw?

Chad: We’re working from a pretty detailed outline, so we definitely know what happens in each issue and where the story ends up. Having said that, we are releasing these in “real time,” or as we finish them, so there is definitely some fluidity to both the narrative and visual elements of the story. We’re filling in details about dialogue, scenery, costumes, minor plot elements and so forth as we go along.

Paco: It’s similar to how George Lucas works these days. Except our story gets better as we revise it.

Big thanks to Augie for his help developing coherent questions.

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Hands down, one of the best comics you’ll find on the web these days is a strip called Scary-Go-Round. Beautifully illustrated, with a genuinely quirky - but not cutesy or annoying - sense of humo(u)r, SGR is the brainchild of the multi-talented John Allison. After approaching John for an interview, then disappearing on him for several weeks, I finally managed to get my house in order and John was gracious enough to overlook my flakiness long enough to provide us with the following piece.

4CR: John, you’ve been a webcomics staple for over 6-7 years at this point. How did you end up involved in such a seedy industry in the first place? Also, how have you managed to avoid the feuding that seems to go on between so many webcomic creators?

John Allison: I got started because I’d been music editor of the University of Sheffield’s internet magazine and I had a grounding in HTML. I was submitting comics to the syndicates, and put my coloured strips online. Then I posted a link to them on rec.arts.comics.strips and the ball started rolling. very very slowly.

I avoid the feuds by not caring about them at all. Life’s too short to stomp around like a big baby.

4CR: Originally, Dumbrella seemed to simply be a name for a group of webcomic creators exchanging links, but now it seems to have grown into much more with shared characters, convention booths, etc. How would you describe Dumbrella now? Is it a studio, a group of friends hanging out…?

Allison: It’s just a group of friends hanging out. The success we’ve enjoyed at conventions was a wonderful surprise, a side effect of a joint effort to pool our resources rather than any masterplan.

4CR: Has the Dumbrella crew ever talked about doing a project together? An anthology or something? You already have a shared character - Space Mummy - that you all use, and you’ve had characters cross-over from one Dumbrella strip to another to the point where it’s actually become plot-points for entire story arcs. It seems like a shared project would be the next step.

Allison: It’s not something I’m particularly interested in. SInce I started Scary Go Round I haven’t done any crossovers at all. But the real reason is that I’m not a Kochalka-style font of comics, I can’t produce a huge amount of work. I can draw a lot but I don’t have millions of ideas so I can’t generate masses of material, so I have to hoard it for my own projects.

4CR: How has the webcomic “scene” changed from when you - and many other cartoonists - first started?

Allison: It’s unrecognizable, always growing and changing in character. To be really honest i don’t read a lot of webcomics, I have no idea what goes on beyond the end of my little street in what constitutes a vast city. I don’t think about webcomics, I just think in terms of “comics”. The delivery method is meaningless to me.

4CR: So, would you ever give up publishing on the web if you thought you could be more successful going straight to print, or syndicating in a paper?

Allison: Of course I would. As principled as I might want to be, at some point I am going to think of the financial demands of my demanding, as yet unborn children.

4CR: If I remember correctly, you’re pretty much doing “Scary Go Round” as a full-time job at this point. Is this accurate? If so, why did you choose to make that leap, and what was it like making the decision?

Allison: Scary Go Round constitutes the majority of my income, but I do freelance writing, graphic design and web design work too. i didn’t really make the decision, it was made for me 18 months ago when I was laid off. I’d just got my first book out and I decided to push things a bit harder. And it worked! it was terrifying, I don’t think you really need to ask what it was like. A huge life change.

4CR: Your original webstrip, “Bobbins,” was hand-drawn and scanned into the computer. Now, most of your regular strips — with the exception of “Scare-O-Deleria” — are created right in Adobe Illustrator. Why the major shift in your approach to drawing? Do you have any spinfluences, or do you pretty much just make it all up as you go?

Allison: I’m pretty sure that I’ve been doing comics in Illustrator longer than not. I started the switch-over in mid 2000, so that’s more than 4 years out of 6. The reasoning behind it was simple, I’m not the most consistent artist. If I’m tired, or sick, I don’t draw very well. Plus, I need the right environment to work in or everything collapses. It took several years to achieve a similar level of competency in Illustrator, and quality still varies based on how much time I give to a comic, but i can deliver on a day to day basis without getting frustrated.

