9chickweedlane | Entries tagged with commentary

Just Stuff:
I forgot Edda isn't Catholic which is odd given her Irish-American forbears. ~~Her Lutheran grandmother would have been expected to convert to Catholicism if they were married in the Church.~~ Gran's a German Catholic, apparently. Edda attends a Catholic school but that doesn't mean anything, it's super common for Catholic schools in the USA to have non-Catholic students, and her friend Mary Rosenzweig is Jewish.
Cardinal Feeny, Sister Steven's brother. Their family must have had a LOT of children if two of them took vows. Anyway, Cardinal Feeny's drawn with the correct garb here. He isn't always.

Set in New Hampshire when not in NY

First mention of "Monty" as God's name.

Sister Aramus aka Diane Fallon aka Diane Durly:

Sister Aramus Has A Past.

Sister Aramus Is Horny.
Amos has a crush on Sister Aramus. Because this is a "classics" with no clear year attached to it I'm not entirely sure if this is before Sr. Aramus meeting Fr. Durly or not.
Sister Aramus meets her future husband.

A step too far!!!

A Confession.

Sr Aramus/Diane goes looking for Edda and it's... never explained why? This will always remain weird to me.

If Diane entered the sisterhood when she turned 18, she would be at this point 32. Edda is at most 20. Why are they acting like best friends? It's weird.

Sister Aramus has a past (and it's gross to the virginal former priest that she's dating)

Character Details and Drift, Amos:
Amos' hair used to be less curly/scribbly and more... troll-doll-like? Generally unkempt. I prefer the curly hair. He also used to have a larger nose. Much larger.
Amos had a thing for a girl named Marsha Armand. Edda went on a tear insulting her intelligence in a previous strip.
Stuff used to get tangled in Amos' hair, including "The Big Book of Dutch Humor," which later comes up in the Brussels story line.
Amos' parents are shit.
Amos is twelve here and still believes in Santa Claus.
I'm going to be honest, I don't get the punchline. I feel like it's incredibly obvious and I'm just overlooking it, but maybe not? Like is it implied that different sects of Christianity are different brands and his version of Christianity is generic? Anyway, they could just say "Happy Holidays."
This is a "classics" strip so I'm not sure of the year, but Amos had a crush on Sister Aramus.
Amos used to have a lot of math, physics, science, et interests. He used to be much more multifaceted.
Amos used to be a more general nerd/"genius" interested in physics and atomic theory, not just music and big words
"Taking Over The World" was a recurring theme
He used to be even more off-putting, and was also constantly pursuing Mary
Again, science/math geekery that's been lost over time
Amos used to be kind of an asshole, and also stood up to Edda
He really did call her out on her bullshit several times, including earlier in this story where he dumps her
Sometimes Amos is allowed to find other people attractive.
Sometimes I forget that Amos plays piano. Here's some other stuff (not sex) he's great at.
Amos hates squishy sounds, which includes ear stuff. There's times he's repulsed by it. Also sometimes mouth kissing is too noisy and gross for him and I really have to wonder just how sloppily someone has to kiss for it to be offensively noisy.

Character Details and Drift, Edda:

At one point Edda wanted to be a journalist and was a skilled writer.

Edda's a troublemaker who breaks rules and how, but is also a super genius. Yeah, total Mary Sue, but who cares. Fun.

Pianist, writer, and ice skater - dancer isn't mentioned. It's so interesting how a character's focus changes over time.

Edda's very smart and educated and that means she's too good for guys who go after stupid girls, who are easy. Edda's at a prestigious college prep school. If she's not surrounded by other high achievers who are at the very least NEAR, if not AT, her level then why is her mother wasting her money on that school? You can't have the school be both an exemplary place of learning and full of barely literate fools who can't complete full sentences or complete basic addition exercises.
Edda used to Start Shit on the regular. Prank people, too.

Edda just... got kind of bland.

