It used to be a truism that webcomics slacked off (either updates, or readership numbers, or both) over the summer and ticked up again in early September, a token of how much net access was tied to academic institutions. Take a look at any of the old long runners, and there’s a better than even chance they started updating in the first two weeks of September, as many strips were outgrowths of college papers.

The ur-example is the Walkyverse by David Willis, which launched Roomies on 10 September 1997 (uh, happy 24th strippaversary last Friday, David), and which saw reboots keep the date: Bring Back Roomies five years later, and the current Dumbing Of Age (reboot? alternate reality?) in 2010 (uh, happy 11th strippaversary last Friday, David).

Willis’s old Blank Label¹ running buddy Paul Taylor, f’rinstance, started Wapsi Square at midnight Sunday night/Monday morning, 9/10 September 2001. Which means that strip #2 went up on a bad day and nobody was reading anything funny. Them’s the breaks sometimes.

But the most significant autumn launch is possibly not an autumn launch at all.

1 October 2001 was the day we met Téodor, Cornelius Bear, and found out Phillippe was standing on it, and Achewood burst into our eyeballs and … not a lot happened, actually. It was a webcomic, sure. But the later spark that showed us what webcomics could achieve, that less than five years later would lead to the greatest sustained burst of brilliance in any webcomic, ever — give me a moment to say some other stuff and I’ll justify that claim — wouldn’t really find its footing for a while.

Chris Onstad has said he doesn’t consider the strip to have started, not really, until three cats were introduced about four months later as The Dirtiest Dudes In Town. Ray was embryonic but recognizable and fell into his personality pretty damn quickly; Pat was … okay, not really Pat; by the time we learned Beef’s name his mode of interacting with the world was pretty much set, and Achewood was Achewood.

So as long as we’re coming up on 20 damn years of Achewood, a few things to share: there’s a nice video essay with entirely too few views on Achewood’s use of language, and I went and dug up both the teaser trailer and the test footage of the tragically never-completed Achewood cartoon series. Go back and find your favorite story arc and just wallow for a while. Come the first, we are all From Circumstances.

Oh, right, greatest sustained burst of brilliance in any webcomic, ever. January 2006 (five years and a day after we first met Ray, Beef, and Pat and man, screw Pat, he’s a jerk) started with The Great Outdoor Fight, which we are rightly still talking about fifteen years later; considering this was a time when Onstad famously did not plot story ahead and did each strip based on whim, it’s a remarkably tight, still riotously funny meditation on masculinity and finding your father.

After literally a one strip interlude, we launched into the story of Phillippe And The Transfer Station which, need I remind you, brought us Ebay Platinum Reserve, Airwolf, the preserved head of Keith Moon, and Ray’s Robert Smith impersonation.

Single strip breather again and we get Beef’s Magic Underpants, the tail-end strips of which feature some of the most perfect single panels in webcomics history. Look at the GENIUS! indeed; Look at his stand in his ROOM!

No intermezzo, the very next strip launched The Badass Games, after which a month of perfectly acceptable strips went by (including the introduction of sass gut and pimp skitters, two of the finest bits of Achewoodian language ever) before we got to one of the most bonkers ideas that Onstad’s ever come up with: Mexican Magical Realism, which would flit in and out of Achewood until Onstad launched perhaps his most trip-all-the-balls story.

By the time Ray walked home from Mexico it was nearly the end of October, and we still had to contend with Mister Band to finish the year and spill over into late January.

QED.

Spam of the day:

Attention: Beneficiary,

We sincerely apologize for sending you this sensitive information via e-mail instead of a certified mail, post-mail, phone, or face to face conversation, it’s due to the urgency and importance of the security information of our citizens, I am deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Paul M. Abbate, We intercepted and seized a sealed envelope at the John F Kennedy International Airport, New York, NY 11430 coming from a foreign, we scanned the sealed envelope’s content and found it contained a part payment of $410,000 United States Dollar value certified payment bond. Also, the sealed envelope had documents with your name on them as the receiver of the package. After questioning the diplomat who accompanied the sealed envelope into the United States, we learned that he was supposed to deliver this sealed envelope to your residence as an inheritance / winning prize payment due / owed to you.

Quoted at length so I could say Dude, pick one damn scam and stick with it. You’re trying to jam in like seven different things here.

_______________
¹ Remember the days of comics collectives? When a bunch of creators would band together into what Jon Rosenberg² referred to as a mutual non-aggression pact³ because why not? A bunch of people who’ve been at this forever came up through one or more of those old semi-communes, and are more than familiar with each other’s elbows, having sometimes put a dozen folks behind a single SDCC exhibit floor table, ow.

Oh, and that link is to the Wayback Machine; don’t type it in directly, it takes you to a completely unrelated site that must have snagged the domain after collectives were no longer a thing.

² Obligatory disclaimer: who supplies my hosting and browbeat into this blogging deal in the first place.

³ He also referred to his Dumbrella cohorts as a bunch of lowlife emo-candyraver drug-addled web-cartoonists which, fair. At least one of them is responsible for the spreadsheets that provide a living for dozens of creators now.

That Dumbrella link is good, although it hasn’t been updated in forever, because R Stevens would rather die than give up a domain name, as is only right and proper. I need to ask him sometime how damn many of the things he owns.