It's pregnancy... surprise!

[brigid]

On the one hand you have this strip from today (11-19-2022) which implies that Edda is pregnant, or possibly about to embark on an attempt to get pregnant. As McEldowney has shown in the past, despite both her and Amos being remarkably fertile (the best at being fertile!) it took months for her to get pregnant. Possibly they don't know where to stick it. Despite their trials and tribulations they managed to get their act together and Edda conceived the rarest type of twins there is... the rarest and most dangerous (the best at twinning!). There Were Complications that involved her being put on bed rest... in a hospital itself.

They must have amazing insurance.

After the scheduled C-Section, and after speaking with her former teacher/current friend Diane, she realized that having a bunch of kids like Diane maybe isn't for her and she had this heart to heart with Amos:


I'm not entirely sure when this is from as GoComics, my usual GoTo for comics, is down. This story line kicks off March 10, 2020

The greatest tragedy of my life.

I was surprised at the conversation because Amos and Edda, and of course their creator, are very Catholic. Despite writing a former sister and former brother (in the religious sense) denouncing their orders after falling in love McEldowney is very conservative and judgemental and Diane and Francis (the former sister and former priest) have eschewed birth control in order to have so many kids they don't remember all their children's names... much like Juliet's brother Roger.

My surprise dropped when Edda told Amos to cancel the vasectomy appointment because she wanted a bunch more kids.

Honestly, I've been expecting a pregnancy announcement for about a year, since he started portraying the twin girls as somewhere between the age of 3 and 8. Again: Catholic. Fleurrie Spocket and Xiulan Yuan both asked her for conception advice a year or two ago, with Xiulan finally conceiving. Note that Fleurrie is at least ten years older than Edda and has been married longer than her.

Now that Xiulan is pregnant I figured it was only a matter of time before Edda followed suit, so Xiulan and Edda could compete as to who had the better/more perfect/more scary and dangerous pregnancy.

Regardless of her reproductive and contraceptive history, and she must have been using IRON CLAD contraception until she and Amos decided to go for it considering just how much they fuck, she now either is or isn't pregnant, and has either announced her pregnancy to her small children without discussing it with her husband OR is sounding the kids out before making a case to her husband as to how they should totally have another baby to not take care of.

So here she is, wearing a LOT of bare skin generally and cleavage specifically around the home while her small (??) children are wearing buttoned up collared... shirts? Dresses? Jackets? They look about twelve and also... not at all human. I mean, I understand that exaggerating someone's facial features to indicate shock and surprise is a norm. It happens all the time. It's common. But that character should still look their age and also... well, I was going to say "recognizably them" but the the twins don't actually have recognizable faces and also most characters look identical other than hair. And these little girls don't look like little girls. Or that they're shocked and horrified, exactly. They look a little more like they got into some espresso powder.

Of course, Amos looks almost exactly like Moe Szyślak in the last panel there.

I'm just sitting here thinking about how this comic would be so much better if the first panel had been Edda interacting with the kids in a real way, not just standing in front of them. Like... her sitting on the couch while they played, or them sitting at a table drawing, or them eating a meal together, or them cuddled up on the couch watching tv together (perhaps the show "The Crown"). Instead you have Edda standing, sitting, or kneeling against a white void while her children could be nearly any height standing in front of her, all stiff and formal like there's a debriefing going on.

The third panel, with them standing stiffly horrified and her turning to look over her shoulder, is fine. But her line sounds like they both were in on the question. Like when you ask your kids if they're ready to leave for Disneyland that day and they're frozen with delight. Or when you ask your kids if they're ready to eat lentils and brussels sprouts for dinner every day for the rest of their lives. But Moe back there looks horrified.

Did she plan this? For them all to hear this at the same time? Did he retreat from her to hover behind a door/corner? Is he trying to hide the white tank-top with spaghetti straps that he's spilled pasta sauce on?

Ahhh, who can say.

At least she didn't wave a urine-soaked pregnancy test around on a stage in front of an audience of hundreds. One that she'd been carrying in her bra until that point.

Small mercies, I guess.