Edda used to draw comics, including featuring her alter-ego "Superlative Girl" (who I've forgotten to list). This hasn't come up VERY often but it's absolutely part of her being a polymath.

Edda is a sassy bitch and it's fantastic.

Every man Edda's dated other than Amos has tried to sexually assault her and needed to be physically attacked and injured to make them stop.

Edda plays/played the viola?

She used to do tap (and modern dance), not just ballet

"I know this means I won't be going to college for a while..." she stopped dancing professionally years ago, there has been no mention of college (or further musical study).

She usually wears contacts, but sometimes wears glasses.

Edda is terrible at keeping secrets

Edda is really dying for a polyamorous relationship. She's very comfortable kissing other people while married to Amos. She wouldn't permit Amos to be with other people than her, though.

Edda isn't Catholic but she's having a wedding Mass performed by someone who isn't a priest. ??? Of course this wound up not happening. At all.

Other than Amos, Edda is very attracted to beefcake. She's also quick to proposition that beefcake.

Edda doesn't actually like talking to Amos.

Character Details and Drift, Seth:

When "beefcake" was realistic and not creepily weirdly lumpen

Slightly self centered, cute hair, reasonable chin and jaw. No drifting: has always found Amos attractive/sexy.

Not just aggressively overtly CODED gay, Seth has already expressed attraction to Amos as well. Don't worry, he winds up marrying a woman.

First appearance of Mark, Seth's long time (and eventually live-in) boyfriend

The first realistic time someone talks about turning a gay guy not-gay.

Seth has always wanted children but we haven't heard anything about he and Fernanda having kids

Discussion of sexuality and morality aside, Seth's neck is now thicker than my thigh and I'm extremely fat with immense thighs so that's saying a lot.

Isabel is the first, but not the last, attractive woman to address Seth using overtly homophobic terms and promise to turn him straight. This is not to point out how absurd it is to think that gay men can be turned straight. No, it's to illustrate how utterly repellent they (the women) are. Although he DOES wind up marrying a hot, homophobic woman.

Gender aside, Seth very much has A Type and the hot homophobic woman he winds up marrying very much is not it.

Here we have both Informed Attributes and also A Noticeable Flaw That Usually Goes Unremarked.

"Seth falls in love with the ART, not the ARTIST" He'll go on to have an affair with Fernanda Jons, then ten years later marry her (without telling his live-in boyfriend, who she constantly insults).

Seth wants kids, he doesn't think Edda's genes are good enough. That's... both weirdly eugenicist and also contradicts him asking her to donate eggs which this directly contradicts.

Bisexuals! Don't exist!! In this strip!!! But love is measured by how often a lady is pregnant, I guess. (Which is part of why it's a little weird that Edda was only pregnant once.)

Seth is 13% straight because bisexuality doesn't exist in this world, if you're a man you're either gay or married to a pair of legs that you want to have kids with.

Mark:
Mark was Seth's super gay art gallery owning three piece suit wearing wild haired barbie loving boyfriend.

Mark was home schooled. This may not be true, it may be meant as an insult, but I'm taking it at face value.

Fernanda Jons:
Fernanda Jons is an exquisite dancer, is from Argentina, and is a homophobic bigot

Character Development and Drift, Juliette:

https://www.gocomics.com/9chickweedlane/1993/11/21>https://www.gocomics.com/9chickweedlane/1993/11/21Juliette's partial CV

Juliette has no friends so she discusses her sex life with her pre-teen daughter. She has a friend named Rosie she talks to very rarely on the phone, and she has people she more or less gets along with at work, but she doesn't have FRIENDS.

Juliette fucked in cars when she was younger.

"What you're doing is harming your daughter." "LOL fuck you."

Juliette fucked in high school.

Captain Blood! Juliette's long had a rich inner fantasy life but at one point it didn't involve her wearing an animal print loin cloth.

After her serious boyfriend Andy left her to move to Spokane to be with his young daughter Juliette started dating this guy. He's boring.

