In this primordial—nay, primitive—strip, a very rough sketch of the Roast Beef prototype inadvertently communicates to Vlad that he has nearly zero exposure to women. In return, Vlad says something that has not aged well. I am vastly certain that if I were to rewrite this strip today, Vlad would reflect on how the little landscape r...
2024-03-29 00:25:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Kenji López-Alt's smash burger recipe on Serious Eats is four written pages long. It is six hundred words longer than the Declaration of Independence (1,959 to 1,320), and has fourteen photographs (including a helpful one of the outside of a building where hamburgers are cooked). The entire webpage clocks in at 3.3MB, which means that tran...
2024-03-28 19:19:53 +0000 UTC View Post
The evening before my parents, Lauren, and I descended upon Hayden's farm to build a new pergola out of the old fort, I sensed complications arising. Everyone in the group, it seemed, had their own carpentry background — some professional, but most autodidact — and the gutters of Babel soon overran with incompatible visions for the simple st...
2024-03-25 22:45:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Shirt lines that didn't make the cut:
*
I AM LYLE
I SMELL LIKE
I WENT JOGGING WITH ONION SLICES IN MY ARMPITS
and
YARD TOOLS
*
I already have GRASS
and GAS
So gimme your (LAWNMOWER?, SORRY, NOT SURE WHAT THIS ONE MEANS)
*
I’M A PERFECT MIXTURE OF
PAL...
2024-03-22 17:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
In this brand-new story, Ray takes Cornelius on a drive to the ophthalmologist, but, as these things go, that is the least of what occurs.
(As an aside to all this, I'm still looking for a way to format these such that the PDF conversion process doesn't turn them into gappy slop, so if you notice any formatting errors, or like to talk ...
2024-03-21 18:33:31 +0000 UTC View Post
A brief e-mail exchange between Lauren and me, as we sat in our respective offices Monday morning.
Perhaps you would enjoy captioning it, as well?
2024-03-19 17:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Curious to hear from you chochachos of the Author's Tier about your specific feelings on these panels. I couldn't ask you this until now because my parents were staying with us, but tonight my parents are 300 miles away in Yreka, trying to eat food at a Black Bear Diner, and I don't have to hear about how much saturated fat is in the biscuits. &...
2024-03-18 17:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
I have spent the past week entertaining my parents, who are visiting from out of town. We are the sort of family who hold seven concurrent conversations despite there being only three people in the room. It is a special kind of multiplexing which can drive others mad. I can handle it, because I grew up in it, but it has the unfortunate downside ...
2024-03-15 17:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
In 2010, back when I was still married and we all lived at the old house together, my wife and kid went on a trip to see her family in California. While they were gone, I thought it would be an act of classical fatherhood to build a playhouse for my child, and surprise them when they returned.
I wasn't in particularly good shape—al...
2024-03-09 18:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
This strip was remarkable to me because the original script took about ten minutes to write, and changed very little through the production stage. (This happens maybe once every thousand strips.) I vacillated a bit on the seventh panel — I always find a way to waste an extra hour or two — but ended up staying with the original. Why...
2024-03-08 18:21:21 +0000 UTC View Post
I add to this list: Oncoming drivers whom you move aside to let pass on a narrow street yet fail to wave. People who bring dogs into coffee shops and don't notice your glaring. Ship captains who gaze inscrutably into the distance instead of saying, "The sea is me soul's final keep, the briney me sheet as I sleep."
What is your pet peeve yo...
2024-03-08 18:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Sure, you could have just gone to Twitter and read all this, but I doubt many people are going there to look for Philippe Twitter content anymore (his last post was eleven years ago), so I, in the spirit of both fun sharing and completeness, present his total output here. As you might imagine, it's fairly light reading. I'd almost just call it g...
2024-03-07 18:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
A friend once took his young boy to witness an exposition of monster trucks — for the boy’s sake, not his own — and returned home a full-throated proselyte of the spectacle. So complete was his joy at the performance of these machines that in his breathless recap, I do not believe he mentioned the boy.
The memory of that charmin...
2024-03-05 01:41:19 +0000 UTC View Post
The "Truth Vase" is defined as any item in a house over which two inhabitants disagree, but whose content or form cannot be explicitly denied as actual. What's your Truth Vase?
