My PCMag coworker Kyle Monson and I recently launched a new podcast for our day jobs called After Hours. Each week’s episode focuses on a different issue in the world of consumer electronics. Last week, in honor of Book Expo America 2009 coming to our fair city, we took a swing at the world of ebooks and the future of print publishing.

Among the guests on that week’s show were Paul Armstrong of the fantastic (and utterly terrifying) Twitter feed, TheMediaisDying; The Onion’s features editor, Joe Garden; and Achewood mastermind, Chris Onstad.

Onstad and I discussed print vs. Webcomics, wordy text bubbles, and why the author doesn’t really care about the Kindle. Check out the full text of the interview, after the jump. You can also check out the latest episode of PCMag After Hours here.

Your strip is part of an increasing trend of starting online and moving into print.

Yeah, I’m really happy to see that. It’s difficult to monetize yourself if you’re online only. And I think that it’s proof that people prefer to read these things in print form. I can do a lot more with a book than I can online.

That was ultimately your goal from the beginning?

No, it was never my goal. It just happened. I never plan anything ahead, really. It’s totally a mess.

Personally would you prefer to read a book rather than something online?

Yeah, absolutely. We came up reading. It might be different in 25 years, but for now a book is the most satisfying thing. I can take it to bed, I can take it to the lavatory, I can take it to the front porch. I’m not stuck at the screen and the mercy of someone else’s navigation system.

Do you feel like you wouldn’t have been afforded the same opportunities, had you started out in print?

I never would have started at all, if that was the only option. I only started this because I started out as a graphic designer working on computers and I could draw that way—I could upload that way. If I had to go through the process of working with an editor and changing content and regular print deadlines, this just never would have happened at all.

And the distribution methods don’t compare at all.

No, I can post a comic and then people don’t have go to a store to buy it. They get it one second later, around the world.

And you’re doing a lot of other stuff with the site—you started character blogs, as well.

Yeah. In 2004, I started 13 different blogs for the main characters of the strip. And it was so liberating, because I could write and I wasn’t restricted to panels with speech bubbles. Now I can be much more verbose. I always went crazy reading comics like This Modern World, which are 90-percent text. And I found myself starting to do that sort of thing, and I thought, ‘well, it’s just not pleasant to read that much inside a comic strip.’ So the blogs were just like the floodgates open. I could really flesh it out and see who these characters were. But of course that also opened it up to shooting myself in the foot, because I’ve got a thousand blog entries from these characters, and I contradict myself all of the time.

Do you get that pointed out to you a lot?

Rarely, because I spend so much time reading and re-reading the backstories for everyone. But I don’t think I make too many mistakes. And I’ve been doing this for seven years. I get the fundamental engines inside each character, so I don’t usually have them contradict themselves. But still, there are always people who want to pick it, pick it, pick it apart.

Is that kind of a nerd defense mechanism?

I’m flattered by it, but I’m also annoyed by it. if I’m going to have a strip go up and there’s something a character is doing or saying in it that’s not true to themselves, I freak out and go crazy. I absolutely hate to have character inconsistencies in the strip. But after seven years, I know what’s going to happen.

Have you looked into other platforms like the Kindle and the iPhone?

My publisher Dark Horse is trying to get my books readable on their iPhone application. And I get approached a couple of times a year by different companies that are interested in doing it. I’m not that excited about it, so I haven’t really bothered with it.

Because you don’t own one?

I don’t own one and I’m kind of ignorant about the way it all works. The technology isn’t what excites me about doing this. What excites me about doing this is making stories and jokes and things.

So you don’t see the day in the near future when people aren’t really going to be buying books? When it will be necessary to have a Kindle application

No, I don’t see that day coming, but maybe I’ll eat my words in ten years. We’ll see.

–Brian Heater

Standing behind the counter, Chris Onstad and his publicist Jacquelene talk with fans at Portland’s Floating World Comics about “The Great Outdoor Fight.” The Great Outdoor Fight? There’s posters taped to the counter reproduced from various decades–each marked by the era’s graphic design–and I’m thinking, did these fights happen?

