Equally Meaningless Differences in the World

The late Adam Finley interviewed Achewood's creator, Chris Onstead, at The Black Table.

"AF: Should an artist avoid giving his/her audience what it wants? A recent strip featuring a fully cooked and fully anatomically correct rooster seemed to arrive from a different place than most of your other ideas.

CO: The rooster penis was an element that relieved the incredible tension between Roast Beef and his dinner date. That they could both laugh about it brought them down to earth with each other. I thought it felt perfect given the situation -- a tension breaker appropriate to the fundamental problem of the first date, which is that the basic purpose of dating is to mate and create offspring via the genitals.

This isn't a toilet humor strip, but I'm not beholden to any sort of oppressive distribution syndicate, and I can draw a chicken penis if I think that's funny. Some days I think chicken penises are not funny at all. Some days I hate them. Some days I think stuff like that just belongs in the trash. But whatever, I write a comic strip. Who cares. Greater men than me have gone to their graves having made equally meaningless differences in the world. I just fuck around on the Internet and later some dude buys a shirt so that I can live my life and pay Driveway Tax or whatever. I sleep at night, and one day I won't wake up. On that day, people in BMWs will drive past my house and honk at my neighbor as he tries to back out of his driveway. Fog will roll in. A grown man will get fired from McDonald's. Someone will ride the train home, and it will clang as it passes my street. I will be dead, and they'll put me out with the Monday morning trash, my feet sticking comically up out of the can."

Full interview.