Achewood, by Chris Onstad from January 10, 2014
Achewood is one of my very favorite comics (not just webcomics). It's got some of the best-written dialogue I've ever read. I will defend it at great length as a work of genius, whether or not it ever gets back to regular updating.
Unfortunately, it's also kind of hard to get into. The stories don't make much sense without intimate knowledge of the way the characters have developed over ten years of strips. Characters speak in a thick stew of dialect, made-up slang, and obscure references. The text is tiny and the artwork is ugly (intentionally)(I think).
This page is from the middle of the most recent storyline, where Teodor, a well-meaning loser of a teddy bear, has met back up with Penny, a woman he knew years ago. I picked this page because there's a LOT going on here, comic-wise. It's typical Achewood: A large, dense grid of tiny panels filled with tiny text. Achewood does not hold the reader's hand; it expects you to piece things together.
First thing to say about this page is that it's got two "scenes" happening. Scene 1 is the first 10 panels, a conversation about (ostensibly) hash browns. The scene change, which in other comics would require a large splash panel/establishing shot/page turn, is marked by a change in background color, a tiny drawing of a car, and the caption with the single word "BUT". The second scene cuts rapidly between a silent moment in the car and the contents of Teodor's imagination. There's no visual difference between the real and imaginary panels; it's up to the reader to figure out from context that panel 13 is Teodor's caricature of his roommates' personalities, not actually them. And that the car plummeting into the sun in the last panel represents Teodor's feeling of impending doom.
The hash brown conversation is rich with subtext. Teodor never admits, even in internal monologue, how desperate he is to impress Penny, but it's clear from the way he says "Good. fucking. save. dude." and from his shame about being poor.Thought-cloud text is the subtext of the spoken conversation, but in a comic, thought-cloud text can have subtext of its own! On the surface, Penny and Teodor are having some relaxed, breezy banter, but there's a sense that they're both concealing some awkwardness because neither of them really knows where their relationship stands after all this time. Beneath the awkwardness it seems they really do like each other and hope they can make things work out this time. (Look at how Penny sighs and then works to restart a stalled conversation in panel 2.)
Let's go back to that caption "BUT." Achewood has established very strict rules for use of captions. Black caption boxes with white text are used to mark the passage of time. The typical time-passing caption is "LATER..." Achewood uses "LATER." along with "SOON.", "AND." "SO." "BUT.", each of which has a slightly different connotation. Note the distinction between black caption boxes, which are "voice of the narrator", and the white caption boxes, which are Teodor's internal monologue. Making them very visually distinct helps us avoid confusing one for the other.
There's two distinct methods used here for showing passage of time. Short pauses in a conversation are shown as silent panels, like panels 1 and 6. (Longer pauses may be multiple silent panels, which creates a sort of "filmstrip"-like effect where we perceive each panel as a constant time interval, especially in scenes like the first one here where the background and camera angle don't change.)
Narration captions are always a little weird, because they're the one place where the (usually visual) "voice" of the author temporarily becomes the verbal voice of the narrator. You thought your comic didn't have a narrator? As soon as you put a narration caption, it does. So you have to watch out for these; they can seriously change the tone of a comic.
What tone is Onstad going for here? What is the voice of Achewood's narrator? One conjunction in all caps followed by a period comes off as curt, I'd say. Abrupt. Opinionated, too -- the word "BUT" implies an opinion about the relationship between one scene and the next. The narrator is set apart from the comic: The reversed colors make it visually more a part of the panel frame than the panel contents. This is not the sort of narrator who the characters can hear and argue with. He's the sort who appears VERY rarely, and when he does appear he stays only long enough to make a single authoritative statement establishing a new scene. But when he's there, he sticks out; he doesn't bother trying to blend in.
The curt narrator, the "filmstrip" effect of time passing, the lack of demarkation between "real" and "imaginary" panels... all of these combine with the sparse backgrounds, the flatness of the linework (it's done as vector art), the tiny text in a boring font, to form a certain aesthetic whole. How would you describe that feeling? It reminds me of an indie film with no background music. The authorial voice is distant, dry, "objective". Everything about it says that this is a serious, depressing, adult world, despite the talking animals. It's the opposite of "wacky". This sober mood makes the ridiculous dialogue ("Like how we experience Led Zeppelin, or family") even funnier. It makes it seem as though it's the characters being funny and not the author: the author is just giving us an objective camera view into a somber world where talking teddy bears happen to be saying and doing ridiculous things.