4CR: “Bobbins” was kind of like “Friends” (or “Coupling,” I suppose) set in an office environment. But “SGR,” while maintaining many of the same characters, has a lighthearted, supernatural aspect to it. Since you carried over so many characters between the strips, why the major shift in tone and genre?

Allison: Well I’ve never seen “Coupling”, and Friends is a show about people dating, living together and having wacky adventures. The move toward the kind of “supernatural” stories in Scary Go Round was really quite organic. Some of the later Bobbins storylines were very bizarre - I redid the story of the Crime Pope for the Scary Go Round ‘Girlspy’ book and Keenspot should be releasing a 100 page book re-telling another Bobbins story before Christmas. That said, SGR introduced a kind of brutality that shook things up and shocked people at first. It sounds very glib but I just fancied doing something a bit different. Bobbins was played out to me but some of the characters had room to grow in new directions.

4CR: Shelley is, I assume, the favorite character as far as most readers are concerned. You’ve already killed her, what, twice now? Did you ever get any interesting letters from readers in response to this continual toying with their emotions?

Allison: When Shelley gets killed, it’s so that she can have an adventure, rather than so she can moulder in the ground. To be honest, the second time I did it was a bit forced. I don’t really like that story. Shelley is well liked but people seem to understand her robustness now, so there aren’t a lot of high-pitched cries when she gets the bullet.

4CR: How much, if any, of your storytelling and plotting is fan-driven? Have you ever altered plans due to fan feedback?

Allison: If someone guesses the end of the story, I’ll change it. But I’ve now stopped thinking more than a day or two ahead, so no one can possibly guess - since even I don’t know what’ll happen.

4CR: The voice of your characters is extremely distinctive - you can tell it’s John Allison’s writing as soon as you start reading, even on the guest strips you’ve done for other webcomics. When it comes to writing dialogue, do you find yourself working and reworking until you get it just so, or does it tend to just kind of flow from your mind to the keyboard?

Allison: I think my writing style is the sound of words being mangled as they are forced out under extreme external pressure. 20% of the time I’m flying, 80% of the time I find writing to be murder. Making up the words isn’t hard, finding things to write about is hard when you do it on your own every day. So I guess that’s why my writing seems a bit tortured.

4CR: Over the last few years you’ve played around with the formatting of the strip, and the end result has been some really nicely packaged printed collections. Recently, you’ve changed the format again. Will this affect the eventual printed collection, or is it still designed to be able to be collected in the nice, digest-sized square?

Allison: I do think about these things beforehand. I was meant to be switching to a more conventional rectangular shape after i finished the material for the last book, because four panels was never ever enough, but I was working on the book for Keenspot at the same time as I started this new regime, and I couldn’t keep it up. I only switched down to the square originally so I could do four (then five) comics a week. The first 30 Scary Go Rounds, when it was twice-weekly, were rectangular. This is very boring. You work around these things. So long as the story is good, I don’t think people care what shape it is, if its triangular and printed on bay leaves.

4CR: I’d love to see you design a triangular SGR book - that’d be sweet. Speaking of different formats, you’ve played about with Flash a bit for special SGR features. Have you considered running animated episodes on a regular or semi-regular basis, or is that just pushing things a little too far?

Allison: I think “a little” is understating the point.

4CR: Now, you break past “SGR” stories down into titled arcs when you archive them. How much planning goes into this as you work? Do you outline entire storylines in advance, or do you just kind of let things happen until you feel the current
arc has run its course and needs wrapping up?

Allison: I used to work on a strict number. it started as 30 comics, then became 40, then it crept up to 45, which was 9 weeks, far too long. It’s the very nature of plotted comics that you have to occasionally get people from A to B, and that’s boring. That’s fine in a book, when it’s one page, but when it’s got to stand up there on the website, naked and alone for 24 hours, a boring comic is a boring comic. So now I have a new rule: I’m not allowed to think beyond the next couple of comics, and I’m not allowed to do boring comics to get from A to B.

4CR: Do you have any other web projects we should keep an eye out for?

Allison: In a word, no.

4CR: Are you planning on creating any more print-only stories, a la Girl Spy or Scare-o-deleria?

Allison: I’ve completed a new 96 page colour book called Heavy Metal Hearts and Flowers, that ought to be out through Keenspot and in bookstores before Christmas. Well, that’s what they tell me. I’m very cynical. And I’m working on a new black and white SGR book called “Where The Flood Waters Soak Their Belongings”, which is about Natalie. It’s a long title, a title with weight. A title to frighten your children with. I don’t think I’ll be hand-drawing any more books for the foreseeable future, I’m part machine now and can never go back.

