If you have five people sitting at a table with a Nazi...

[brigid]

12-16-2022

I didn't predict Edie (Gran) and Kiesel because we haven't seen them be romantic/horny in, literally, years.

And it's extremely telling that we have them presented as YOUNG versions of themselves. McEldowney very obviously has no difficulty portraying older men being sexy with with much younger women, but old sexy women? Sure, he'll draw characters having sex on top of tables in diners, or licking toes on the sidewalk, but this is a bridge too far!

The casual reader of this strip will start out wondering why Edda's hanging out with a random red-haired guy - a waiter, perhaps? - then smooching him, cheating on her husband. And then there's the names! Edie and Kiesel. Ah! Got it. Edda has a sister... a twin sister, maybe? Wonder when we'll see her again! Do they have kids, too?

No, no. No. That's her grandmother and the Nazi officer she banged, lost track of, then reunited with and now lives in Austria with.

As, you know, as one does.

To sum up quickly:

During World War 2 Edie, a first generation Austrian-American, was recruited to speak to Nazi soldiers to get intel. You see, she's a pretty young Austrian girl who'd remind them of home, and these scared lonely teenage grunts would spill their hearts out to her... and their secrets. She meets Lt. Peter Kiesel, an Austrian Lieutenant in the Wehrmacht. He doesn't WANT to be a Nazi, and he's angry with HER for working with Nazis (she plays her role well enough to fool him), but he's a Lieutenant because something something patriotism. He ultimately decides to give her information so that The Powers That Be continue to find her useful. Great, right? Woohoo, gonna win that war! The information he passes on is all true, but... none of it will actually endanger the German military or cause them harm. It's pointless. He protests that he's not ACTUALLY a Nazi, he doesn't support them, but... he could absolutely have shared everything he knows with the Allied Forces, yet didn't. He could have refused service entirely and been sent to the Russian Front. (If you ever meet a German whose granddad was at the Russian Front? That's very possibly a dude who was sentenced to a slow, painful death for not joining up. It absolutely WAS possible to refuse... you just faced horrific consequences. Which some people did.)

Kiesel was an opera singer who trained Edie... in the POW camp... for some reason? They fell in love. After the war they met again, still had the hots for each other, fucked, and made plans to go to Austria together and get married. Yes, the fucking involved her deep throating his ice-cream covered hand in a city park.

Almost immediately after that Edie realized that Bill O'Malley, who'd previously kind of sort of proposed to her, was still alive even though years had passed since his disappearance. He was hiding and refusing to speak to her, and other military people were going along with this, for... Reasons? I guess? Edie decided to fulfill her earlier promise and break up with Kiesel. When Bill discovered she was pregnant he married her and raised her kid, Juliette, as his own. He and Edie had another child, Roger, as well. Also they loathed each other?

So! A Nazi.

I want to point out here that Bill, Juliette's dad, was Lost Behind Enemy Lines and hooked up with a sexy sharp shooting member of the French Resistance. She was very sexy and was a sexy assassin. He was super happy with her. They got married. She was killed for being a Collaborator, because she was too good at pretending to be a Nazi so she could kill Nazis. This made him very sad and he was never happy again.

We also had an interminable flashback to Thorax's experience in England in WWII. I'm... not even going to touch on that hot fucking mess except to say that he hooked up with a sexy Polish sharp shooting assassin double agent who was pretending to be a Nazi so she could kill Nazis. She was killed. This made Thorax very sad.

The lesson here, I guess, is that if you're a woman who kills Nazis then you're dead but if you're an actual literal Nazi then you get a long life with a successful artistic career and eventual reunion with your True Love and your immensely talented daughter and granddaughter (and possibly great granddaughters? No idea if they've met Edda's kids, why on earth would we be shown something like that, ugh, how dull, let's get back to tub fucking or licking toes on the sidewalk). If only either of those women had been ARTISTS! Then maybe they'd have deserved to live.