Wait—Achewood is going on indefinite hiatus??? Man, that's what I get for staying off the internet for a few days to reproduce! Seriously, the announcement by cartoonist (and blogger, and prose author, and recipe author, and god knows everything else he's done with this strip) Chris Onstad that his much loved, much acclaimed, collected-by-Dark Horse webcomic Achewood and its tales of the misadventures of a bunch of cats and squirrels and stuffed bears and things will cease regular publication indefinitely really shocked me. As I've mentioned before, I haven't regularly followed the strip since its early years (that's on me, not on the strip, which I never stopped enjoying), but I just assumed it was the kind of thing that'd be around more or less forever—it seemed to have the audience, and Onstad (who's done literally thousands of strips, in-character blog entries, and assorted other ephemera for the comic) clearly didn't lack for ideas. But when I heard a while back that Onstad was asking for donations to keep the strip afloat I realized that acclaim, audience size, and revenue are by no means interrelated sure things (even though the rhetoric surrounding webcomics sometimes seems to suggest that they are), and now that Onstad is retiring the strip for a while to recharge his creative batteries and bring the characters up to speed with where he is now as a person, I realize that even an idea man as proficient and prolific as Onstad isn't an endlessly renewable resource. In addition to the aforelinked post, Onstad talked to Comics Alliance's Aaron Colter about the decision. Read it and pray for a Roast Beef resurrection.