So Achewood has more or less become a premium comic. As far as I can tell, Onstad updates every other week and then spends the rest of his time updating in his premium section. I understand that this is like, his job now, but his comic is only good enough to have a premium section in the first place because of the audience he built from a free comic. I hate it when webcomic authors do this.
No, it really hasn't. The Achewood fanflow gets updated just about as often as the actual strip does; it's just that he usually posts two or three things more or less simultaneously whenever he updates, and half of those are just previews of upcoming strips or merchandise that's going to be appearing in the store soon.
You might think I'm joking. Let's compare the month of February: he posted
five comic strips. 02/02, 02/06, 02/16, 02/22, 02/28.
Here are the fanflow updates for February.
02/02—New Strip: Two Hearts Beat As One
02/06—New Strip: Doppelganger
02/06—Round up of loose ends! (miscellaneous drawings and text; maybe consider this Half A Comic)
02/11—a powerpoint slideshow he presented at some talk somewhere
02/16—New Strip: Phillipe, Entrepreneur
02/16—a depiction of Ray wearing Shiatsu Donkey Weights
02/16—planning sketches for the construction of the 02/16 strip
02/22—New Strip: Shirley Temple
02/22—oblique joke revolving around an altered screenshot of Twitter's adspace
02/22—what basically amounts to a Roast Beef blog entry
02/23—You know those jumbles in newspapers that are offensively easy? That involve, like, six individual words, which (when solved) will give you the six letters to a
seventh word? Ray made one, and that's what premium members are paying for today.
02/28—New Strip: Find Something You Like and Copy It
02/28—what basically amounts to a Ray blog entry
Cut the new strips (which were posted simultaneously to their appearance on the main site), and that's 8 updates. Four of the remainder are almost contemptuously vacuous. Of the remaining four, two are basically just some stuff Onstad had lying around. That leaves
two entries of actual substance, but are actually just blog updates behind a pay wall.
Yeah, so I don't know what the fuck Onstad's up to, either. Some of the subscribers are kind of hoping he's secretly putting his animation plans that he'd mentioned about a year ago into effect. Otherwise I think we're all starting to feel a bit like rubes.
