Achewood Turns 24 (Patreon)

In the wee hours of September 11, 2001, I stood from my desk, cracked my knuckles, and shut off the beige litter genie they were calling a Macintosh back then. It had been a long grind in a hard chair to herd the dozen or so first Achewood comics onto a hand-rolled HTML page and email the URL to everyone I knew. A few hours later the world hit the dirt sideways, the pledge of allegiance faded to static, and only one thing was clear: Achewood had begun its long career of banging its head on the towel rack, blacking out, and starting over. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it; those who repeat it become history.

I relaunched the site on October 1, 2001, to scattered golf claps. Over the next two decades and change I count three spectacularly failed book deals, a failed animation project, a failed Netflix series, and innumerable smaller failures that I keep in jars in the milk door, just to scare burglars. I did get a couple hardcovers done through Dark Horse, and this Patreon thing is pretty swell, but when I collapse in the easy chair, hold my temples, and beg for it all to make sense, it is your presence here which counts as the only true measure of success.

Achewood readers are people I wish were my friends and neighbors. To a person you are wittier than the drone one seat over, you are kinder of heart, and your intellectual dowsing rod goes off at all the weirdest times. If Achewood is bait pulled from my brain pan by a blind arcade claw, you are the trophy sturgeon.

Thanks to your overwhelming support, I currently see no path forward where I don't do Achewood. I can take a plane ride to visit my kid, I can take my wife out to Tablecloth Dinner, I can buy a shirt with a horsey on it. (Secondhand, of course. My mama didn't raise me to stick a leaf blower in the bank account.) I feel content that I serve, in my capacity as an entertainer. This is good living. We're in it very much together.

I'd hoped to have my current pile of new art and shirts ready for shipping by this date, but a basement renovation to create a new studio and warehouse is, predictably, running long. We're cutting and pouring new concrete, replacing rotting posts that carry eighty tons of hope, vacuuming a century of toxic powder from the ceiling joists, and carefully tapping oakum-sheathed wiring with a screwdriver, to see if it lights like a fuse. This will be done in time for holiday shopping, god willing.

Thank you for sticking with me. Achewood is well. I'm so happy you're here.

Love,

C