Community Profile

What even IS 9 Chickweed Lane?

It's a comic strip that started out following the adventures of young divorced professor Juliet, her pre-teen daughter Edda, and her mentally and verbally abusive mother Gran/Edie. Over the course of the strip Juliet and Edda bought each other bikinis and lingerie, especially animal-print body suits. Edda slowly matured through high school, developing a romantic relationship with her utterly revolting nerd-stereotype friend Amos. They both are such amazing excellent prodigies (her in ballet (although she also plays piano well enough to accompany professional musicians on stage at performances people pay for?), he in music (cello)) that they are headhunted by a ballet corp and Julliard respectively and graduate high school a year early. They break up and move to New York to develop their educations and careers.

Eventually Edda and Amos get back together and fuck on top of a grand piano while being filmed by drones and broadcast worldwide. Edda's mother and grandmother watch, of course.

Also Gran once dated a Nazi? Like a literal Nazi? From Austria which makes him a not-Nazi somehow but he was an officer and when he agreed to give Gran (then a first generation Austrian-American named Edie who was super hot and looked just like Edda and had hair that was either brown or blonde at different times) information about Nazi movement and tactics he only gave her information that sounded good but wouldn't actually harm the Nazis. Anyway, he and Edie fucked, conceived Juliet, ridiculous contrived complications ensued and Edie wound up marrying her previous flame, American veteran Bill O'Malley. Edie and Bill essentially resented each other throughout their entire marriage and frankly I'm glad I didn't grow up in that like Juliet and her brother did.

Amos is a world famous cellist who apparently supports their family on the income of being a world famous cellist alone. Or maybe Edda has money set aside from being a world famous super model and ballet dancer? They live... somewhere. Possibly New York? Probably in New England. Edda doesn't seem to have a job and when offered one at her former school she freaked out at the idea. She and Amos have twin daughters who are rarely seen and when they are, they... are, shall we say, very poorly written.

The comic essentially turned into a hot mess of weirdly drawn people fucking in public while using absolutely enormous words and convoluted sentences. McEldowney regularly abuses ellipses, something that possibly bothers me more than the "smart" (and often misused) vocabulary. He has A Thing for legs and for WWII and once kicked off a June (Pride Month) story line with a firmly established gay character falling in love with a woman, having a LOT of sex with her, then getting married. His boyfriend, with whom he was living at the time and had been dating for a decade or so, found out about all of this pretty late in the game and was depicted as a selfish jerk for objecting.

I mean.

I could go on.

McEldowney spent an entire week with Amos licking Edda's feet... in public. While a police officer watched. A week! A full week. This comic is syndicated and runs in newspapers.

Or it did. He used a racial slur ("but it's historically accurate!") and some newspapers dropped him.

I just really...

I could go on.

This comic strip inspires pretty strong emotion in people.

It also has the ability to be good which is what inspires me, specifically, to comment on it. Every time he draws backgrounds or interesting poses or people doing something other than fucking I perk up waiting for more. And then my hopes are dashed, often in utterly bizarre ways. Like time travel that ages their twin daughters into sexy adults who call Edda super sexy (while wearing her slinky gowns?) then point out that she has big feet.