Enter Elliot.

Juliette's only friend, Rosie, exists only on the other end of a phone - unseen and unheard. They have a very antagonistic relationship, each bragging passive aggressively about their lives.

Juliette hates and loathes her students and wants them to fail, although we don't see that desire for failure here.

Juliette is what people HATE about tenured professors.

The biggest thing Juliette seems to get out of her friendship with Rose is an ego boost. She is never shown caring about Rose, reflecting on Rose, worrying about Rose, praising Rose. It's all about Juliette, and about Juliette feeling better about herself.

Seriously, she and Rosy don't seem to like each other. This isn't playful banter, this is two people sniping at eachother, trying to make eachother feel old. Or at least that's how Juliette takes it.

Character Development and Drift, Gran:

Gran's brother Harry. Gran went through a MASSIVE retcon at one point, a long WWII story line about her time as a double agent singing for German PoWs to get information. During that story line her almost-fiance Bill O'Malley (who she wound up marrying) goes MIA, presumed dead. She spends a lot of time worrying about him, naturally, and carries his dog tags around for a decade afterward, unable to let him go. Her brother is never mentioned. At all.

This is poignant in retrospect, knowing about the retroactive continuity that made Juliette the "lovechild" of an illicit dalliance between Edna and a Nazi Opera Singer.

Emotionally destroying your child used to be the height of comedy, you see.

Has Gran ever mentioned that she worked for the O.S.S. during WWII? Anyway, I do enjoy that McEldowney took a running gag and turned it into an actual story but I wish that actual story didn't involve Nazi Romance.

Of course her personality was completely different in her youth.

The sheer loathing and hatred that Gran and Bill had for eachother is distressing... doubly so when you consider what each lost, what each gave up. That context, added later, makes their relationship tragic. Without that context they're just shitty people who raised some fucked up kids.

Gran hated Jack, with good reason. She also pressured Juliette to stay with him.

Mention of Gran's brother again. McEldowney regularly takes the stance that people hate and despise veterans, especially those who died in service, and that it's some huge deviant act to remember them and mourn them when, in fact, it's part of our national bedrock. Anyway this is pretty schmaltzy too.

Character Development and Drift, Mary Rosenzweig:

Mary plays the flute.

Mary is in ballet class with Edda, although of course she doesn't get invited to join the city ballet corp at 17.

It doesn't really ever come up but Mary is Jewish. This is pretty common at Catholic schools if there isn't a Jewish community/Jewish school near by.

Edda and Amos Childhood Relationships:
We Must Never Marry
NYE Kiss #1
They alternate between being destined lovers of a great romance and... dating other people.
Edda states they can never have a romantic relationship, Amos believes otherwise.
Mary Rosenzwieg is introduced, Amos' longest-lasting obsession. There was also a girl named Marsha.
Wishing on a star (for Mary). I actually prefer it when an author doesn't set up an end romance between kids. No big destined fate love. Just two people who grow together.
Edda wonders if they'll ever meet other people and fall in love. This is really nice, actually. Good art, good poses, nice backgrounds, nice quip, and it's cool to see them so physically intimate in a way that isn't sexual/sensual. It grounds them as friends. Also I like Amos' hair.
"Falling In Love" means "horny."
Edda "necks" with unnamed boys who aren't Amos
Their designated pairing started earlier than I remember, here with the end of a story involving a flash forward.
20 years ago these two were already discussing procreating... with Amos still attempting to date Mary now and then but not, like, an exciting or dramatic way
More "father of my children" stuff. Edda has always felt more possessive of Amos than he has felt of her, and while willing to claim him has always kept her options open as to hotter dudes.
And again, the joke is that Amos loves Edda, who is hot stuff, but Amos is ehhhhh
But does it matter, when shortly after Amos is back to begging Mary for scraps of love?
Amos continues stalking Mary; a few strips ago Edda was on a date with a good-looking creep. But soulmates, right?

