Sex and Violence

[brigid]

9 Chickweed Lane for 11-20-2022

GoComics is still down so I've pulled this from ArcaMax.

McEldowney has a long history of Edda attacking the piano violently, sometimes orgastically and sometimes just... angrily. She's a passionate woman and that passion is equally split between violence and fucking. Either way I imagine she goes through pianos about as fast as she went through toe shoes when she was a professional ballet dancer. Pianos are slightly more expensive though, I think.

If GoComics was up I'd do a trawl through the archives and show some other examples of her getting sexy and/or furious with a piano. I don't think we've ever seen Xiulan humping a cello and for that I am grateful.

Several years ago McEldowney had a week or more series demonstrating different composers and how Edda approached their music. I'm familiar enough with classical music to get the jokes but wonder if they'd fly over the heads of other readers. But that's the sort of thing that doesn't really matter... McEldowney's audience, the one he writes for (at least in theory), are people familiar with classical music and with ballet. I'm familiar with classical music. I listen to the classical station on the radio (who listens to the RADIO for crying out loud?). When I was a kid and PBS aired the entirety of the Ring Cycle I stayed up late to watch it. I played in an orchestra in grade school and high school before dropping out of it because I sucked so bad. I make a lot of references other people don't get, like to PDQ Bach/Professor Peter Schickle.

Watch on YouTube

I am McEldowney's audience.

It's great to have an audience in mind and to write specifically to that audience instead of trying to capture the attention of a very wide range of people. That way likes bland mediocrity. You can't be all things to all people, and that's why so many comic strips and sitcoms and so much other stuff is just kind of there, not really connecting with an invested audience. It's just something to pass the time.

So showing a young pianist having different approaches to different composers, having different emotional reactions, being invested in different ways... that's fantastic. That's what this comic should be. Instead we wind up with her having orgasms while playing, and nobody ever mentions Béla Bartók.

It feels like his intended audience has shifted from "I make comic strips for over educated classy nerds" to "I make comic strips for over educated classy nerds... who want to see people fucking in public" which is a VERY specific audience, I must say.