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One-Hit Wonders (Patreon)

Published:
2025-10-15 17:00:05
Imported:
2026-09
Tags:

Content

Could Achewood have been a single-panel comic, like The Far Side, Family Circus, or those featured in The New Yorker? No. Achewood would never have become anything if it had been limited to twenty words a day, with no ability to land a lip-smacking Snoopy's balls in panel ten. Can you imagine The Great Outdoor Fight, one panel at a time? I'd still be releasing it, from an asylum, drawn on toilet paper with hairs pulled out of my head. I would say, "Our every move is the new tradition" as the guard tasered me back into my hard steel bed.

These panels, these Kraft singles, are fun. But they are not for the uninitiated.

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Comments

Julie (HiDeeHoGal)

This reminds me of Youtube "out of context" compilations. These hit even if you don't know the youtubers' work but they REALLY hit when you do. Achewood out of context would be very Kliban-esque. To be honest I am glad you did it the way you did.

Ian Stewart

ERROR: The cocktail wiener speared onto Ray's cell phone antenna would primarily act as an insulator, and would NOT improve signal reception.

Conor Nelson

lol please make this a recurring feature

Matt Mitchell

Good god I love this sort of thing. Also - do you ever come up with one of these and then work outward from it to fashion a piece around it?

b.zap

Prison, The Great Indoor Fight

Bruce Wright

God, I HATE baseball season.

Clench and Cheese

This is definitely a good topic. I cut my teeth with underground print comics, but at some point I had a book written by a New Yorker cartoonist who talked a lot about how he got ideas to develop into cartoons. The single panel is the hardest of all the forms, in my opinion. You need to tell the entire story with a very few words. Larson was the master, but before him we had Charles Addams (in the same weird vein). Gomez and Morticia watching the kids building a giant roaring fire with flames licking up the mantel with Morticia saying "The little dears! They still believe in Santa!" or another one with a lawyer at a patent office pointing a ray gun out his open window saying "Death ray, fiddlesticks! It doesn't even slow them up!" My new personal favorite is from the Rejection Collection of New Yorkers cartoons that were deemed to weird/offensive/obscure for publication. A toilet is smiling with little rah-rah hands saying "Today is gonna be different! I can FEEL it!" The four-panel is hard too, especially for people new to the strip and its characters. Achewood was the weird kid in the corner that it took a minute to get to know. Still is!

Gavin Byrnes

shades dark, chain around stomach, "baseball season" below the wall , shorts instead of thong, the bandanna and the socks are a different look for Ray. I suspect that his nipples are too close together, but that could just be the angle

Bruce Wright

Don't leave out Gahan Wilson, for godsake.

2scrogz

Baseball season could be prevented if Ray just simply sat down to pee. He already does it to avoid audio-casting when company is around, doesn't seem like something he's inherently opposed to.

2scrogz

Strip idea: Ray suddenly realizes how much cleaner his bathroom could be if he just simply sat down to pee every time, feels compelled to write a self-help book about it and similar realizations that he assumes will become evident to him in his newly enlightened state, ultimately realizes there isn't enough there for a full 100+ pages, and enlists Connie as ghost-writer to "flesh it out" - much to Connie's chagrin.

Nicholas Williams

I live in constant terror that I will have to tap dance my way out of a jam.

Sedric and Charlie

Panels 4 and 5 represent a non-linear psychological horror narrative in which Ray is sure "baseball season" is following him around, that distinctive puddle appearing in places it couldn't possibly be coincidental. At first he suspects a prank by Lyle, but soon baseball season is turning up in venues that would never let such a man through the door. People begin accusing him of defiling their establishments with unspeakable micturitions, all the while Ray insisting he has pissed nowhere except (adjacent to) his own toilet. His mental decline is observable in the chaos of his wardrobe as he tries to repel or elude baseball season through disguises and alter egos and strange rituals with hotdogs that he heard about through some cursory online research

Sedric and Charlie

Panel 3 represents a 78-chapter erotic fanfiction in which Téodor eats a realm of Roast Beef, that will later have the serial numbers filed off to become the successful novel/movie trilogy 'Code Food'

Achewood

This has all the legs of a stephen king classic short. In the end it is revealed that Ray is just a figment of the imagination of the man who mops up at the Yankees stadium. It’s set in the early 60s.

Achewood

Locked in the restroom of an Airbus as it begins to fishtail out of the sky; nothing can stabilize it; a wing rips from the fuselage and tears the cabin in two; you tap-dance madly through the air to your death

Achewood

Yes, he’s like the Ocean Spray Fleetwood Mac guy, whose career nosedived with enough force to puncture a cast iron hull once it was revealed he was just a moron

Achewood

Pretty good! But also, Ray would rarely remember his mom’s actual birthday on the actual birthday, unless Beef reminded him.

Clench and Cheese

Oh I left out a ton of people. Thurber, Arno, Heather Hokinson, Wilson, Kliban, Booth, Parch, Gross, Chast, price, Cheney... Addams and Larson are in a class by themselves for tone and production. You could maybe even add Family Circus and Dennis the Menace (but those come from gag factories, not individuals)

Gavin Byrnes

Good point. I was thinking of that as "unlikely but plausible," like the hot dog in the phone antenna.

Achewood

Yeah, it’s a bit gray. Also, his glasses are egregiously far up his forehead, like even further than the earliest Ray strips.

Achewood

ARNO ARNO ARNO ARNO I just spent easily a half hour trying to track down / remember that name after reading your first comment. The closest I got was Sempé. THANK YOU

Achewood

Some baseball games never end, even when your doctor “prescribes” saw palmetto. And I looked it up: Zyrelax is fake.

Achewood

No, these tend to be goofs I make up out of the panels of existing strips, to blow off steam and/or make fun of myself. I still couldn’t tell you the process by which a strip goes from inward head-mumble to Ray eating at Scobler’s, but it sure ain’t efficient, I’ll tell you that much.

Achewood

Well shit, that’d be a pleasure, self-satire is somehow easier than the original writing

Achewood

What if it was a cheap dog with plenty of staples and lead in it

Achewood

I’m getting the sense there’s an appetite for more!

Bruce Wright

The lovers, reunited after so many desperate adventures, tap dance slowly on the beach as the event horizon from the impact heads toward them at 2,500 mph

blair

Yeah, I was so jarred by that I stopped spotting.

Ian Stewart

Magreaux™ brand Hot Dogs: Always Foreboding a Good Time

Bruce Wright

Peter Arno rocks. Love that whole era for humorous prose too, Benchley and Wolcott and Will Cuppy, the wittiest dude America ever gestated

Achewood

JHC: Well you’re right, because I do.

Achewood

Alright Bruce, what’s the place to start with Cuppy?

Bruce Wright

his master work was assembled after his death, which he would’ve regarded as just his luck, basically. The book is called The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, and was published to monstrous sales and acclaim in 1950, shortly after Cuppy “called it a day,” as he had previously described suicide. IIt’s the most concentratedly funny book i’ve ever encountered, though it presupposes a certain familiarity with history that is not perhaps as common today as it once was. (his research, by the way was impeccable, although many people didn’t realize that at the time. ) He has other books of humorous essays, but this is the one to begin with. Pith and vinegar.

J. Alex

Beef actually saw that lizard bite coming a mile away. Ray should not have gotten that close.

Matt Mitchell

Efficiency is overrated in the creative process. I’m living that right now.