“What is the Great Outdoor Fight?” I ask Chris, referring to the posters.

“It’s completely fictional,” Chris says, “but it makes sense . . . an enormous outdoor brawl.”

I thought it happened as advertised.

“The poster is promo . . . I worked as a graphic designer.”

A beaming young couple approaches the counter. The woman pulls out a mailing tube and Chris says, “hey, I recognize that.” She takes one of his posters out of the tube–this one circa 1950 with an illustration of elk locking horns.

“Who am I signing this to: your name, an imaginary name?”

The couple exchange excited looks, expectant. “What do you think?” the guy asks.

“I think a signature’s fine, but it’s your poster.”

The woman starts talking pastries with Chris, something requiring “sugar pumps”.

“I work with laminate dough,” the baker says cryptically. “The sheets . . . making croissants. I spend a lot of time with butter.”

“We can talk about baking,” Chris says. His self-published cookbook is displayed on the counter. She’s a student at the culinary institute and asks Chris to draw a character on her white chef’s coat. Chris sketches Philippe onto the white coat with a Sharpie, each indelible line going onto the fabric with speed and facility of writing. I ask Chris if he ever uses a tablet to draw onto the computer screen.

“Originally, I drew the strip with a mouse. My wife finally got me a tablet for Christmas . . . it went native right away; the tool works really well.”

“Now all the drawing’s been done years ago,” Chris confides. The characters are vector-based graphics, allowing infinite variations and resizing of the same drawing. “I was just doing my thing in my house, posting on the Internet, but now we have the book out: we have to get on the plane.” Chris is on a ten city tour, posting up-to-date info on his blog.

“Since we published the book, we’ve lots of attention from animation: Adult Swim, Nickelodeon–” Fans at the counter start commenting on the major networks, what can and can’t be said on Cartoon Network versus the creative freedom of Webcomics.

The Great Outdoor Fight collects a three-month story arc from Chris’s Achewood, a strip featuring characters based on his wife’s stuffed animals: cats, a bear, a baby otter, a squirrel (and some robots). His wife now runs the business side of Achewood, and they have one full-time employee. With some 10,000,000 page views per month and Time Magazine’s praise–Achewood ranked best graphic novel of 2007–the opportunity to share his hilarious brand of comedy has arrived.

Now, Chris contributes weekly to the New Yorker’s online “Cartoon Lounge”. Though it sounds animated, there’s no drawings; he’s writing comedy in tandem with Zachary Kanin. The strength of Achewood is Chris’s writing. While his book sells in comic book stores, he admits to rarely reading comic books. He’s a fan of comedy writing: P. G. Wodehouse, Dave Barry, and P. J. O’Rourke (and cookbooks, too).

Jacqulene mentions Achewood Vol. 2, and I ask when it will be coming out.

“He can tell you,” Chris says, pointing to a man who has just arrived with a curly red-haired woman. “That’s Dave Land, my editor.”

“May 2009,” Dave says. “Maybe a little later.”

Dave tells me The Great Outdoor Fight is doing well in comics’ specialty shops, and there was a piece on NPR about it last week. After the radio show, Dave checked the book’s rank online–Amazon updates sales figures hourly–and saw a bump in sales. Word-of-mouth built the strip’s popularity, so I ask Dave how did he first hear of Achewood.

“When Chris first started posting The Great Outdoor Fight online, I heard a buzz that it was really hilarious.”

At first sight, the strip looks like a wire-frame. It’s all one line weight. For cartoonists who spend their career on finely crafted visual storytelling, Achewood requires some investment. There’s not much to the visuals; but once you read it, the strip gets you laughing.

Chris’s work is part of Dark Horse’s Webcomic line—they’ve published a handful of other Web-based comics: Perry Bible Fellowship, Wondermark, K Chronicles, and Slowwave. It’s anyone’s guess what new roads will open on Achewood’s book tour, but for a full-color vista: check out the eight page strip on myspace.com/darkhorsepresents.

–Arthur Smid