Edda and Amos Adult Relationships:

Amos begins a voyage of self discovery regarding his sexual proclivities of sub-hood.</>

Despite his attraction to other women over the years Amos declares himself neither heterosexual no homosexual but Eddasexual, and recites some bible verses normally beloved by lesbians plighting their troth.One could examine this for subtext regarding Amos, his sexuality, and his gender or one could surmise that McEldowney is lazy and didn't bother to look for context for that particular romantic Biblical quote.

lAmost immediately after Amos vows his entire sexuality orbits Edda she goes and tries to seduce her (mostly) gay room mate. Again. She's very upset when he rebuffs her (again) after telling her how hot she is. This leads to her having an erotic dream about Seth that turns into her and Amos having sex, Amos being surprisingly buff, her having sex with Seth and then having sex with Amos, or Edda fantasizing about Seth while she has sex with Amos. There are so many ways to read it and McEldowney apparently meant it to be confusing. Later it seems like she taunts Seth for both not being good in bed and also for never having the chance to have sex with Amos who is very good in bed.

Gross:

Gran used to be overtly, aggressively abusive as opposed to just cranky and unpleasant. Although it's a retcon, Juliette being fathered out of wedlock and "trapping" Edie in a marriage to Bill O'Malley adds a lot of layers to this. The layers are all gross and bad.
Although his own characters are hot, McEldowney absolutely DESPISES people who are attractive and assumes they are all uneducated/stupid which is the absolute worst thing anyone can be. Yes, this exists to show that Amos, with his intellect, is not desirable because he's not hot enough (yet). But it's an ongoing theme. McEldowney, usually through Edda, grabs every chance he can to insult attractive people (usually women). Also: people who play or enjoy sports.

I cannot imagine carefully observing my parent(s) sexual activity and imagining myself imitating it.

Minors discussing their loins and potential fruit isn't a new subject

Edda fawned over her mom's sexiness (and lingerie choices), just as her daughters fawn over her

It's really not uncommon for McEldowney to put homophobic slurs in the mouths of his characters.

Yes, this is an excuse to show off her legs, but Seth is constantly calling Edda fat and we're meant to see it as a funny punchline.

Even the flies fuck under the mistletoe.

Any man who doesn't immediately throw himself at a woman who is wearing sexy clothing and "ravish" her obviously has something wrong with him (except not really because unless they're Evil Villains all of McEldowney's male characters are Perfect Gentlemen Nice Guys.) Also he has men jerk off while thinking of his female characters pretty often.

Well, what would YOU do if you had a very long strand of drool attaching your mouth to your loved one's mouth?

Xiulan's father grabbed and attempted to crush Hugh's genitals upon meeting him, as one does. Hugh responds by... getting a boner?

One of the most cursed things I've ever seen (two feet with their toes entwined in coital ecstasy)

Cheongsam are routinely sexualized and fetishized, especially when Asian women are depicted wearing them. McEldowney loves dressing his characters in Cheongsam so short and tight they might as well be painted on, barely covering their genitals. Calling one "cheongasm" is pretty gross considering that history, and his own fetishes. In the very next strip he has Seth talk about "hookers" who are "short on crazy money" and reveals that Edda wants everyone to go sans-underpants. Just to really drive home the cheongsam/sex relationship, you know?

Edda and Amos both kiss like dogs.

Music to Fuck To:

Juliette uses (her daughter) Edda's piano playing as background music to get her in a sexy mood as she makes out with Elliot

Juliette assumes that her minor daughter is essentially fucking the minor she's playing music with because music is just that sexy. This is a normal consideration to have.

Juliette and Elliot become overwhelmed with horniness while listening to her daughter and daughter's childhood best friend playing music, while sitting on the couch next to Juliette's mother.

Table Fucking:

He laid the groundwork at least as far back as 2002.

