The American comic strip was born with "Hogan's Alley", Richard Outcault's cartoon about urban street life. Appearing in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in 1895, it featured a boy with a wide grin and a shaved head (a common sight among tenement-raised children: it got rid of lice), whose snappy, slangy words appeared on his shirt. It didn't take long for this popular cartoon boy to start appearing on matchbooks and cigarette packs around New York. William Randolph Hearst, Pulitzer's publishing rival, knew a good marketing tool when he saw one: he hired Outcault to write for his New York Journal, and in 1897 commissioned a cartoonist to create a strip revolving around two young pranksters. The result, "The Katzenjammer Kids", became one of the most popular strips of the 20th century. It still appears in a few papers today. 

That comic strips have always been rooted in commercial concerns, with newspapers dictating their size, frequency and often content, is not to say that they are not art: after all, Shakespeare and Bach were jobbers too. Occasionally a strip will transcend the mass: there was the melancholy insight of Charlie Brown and Linus in "Peanuts"; the hermetic perfection of Krazy's thwarted but undimmed love for Ignatz in "Krazy Kat"; and the manic sharpness of a boy and his stuffed tiger in "Calvin and Hobbes". If such bouts of brilliance emerged only once a generation, well, most plays are pretty awful, too.

Unlike most strips, these ended when their creators retired. Most strips are the property of a syndicator; when the original artist dies the strip is handed off to someone else. This helps to explain why strips such as "Gasoline Alley", "Beetle Bailey" and "Nancy" continue to chug away predictably, dully and unfunnily for the better part of a century. Syndicates are gatekeepers; cartoonists find it difficult, if not impossible, to get published (or make money) without them.

But what if a cartoonist didn't have to rely on newspaper contracts? What if he could write and draw whatever he liked, and sell whatever ancillary materials he fancied? (Such commercial spinoffs are no afterthought: when Charles Schulz retired in 1999, the "Peanuts" empire--television specials, books, dolls, keychains, etc--was raking in more than $1 billion a year.)

Chris Onstad published the first instalment of "Achewood", an online strip, on October 1^st 2001; it has appeared relatively regularly ever since (online publishing allows more flexible scheduling). Like the three great strips above, it rests on a premise at once basic, absurd and elastic: a group of talking animals live human-like lives in an unpeopled version of suburban California.

Explaining it to the uninitiated can be tough: because he never had to hammer the square peg of his style into a syndicate's round hole, the strip relies on idiosyncratic and often raunchy humour rather than old chestnuts and focus-grouped laugh-lines. Its characterization is richer, deeper, more rewarding and more realistic than in any other strip in history: these are not collections of traits and tics, as in "Peanuts"; these are characters with real emotions and real conversations. In particular, it captures the rhythms, humour, ruptures and tenor of male friendship beautifully, particularly in the dynamic between the two main characters: wealthy and carefree Ray, and the neurotic, sweet, depressive Roast Beef. 

"Achewood" takes full advantage of its online medium: Onstad creates not only the strip itself, but also blogs in the voices of 12 of the strip's characters, has written six issues (and counting) of a zine published by Roast Beef called "Man Why You Even Got to Do a Thing", and recently he's started a premium subscriber section with visual, photographic and textual content (this section costs $2.99 per month; the strip itself is free, along with its archives). He has self-published several collections, but "The Great Outdoor Fight" (Dark Horse Comics, $14.95), which came out in late August, marks his first collaboration with a traditional publisher.

The stand-alone book features one of the strip's richest and most self-contained story arcs. It traces Ray's path through a so-called Great Outdoor Fight, a Hobbesian all-against-all last-man-standing brawl with 3,000 entrants and no rules. Ray is rather chubby and good-natured, with no documented propensity for violence, but a story needs its drama and its hero, and Ray shines. Onstad's talent for details is on full display here; every character, however small, is rendered with specificity of manner, dress and dialect. A hot-dog chef who appears in only one strip is rendered with long hair, a bald spot, a sleazy moustache and a greasy tank-top. One of Ray's compatriots in arms--another tough-talking cat in a leather vest--is named "the Latino Health Crisis".

The book includes some extras too, such as a brief history of the fight, profiles of several winners and a glossary of fight-related terms ("tick: a fighter who roams the grounds in search of water. Typically Hungarian"). There are also six recipes from a "Great Outdoor Fight" cookbook, including "Dinosaur Potato Chuds", or hollowed-out baked potatoes stuffed with chicken drumsticks.

The result is a fine and well-produced "Achewood" package. But I couldn't help but miss a few elements from the web version of the comic. On the site, moving the cursor onto the strip reveals an alt-text tag: a meta comment on the strip from Onstad himself. The cultish fans of Onstad's distinctive brand of humour tend to feel like the strip is written for us, and those little tags heighten that impression. I wanted them back.

"Achewood" finds itself in a peculiar conundrum: as it grows, big publishers will come calling. They offer better distribution and higher production values. Dark Horse did a great job: the book's images are crisp, the front cover solid, and the front and back inside panels are particularly impressive, covered in publicity posters from past Great Outdoor Fights. Onstad's previous, self-published books are far more modest-looking and are available only on his website.

But to read "Achewood" on the page is to lose some of its charms: the alt-text tags, the blogs, the links to comment pages, the ability to scroll back through the archives, and, more numinously, the sense of belonging to a community of initiates. I hope the book is very successful, spreading the darkly hilarious word that is "Achewood". But the real action and the real art is online, away from the concerns of latter-day Hearsts and Pulitzers. Long may it stay there.

Picture credit: Chris Onstad

(Jon Fasman is an editor for Economist.com, and the author of two novels, both published by the Penguin Press: "The Geographer's Library" and "The Unpossessed City", coming out in November 2008. He writes regularly about food for Intelligent Life and MoreIntelligentLife.com, such as "It's Offal Good".)