In case you haven’t already encountered it, here’s the deal with Achewood: If you come across the comic strip online right now, in it’s seventh year of publication, you’ll probably feel like you have no clue what’s going on.  Something about cats, and bears, and robots, and a naïve otter.  Heck, you probably won’t get it when you read the first strip. But if you spend the time to go back through the archives, read from the beginning, and take the time to learn about the characters and their history, you’ll quickly become engrossed in one of the most savagely funny evolutions in comics today.

Writer/artist Chris Onstad has developed a small universe inside a pathologically erudite world called Achewood.  It’s a place where your toys and your pets live human-esque adult lives right alongside us.  Our hedonistic habits, shopping centers, television shows, celebrity chefs, and fashion labels are theirs.  And in Achewood, Onstad has created a cast of characters that have effectively satirized contemporary life through their own distinct personalities.  It’s rude, it’s frequently crude, and some of the smartest work being done in webcomics.  Not only do you have the semi-regularly updated online strip, but Onstad has created blogs for each of his major characters, displaying a range of voice and a breadth of cultural savvy.  There’s even a series of Achewood cookbooks.

Which makes it both a triumph and a challenge that Onstad’s The Great Outdoor Fight has finally been collected in hardcover book form and is now available through Dark Horse Comics.  The “Great Outdoor Fight” story-arc is one of the most sustained sequences of the strip’s history, and is a mixed-sentiment fan favorite (explanation to follow).  It ran over a number of months online, and the amount of backstory and characterization make it a perfect stand-alone collection—if you already know Achewood. 

This isn’t an easy one for new readers to pick up.  It’s just not possible to understand the absurd humor if you haven’t come to know Ray and Roast Beef—essentially the two main characters of the strip, and the central focus of this storyline.  Knowing something about Ray being the luckiest semi-idiotic egomaniac with a heart of gold in the world is important to getting the joke of his being invited to the event that gives the book its title.  Knowing that Roast Beef is a chronically depressed hypochondriac with the world’s worst self-image is important to understanding the transformative moment of Beef taking charge in an event that is entirely about machismo.

For the Great Outdoor Fight is the most aggro of competitions.  Three Days, Three Acres, Three Thousand Men.  An all-out, nothing-barred, bloody fight until the last man standing is declared the victor.  It’s hyper-violent, completely over the top, and a hilarious commentary on the historical urge for bloodsport.  And yet, because Ray is the son of a former champion, the entire fight becomes an observation.  There are graphic moments, but those are less important and less visible than the people involved and their reactions, from the Achewood gang at home following along online (through a blogger using a Blackberry from inside the fight itself) to the strategy discussions of Ray and Roast Beef.  The hows and whys and spectacle of the event are more important than the action.  When this initially ran, it actually drew a mixed reaction from the fans, who only received small chunks in daily updates.  This made it hard to sustain the momentum, and the lack of visual violence and the almost necessarily pat conclusion left some feeling underwhelmed.  But when it’s placed in full context in this book, you can see the complete picture and not stall out waiting for updates.  And sure, you can get this experience by reading it online in the strip’s archives, but something about the book form makes it feel more unified.  If you’re already hip to the language manipulation of Achewood’s style, it flows much more smoothly in this form.  Plus, you get a few neat little extras, characteristic of Onstad: a text intro and history, some fight-related recipes, and some new art.

But if you’re someone who’s had Achewood recommended to them, or is curious about Onstad’s recent ascendancy to New Yorker blog subject and GQ comic strip appearance, do what everyone is told to do: go start from the beginning and read the strip online.  Then read the character blogs.  And then you might fully understand why the release of The Great Outdoor Fight in a mass-market form is a great thing. 

—Patrick Schabe

I was surprised by the sudden arrival of the fall season today in the northern hemisphere. Some people feel like it will soon be time to pull on the woolly coats and hibernate until the sun shines again, but I feel there is a reawakening going on in areas with vibrant student populations.

The energy on campus as first assignments come due and readings start to pile up is fantastic. And with a return to school comes a renewed focus on outreach programming related to literature and writing.

This Saturday, 28 September, The Word on the Street Book and Magazine Festival 2008 will be celebrated in five Canadian cities: Calgary, Halifax, Kitchener, Toronto and Vancouver. The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia is sponsoring some excellent readings and local events not only in the week leading up to The Word on the Street Festival, but right on into October as well. And all this week, Thin Air, the Winnipeg International Writers Festival, is on. I particularly wish I could have swooped in for Andrew Davidson’s reading from The Gargoyle at Winnepeg’s Millennium Library. He’ll be in Toronto on 24 September, just in case you’re interested.

Any upcoming book or literacy festivals in your area?

—Lara Killian

There is a one-panel cartoon, published last year, showing a doctor with the twined snakes of the caduceus on his chest asking a parent to tell her screaming child that he’s not part of Slytherin. The cartoonist who wrote the caption doesn’t mention JK Rowling or Harry Potter. They’re able to assume that the audience will be so well acquainted with the books that they don’t need to. Ann Radcliffe’s fame was once like that.

It lasted for a long time, too. In Les Miserables, published 40 years after her death, Victor Hugo refers, in an aside, to “the vivid imagination of the police, that Ann Radcliffe of the government.” Thirty years later Henry James mentions one of her books in The Turn of the Screw. “Was there a “secret” at Bly,” his narrator asks, “-- a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?” In both cases the author treats the reader as if they will naturally know what he means. To them Radcliffe was familiar enough to be used as an easy point of reference: as cold as snow, as high as the sky, as Gothic as Ann Radcliffe.

