Achewood has long been my favourite webcomic, and in The Great Outdoor Fight it has finally made it to paper. An oft-trotted out cliché about Achewood is that you either love it or you ‘don’t get’ it. While I don’t think that’s true, I do think you need some patience before the full pleasures of the strip are revealed. Probably only Doonesbury has rewarded longevity of readership to the same degree.
To give those who may not have read any Achewood previously a brief introduction – our main players in the book are Ray and Roast Beef, both cats, one a millionaire playboy and one a manic depressive whose real name is Cassandra, they’ve been best friends since ‘old times’ . In The Great Outdoor Fight, Ray and Roast Beef become archetypal action movie buddies – the brains and the brawn, ready to take on all-comers. Not just any competition, The Great Outdoor Fight aims to find the greatest man. Three days, three acres, three thousand men.
Our story begins when Ray’s mother lets slip that Ray’s father was a winner of the Fight, Ray determines to enter as BOC, Blood of Champion. Roast Beef, probably the greatest unknown Fight scholar the world has ever known, scams his way in to help Ray live to his father’s name. And when your father’s name is The Man With Blood on His Hands, you’ve damn sure got something to live up to.
Every fan of Achewood has their favourite arc, and I have to say that the Great Outdoor Fight was never one of mine (although I liked it well enough to buy the 1950s poster). I never felt it flowed as well as other storylines, or that the characters were at their best dropped into a souped-up action movie premise. I’ve always preferred Ray and Roast Beef waxing philosophical by the pool over some crunchy stellas. Tight. That said,The Great Outdoor Fight is probably the best Achewood arc that Onstad could have chosen to publish. Instead of providing a ‘previously on Achewood’, or character synopses, we’re instead introduced to the history of the Fight itself, as well as given bios of previous winners of the fight. This is a stroke of genius on Onstad’s part, as rather than trying to introduce complex characters that have taken years to develop , he doesn’t bother at all. The Fight itself is the star character here. While the story starts at the beginning, our characters are very much in medias res. The problems I had with the flow of the story in the daily web format are gone and the panels here flow seamlessly, though I think there may have been some tweaking of the format from screen to page.
This book is an absolute must buy for readers of Achewood. Whether the simplistic drawings and cliquish dialogue will endear newcomers to pick up the book, I don’t know. Having a hard copy will certainly make it easier to pimp out to all those people you just know are going to love it but won’t bother clicking through on the web. So, go buy the book, then throw it at at people until they love it. Then maybe Cornelius will get his own book.