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Welcome to a world where cats routinely die and come back from the dead, where they drink Ketel One and have their own Dear Abby-like advice columns. A world where a 5 year old otter child is making a serious run at the presidency, the Sani-Taco rules supreme, and robots have asses. It’s a magical place that’s visited regularly on the internet by Dave Barry, Tony Millionare and James Kochalka.

Enter the world of Achewood as envisioned by cartoonist, internet pioneer and man about town, Chris Onstad.

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4CR - Your stated influences include Garfield, Snoopy and Berkely Breathed’s work, but what sort of professional background did you approach cartooning from? Do you have a writing or art degree, or is this something that you just happened to fall into?

Chris Onstad - I came at it as a graphic designer who was bored making network diagrams for computer companies. In college I?d fallen in with the satire magazine, the Stanford Chaparral, and that?s where I spent most of my undergraduate years. I enjoy writing, and writing humor particularly, but it?s tough to get a gig on Letterman so I fell into doing tech industry whatnot, as I had graduated right at the peak of the dot com bubble in the heart of silicon valley. I was even a ?Research Scientist? at this one lab for a couple years, if you can believe that. I didn?t take a single ?science? class in college. Fancy IT titles and German sports cars were falling from the trees in 1997.

4CR - It’s often said, probably to the point of now being a clich?, that the best characters practically write themselves. Do you find this to be true for any of the Achewood clan?

Chris Onstad - The relationships between the characters that are most opposed personality-wise (Ray and Roast Beef being the prime example in the Achewood universe) are the most fun to write, the ones that flow most freely.

4CR - Achewood tends not to follow any sort of traditional Monday through Friday structure when it comes to the strip and the story arcs, often starting or ending stories mid-week, sometimes dropping a plotline abruptly in favor of something else, then returning to the earlier story at a later date. How far in advance do you plot out the strip, and how rigidly do you tend to stick to your original outlines?

Chris Onstad - I don?t plot at all. It?s a stream of consciousness exercise. It seems to flow together well, so I?m pleased with it over time, but obviously it?s impossible for me to know how it looks to the mind that didn?t write it. There?s probably some logic behind the fact that I am not wealthy, though.

4CR - How much does fan feedback affect the directions of your stories, if it has any effect at all?

Chris Onstad - Any artist/writer is lying if they say it doesn?t pop into their heads once in a while. You get used to it, though. You get used to hate mail and love mail and smart mail and thoughtful mail and kid mail and all of that. You develop a crucial thick skin. I doubt Keith Richards gets pissed off when people say he?s ugly, to him that?s just ambient noise. I?m used to people saying that Achewood is horrible, but I?m also used to people who write in to Ray?s advice column with genuinely traumatic personal problems that they shouldn?t be asking a cartoon cat. They?re all over the board, those Internet users, but you get used to it.

4CR - I know that you say that you don’t have a favorite character, but Ray certainly has become the center of most of the happenings in the Achewood universe. How much of yourself does the reader hear speaking through Ray, either in the strip or in the advice column?

Chris Onstad - I don?t think you can surgically extract the writer from the character, no matter how disparate they may be. I?m not like Ray, I?m introverted and on the quiet side, but I know how extroverted people are because I?ve been around them. It?s fun to write someone who never gets depressed and always sees the huge house party at the end of the tunnel. It?s also interesting to write Roast Beef, who is the polar opposite, and Philippe, who is five. How did I think when I was a kid? Well, let?s see here. I would like to eat a duck or a hamburger for dinner. That?s how I thought.

4CR - Have you ever received an email for Ray’s advice column that was simply too bizarre to use?

Chris Onstad - I can?t address some of the heavier stuff because I?m not a qualified counselor or therapist and I have no business offering advice to those who really need it. If your wicker sofa is rotting, or if you have a stupid haircut, then yes, Ray will shoot off some ideas, but leave the suicide stuff in your Drafts folder, please. Ray is obviously against suicide and will tell you about that much. If you commit suicide, how can you possibly make it to his Friday night party? It doesn?t add up, not in his head. Not to his way of thinking.

4CR - On top of the regular comic strip, you also have Ray’s advice column and you just added 8 new blogs for various Achewood characters as well as your own personal blog. How on earth do you find the time, much less the creative energy, to maintain all of this?

