It’s unfortunate Robert Warshow did not survive to write about Chris Onstad’s Achewood. Writing about comics (serious writing, that is) is rare. Too often, it ends up as either a collection of inside-baseball, hobbyist trivialities, or abstracted, culture-theoretical overreaction, a la the Baudrillardean love-fest surrounding Grant Morrison (the writer of Doom Patrol, The Invisibles, and The Filth.) The latter group is also inclined to insist that “Comics are too real art!”, and to wield the term “graphic novel” as though that were enough to make Stan Lee and Kafka peers.

Warshow, in his writings on popular culture, never trivialized it and never glorified it. If “Woofed with Dreams”, his brilliant essay on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat is any evidence, Warshow would have been the ideal candidate to write about Achewood, which deserves such serious, cool-headed treatment if ever a pop-culture artifact did.

Achewood (which appears daily at Achewood.com, with an on-again, off-again Sunday supplement at Serializer.net, an online comics clearinghouse) narrates the surreal daily lives of a group of animate stuffed animals and a few anthropomorphic cats, living in a semi-affluent suburb in California. The stuffed animals are, allegedly, Onstad’s roommates; the cats live on their own. If this sounds at once boring, saccharine, and creepy, it’s no fault of Onstad’s. The strip’s content is inherently difficult to condense.

What makes Achewood so compulsively readable? It’s hard to pinpoint. The art is highly competent but not particularly prepossessing. The humor is fairly low-key, although Onstad has produced some hysterically funny individual strips. But it’s endlessly fascinating. This is due, in part, to the fact that Onstad is a virtuoso. He could give advice to every writer in the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories at creating sharply defined voices for his characters (they recently started blogs, which are all dead-on, further demonstrating Onstad’s gifts as a ventriloquist.)

But my appreciation for Achewood goes well beyond mere technical admiration for Onstad’s gifts.

Onstad’s humor is subtle. It revolves around the fact that all of his characters are pathological personalities, living at very close quarters — Ray, one of the cats, is an epicure and a pussy hound, wealthy beyond belief from a pact with Satan, and a thorough fool. Mr. Bear (a stuffed bear) is the author of a series of children’s books and an Edwardian man-about-town; Philippe (an otter, also stuffed) is a terminally innocent five-year old. Their reactions are predictable and unpredictable at once — you know roughly where on the continuum of behavior they will fall, but the variations of the particulars are endless. Think Laurel and Hardy, or the Marx Brothers, or Seinfeld.

This is not to say that Achewood is more formulaic than other works of its type. But perhaps the anarchic, gentle absurdity that is its stock-in-trade only works if there is a repeated, familiar element that anchors it, that prevents it from becoming a (boring, saccharine, creepy) daydream.

It’s risky to draw out particular examples of Onstad’s recent work — they will make no sense to anyone unacquainted with the larger context. Some might claim this is a flaw. (On the other hand, “The Wizard of Id” revolves around standalone-joke strips, which is a formidable argument against them.) But here is one of the earlier Achewood strips, which adheres a bit more closely to the usual idea of the daily, punchline-oriented strip, and which makes a bit clearer, I hope, the vein of Onstad’s humor:

I chose this strip because it sets out, quite openly, the aims and means of Achewood’s humor: “I’m a human; I invented a voicemail system where 7 means delete!” — what a brilliant stab at the humans! Specifically, at our triviality and self-satisfaction (“Man, this Jeff Beck album really cooks!”). The absurdity of life in Achewood, in the midst of its normalcy — how instantly recognizable! What human character does not, examined closely, look as clownish as Ray the cat? The fact that all the personalities in Achewood are extreme is not a cheap gesture on Onstad’s part — it seems to stem from his conviction that the world is foolish and people are weird, to butcher Wallace Stevens.

Comics are fragile — they can’t bear a weighty sociological interpretation, without collapsing under it. And it would be an overstatement to say that Onstad’s central preoccupation is the particular set of incapacities that arise from living with the opulent ease modern life affords. But an element of this preoccupation shows itself in his work, I think.

As Achewood evolved (and continues to evolve), the storylines did (and do), as well — the best story arc, by far, involves the entire cast racing to rescue the child Philippe from the clutches of a serial killer. The failure of these semi-adults to do so is offset by the fact that Philippe manages to escape on his own. But that dark sense of incapacity pervades Achewood, as much as its sunny absurdity — Roast Beef, another cat, is an emotionally crippled (there is no punctuation in his speech bubbles; the font is a size smaller than when other characters speak), agoraphobic programmer.

I’m no expert on comics; and I think that taking a slavering, fanboyish attitude toward Achewood would probably obscure most of what is good in it. But it’s eminently worth reading, in a way that no comic strip I have seen has been , since the heyday of Calvin and Hobbes. You should start reading it, if you haven’t yet.