2024-03-01 18:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Please post your questions for me within twenty-four hours of this Q&A going live! (I.e., between now and tomorrow, Thursday February 29, 11AM Pacific.) I will respond over the course of the following few days, but usually within the hour. Patreon will send you a message when I reply to you.
Questions can be about anything, though Ache...
2024-02-28 19:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
The second Q&A will also be open to non-subscribers, in the hopes that it will get new people on board and enjoying the most recent year of Achewood. This is the best and most consistent material ever released under the masthead, and I would love for it to bring happiness and laughter to more lives.
The last Q&A had over 270...
2024-02-27 20:44:59 +0000 UTC View Post
Good Monday Morning, Valued Denizen of the Author’s Tier!
Here is some news of my week, which I present to you as valid entertainment.
1. An Exciting Medical Device!
Tonight I am installing a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) onto the side of my arm. I have no reason to do this other than pure curiosity a...
2024-02-26 19:14:58 +0000 UTC View Post
This is just a little comic with a little idea in it. Lyle does not burst through the wall with a buzzsaw, raging about the inadequacy of the present. Maybe this comic is kind of peaceful. It is a snatched glimpse of a small moment.
There will still be the usual new strip Friday. Today's comic is just a little one. I like to think th...
2024-02-26 16:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
In the cold light of morning, as the dew sticks to the neighbor's eaves and the hot joe sits silently in the mug beside you, some of the previous night's panels bring only shame.
2024-02-23 18:01:02 +0000 UTC View Post
(Note: precisely one minute after this strip posts, six rejected panels from it will post in the In-Universe and Author's tiers.)
If our bodies can release amazing trippy chemicals as we're dying, then (a) why do they wait until then to do it, and (b) how did this ability evolve into being? You'd think tha...
2024-02-23 18:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
This is going back, back, back so far that the type is pixelated and their muzzles are, for some unknown reason, now rendering as blotchy color, as though they were slowly derezzing out of our universe entirely. (This was apparently before I knew about archiving the original high-res files in some way that could be searched for.)
The...
2024-02-22 20:52:09 +0000 UTC View Post
Please enjoy the full transcript of this long-forgotten public service bulletin, recently discovered by Roast Beef Kazenzakis at a cavernous junk shop several miles out of town.
2024-02-17 17:41:52 +0000 UTC View Post
What's one unsettling or otherwise noteworthy detail you've discovered in an Airbnb? I once opened a jar of shampoo and caught Hugh Laurie's limp from House.
2024-02-16 18:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
(Please see the photo captions for more-concise early thoughts on my visit here.)
With the exception of the local drivers, upon whose murderous pathologies I will expound elsewhere—perhaps before legislature—Savannah presents itself as modestly charming.
My tourism needs are not difficult to satisf...
2024-02-13 21:04:22 +0000 UTC View Post
We see Ray and Beef growing distant in the wake of the victory which redefined their lives.
2024-02-10 18:00:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Next week we begin a run of Old School Classic standalone strips, set to run indefinitely. The story arcs are very pleasing to mull over and plot, but under the mop of my well-being I sense a hunger for the wham-bam of the spirited and irreverent basal ganglia of this excitable troupe.
I'm also doing another Author's AMA, open to all...
2024-02-09 18:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
In the little house on Holly Street, before the baby and the book tours and the Oregon move and the rest of that rise and spectacular grind of a fall, I went to Michael’s Arts and Crafts and bought a couple tubes of cheap acrylic paint.
“I should learn how to paint. I’m an artist, after all, and I’ve seen that other artists do thi...
2024-02-05 20:39:45 +0000 UTC View Post
My baking coach Neven brought over some fresh homemade bagels this morning (final photo), so we laid out the fish and brineys and did it up. Afterwards I spent a while in the studio taking a few passes at the latest canvases, and felt like it was time to share again.
2024-02-04 22:47:34 +0000 UTC View Post
**PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THIS INFORMATION OUTSIDE OF PATREON**
**I AM NOT SURE BUT I THINK I COULD GET COMPLETELY YELLED AT**
This is actually the storyboards for two sequences:
1. Zooming in on Beef's childhood trailer with Gramma K, right up to his bedroom door
...
2024-02-03 18:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
That's right, this one's two pages long. Don't forget to read the second page, because that is where the finale is. If you just read the first page, it will seem like a pretty bad finale, or at least the kind of anti-finale that has been popular in Hollywood lately, ever since writers' parents stopped reading them Agatha Christie as infants.&nbs...
2024-02-02 18:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post