Chris Onstad - Writing is much faster than cartooning. Cartooning is hard. Blocking out momentum and dialogue frame-by-frame is hard. It?s highly constricting to always work in that tiny format. Just jumping into a voice and working through a few hundred loose words is pie and jam, pastrami and swiss. I enjoy the new ?blogs? very much; they allow me to develop characters much more thoroughly and rapidly than six panels a day ever could. I don?t know why I started writing the blogs, I think it had something to do with this new kind of mysterious cloudy rum, but since I did I?ve never regretted it. It?s a wonderful way to get into character.

4CR - You’ve stated in the past that the internet is where Achewood should be and that print is not your ultimate goal. However, at this point, you have 3 collections of Achewood strips (and a cookbook), and I assume more are forthcoming. Do you still feel that the internet is ultimately the perfect place for Achewood, or has your PoV shifted on that somewhat? Do you get a different sort of satisfaction from being able to hold a book of your creation in your hands than you do when you look at it online?

Chris Onstad - Print or online, I don?t care. That?s my opinion this evening. I want people to laugh and I want to make a living providing that. That?s the perverse pathology at the center of this.

4CR - Has all of the current hubbub about Scott Kurtz self-syndicating PVP in the near future caused you to toy with the idea about getting Achewood into the papers? It seems like it would be a perfect fit for a college paper or alternative weekly or something along those lines.

Chris Onstad - We?ve been developing a syndication program for the college and alternative weekly format. You should hopefully see offerings along these lines in fall of 2004 or winter 2005. We?ve already been published in several of these types of papers, and have been received with the requisite ?I love this comec [sic] strip!? as well as ?cancel this offensive comic, immediately! It is hurtful against several concepts!? We?re used to that kind of whatnot from various outraged protectors of the private personal universe we all seem to share when someone?s mad.

4CR - Are there any plans to collect the color Serializer.net strips in a printed format at some point?

Chris Onstad - No, but there is a good chance they?ll be worked into the books I?ve got coming out through Checker Book Publishing Group starting in Nov. 2004. We just inked a three-book deal, with huge international distribution. We?re very excited to be working with them.

4CR - How did the Checker Books deal come about? Did they approach you with bags of cash in hand, or did you go to them?

Chris Onstad - They approached us one day while we were diligently trying to create Achewood. It was a lovely offer, and as I sat in my robe and typed my answer to them, a bird alighted in a tree and sang a wonderful song. The song was the ring on my attorney?s cell phone, and things looked good to him. See you at Christmas with lots of new material in my leaky bag!

4CR - What will the difference be in the collections from Checker Books and the ones already available on achewood.com? Will they reprint those books differently, or will Checker simply be picking up where the original collections left off?

Chris Onstad - The Checker collections will feature lots of new material, in addition to the strips. It?ll be well worth picking up if you?re a fan.

4CR - What was it like when you found out that James Kochalka was a fan of the strip? Was it just kind of a cool rush, or did you all of a sudden know you’d “arrived”?

Chris Onstad - Hey, James is a really nice guy, but I won?t consider myself to have ?arrived? until I?m mimosa-a-mimosa with Debra Messing, discussing the finer points of my thick mediterranean curls.

4CR - You’ve mentioned in the past that you’re reworking finished strips all the time, generally soon after you’ve posted it. Have you ever considered leaving both versions of the changed strips available to the public, or offering a Bootleg Achewood print collection or something along those lines?

Chris Onstad - Well, not all the time. One in fifty, maybe, I?ll wake up and change a line or two. That?s a luxury of the medium. Sometimes I like both versions (http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=06132002 - see that and the variation linked to above the strip) and keep both. Other times I change it because I don?t like it and want to improve it. Doing five Sunday-sized strips a week is tough bolts and sometimes I?m not done with it within the suggested 24-hour strip generation parameter.

4CR - Last year, you said that there was a screenplay, video game and more Achewood related items in the works. Has there been any progress made on any of those fronts? Can we expect to see an Achewood animated series on HBO’s fall season list?

Chris Onstad - Projects of that size take time to mature. Check back in a while, the best babies take the longest to come out of their mommies. I think any doctor would tell you that.

4CR - Seeing as 4CR is traditionally a comic book site, are there any comic books or comic book creators whose work you particularly enjoy?

Chris Onstad - What you?d expect. Chris Ware, Jim Woodring, Tony Millionaire, Sam Henderson, Al Columbia, Jesse Reklaw. Good fellows, to a man.

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So, there you have it. Check out Achewood for yourself if you haven’t already. It’s easy to find at http://achewood.com, and keep an eye out for the new Checker collections in a few months.

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