The author of The Mysteries of Udolpho was born in 1764 and died in 1823. She housed her characters in Catholic parts of Europe—in Italy, in France, places with dramatic landscapes and exotic monasteries—without ever leaving England. In spite of her fame she preferred to stay out of the public eye. She didn’t invent the Gothic novel, but her popularity helped to form the tone of beleaguered high emotion that became one of the genre’s defining characteristics. Her language is firm and imporous without being static, her pen has an eye that moves across the landscape:

“To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenees, whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward to their base. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts …”

Her voice is a series of contrasts: clouds and blue air, barren rock and forests, the sharp double-pop of precipice leading into the open-ended sound of pasture and wood. Radcliffe is sensitive to extremes. In her books, sensitivity itself becomes a sign of moral virtue, particularly a sensitivity towards wild, natural places. Her villains are people who have allowed the urban world to coarsen them. They would rather gamble in a casino than look at a forest, and they prefer ostentatious glamour to “modest elegance.” Her heroes are the other way around. When Emily’s aunt in Mysteries of Udolpho complains that the wild mountains of Italy are “horrid,” the reader knows that there is no love for this aunt in the author’s heart.

The apparently supernatural events in her books all come with rational explanations. If one of her characters thinks she’s seen a ghost then the scene is not there to prove the existence of ghosts, but to give the characters, and, through them, the readers, a chance to be overwhelmed by their feelings. The object of the emotion is less important than the emotion itself. Her oeuvre is like opera in this way—the plots are preposterous, but the whole thing is done with such luscious self-belief that the audience is tempted to forgive.

Radcliffe is not as well-known as she used to be. In modern editions of Les Miserables, Hugo’s reference has earned itself a footnote. No one is likely to make her the punchline of a cartoon. But her fame still survives in odd ways, in hidden signs and signals, like the theatre production that mingled Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey with Udolpho, or a fleeting reference to a castle called Dunbayne in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or the small Gothic publishing house in Kansas whose owners seem to have named themselves after one of her characters. They call themselves Valancourt Books.

* A Radcliff reference page.
* The works of Ann Radcliffe online at Adelaide University.
* Valancourt Books.

—Deanne Sole

The launch of the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Australia has attracted a little attention—partly for the two substantial $100,000 awards and partly for the fact that the PM himself has final say.

Most people are unconcerned by this role, but Gail Jones in The Guardian finds it troubling:

But should the Australian prime minister have a say in “his” award? Emphatically not. Judging panels are contentious enough without prime-ministerial opinion inflecting adjudication. The winning text risks being seen as content-endorsed, or in some way charged by political approval.

In part this is a hangover from the previous administration, where PM John Howard was something of “culture warrior” and had a tendency to weigh in heavily on art and literature he considered biased to the left.  New PM Kevin Rudd has shown a more hands-off approach.

The bigger question is surely “What do politicians know about books?” Politicians will occasionally write works of political science and policy—and at the end of their public life will often write scurrilous memoirs—but few engage in serious literature.

There is some hope here in my state of New South Wales, where the new Premier, Nathan Rees, has a degree in literature.  His predecessor was widely seen as a philistine, although the one before that (Bob Carr) was a self-confessed book nut—so much so that he recently wrote a book entirely about reading.  To tell the truth, I’m not sure that the writers of Sydney have really noticed the difference.

But what of the contenders in the current US Presidential campaign?  Barack Obama has written his own memoir and a manifesto of sorts.  John McCain has written a few books about his life.  McCain’s daughter Meghan has written a hagiography of the Republican candidate.  As for Sarah Palin… well, she’s expressed interest in banning a few books in her time.

I’m not sure any of them has much time for contemporary literature.  Maybe Obama does, but you can bet he won’t be discussing the merits of Junot Diaz as he campaigns for the votes of working-class Ohioans.

—David Pullar

I’m just going to go ahead and blame an international move and return to full time grad school for distracting me enough to overlook this one: a group of concerned crafters, wanting to show British fantasy author Terry Pratchett the depth of their concern for him. As a group, starting in January, they created a ‘pratchgan’ – a patchwork afghan composed of small blocks referring to various aspects of Pratchett’s Discworld. The completed work was presented to Pratchett at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 16 August; he seemed quite impressed.

Pratchett was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease almost a year ago. He publicly stated in May of this year that the disease is now affecting his work – spelling is becoming more difficult and his typing has slowed down.

Pratchett is determined to keep writing for as long as possible rather than take an early retirement. Different fans find various ways to show their support, and you can see more about the pratchgan on the blog of the organizer, here, including pictures of Pratchett accepting the gift along with a batch of letters from fans.

Personally, I have to love the Librarian square, with his brown orangutan face surrounded by fluffy orange fringe. I think I also spotted the Death of Rats in there somewhere, have a look yourself! What character or concept from the Disc would you most like to see rendered in yarn?

—Lara Killian

The Internet is alight with the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide. This is hitting me hard, not only because of Wallace’s youth, talent, and unfinished business, but because of my sense that he was not the type of artist who did this. In his writing, and especially in his magazine writing, I always found an authenticity and decency and all-around avoidance of self-tortured preening. I’m not saying we can spot suicidal hints in an artist’s work, but I am saying Wallace connected to real emotions and real concerns in a way that separated him from many of his pomo peers.

This doesn’t feel like the time to track down who broke the news, but I found out via the LA Times‘s blog. In choosing an image to accompany the story, their reporter posted the wrong book cover—not of Wallace’s opus, Infinite Jest, but of Stephen Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide, a short volume in the “Continuum Contemporaries” series.

The Times‘ unintentional slip feels like a fitting sort of tribute—with possible implications for Wallace’s style and audience, his relationship to academia, and even the state of fiction today—but I don’t feel like parsing it. I just feel sad.

—Craig Fehrman