Just lunged right over the table at him right there in public

They aren't outright fucking, and they aren't on a table, but hot and steamy makeouts on the large wooden desk of your childhood principal while she's sitting right there has to count for SOMETHING, right?

Diner Fucking

Thighs heavily airbrushed and parted, ass very flat and pointed directly at the viewer.

Edda has clambered onto the table to rub her crotch against the edge of it. You know. Normal stuff.

I'm not SAYING that this is proof that diner fucking is A Thing, but I am posting this link here.

Piano (and other instrument) Fucking:

Edda announced her plan to fuck on stage at a young age, apparently.

Sorry, you have to rub your genitals on your piano before you can play Rachmaninoff, says no one ever.

What do you get when two people who hate each other are forced to play together? They end up getting married, of course.

A duet: just like sex

He's hammering on that piano just like he wants to hammer her. She's sucking a finger, rubbing her thighs together, and is nearly cupping her boob. This is in newspapers.

I do not know how much more explicit this could be.

It looks like she's just grabbed for his dick or something as he's trying to play piano.

The start of a piano fucking theme."

Boner Comics:

Sven has a boner.

Amos has a boner.

Young Bill O'Malley has a boner.

Young Bill O'Malley has a boner (not a luger).

Amos has a boner.

Hugh has a big shower boner and big boners mean good sex on a wedding night between two virgins.

Hugh has a boner and it's bulging.

Hugh and also the waiter have boners.

Hugh, the waiter, and Amos have boners.

Amos has a boner and the only solution is making out in the audience at a concert that he was supposed to perform in but dropped out of at the last minute so someone else could take his place because True Love

Hugh's dad jokes about Hugh's boners

Amos has a boner from talking about changing one's surname after getting married.

Amos has a boner due to politics.

Lingerie Obsession:

Edda, a 12 year old, has dragged her 12 year old male friend into the lingerie section so she can describe the silk negligee she is going to buy her mother. What. The fuck.

I have never done this with my mom's underthings and none of my female friends who I've asked have, either. It feels deeply weird and intrusive if not downright creepy.

She's basically wearing an animal print underwire with no bra cups I guess.

Amos isn't the only male character who wears high heels, but he wears them most often.

Antediluvian reprobates

As women, we naturally discuss our lingerie choices while at work. Also: other women being confident directly challenges you and might be your downfall.

The most important question one professional woman can ask another: what kind of underpants do you wear?

The only way women can be successful: by wearing sexy undergarments, and a lot of them.

A leather bodysuit under a business suit? Sure. Why not.

Edda buys lingerie for her mother to seduce her husband in. The lingerie needs a lot of describing. It also terrifies the husband, which he finds erotic.

How exhausting it must be to only ever receive the fashion advice of "wear animal print lingerie" from your mother. Anyway, this exists to set up an entire week where Edda describes her panty choices for different composers, culminating in no panties at all. On stage. She changed her sexy panties multiple times during the same recital, making sure to tell her boyfriend about each panty change, including her final no-panty performance.

Is this... meta-commentary?

I'm guessing this is a "Doonesbury" reference? "Doonesbury" was a daily political cartoon so, yes, it makes sense that's what the cast would be? I haven't seen a collection with footnotes, though. I'd love that.

Too Much Fucking

Newspaper comics are too explicit!

Comics don't have enough good old fashioned humor!

The only two jobs McEldowney can think up here is "artist" and "person who works in an office while wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase"

We got this letter about there being too much sex in comics.

There is absolutely, positively, no editor involved in this strip.

The Whole Abortion Thing:

Having to make the decision between giving birth, having an abortion, or giving an infant up for adoption can be very difficult! But this is the first shot over the "abortion is bad and evil and bad" bow.

"You wouldn't dare!" a man she's not in a relationship with dictates what she should do with her body.

I mean, it's possible to have a baby later, so... she absolutely could have her very own baby. Maybe one she gets to decorate the nursery for herself.

A Wild Straw Feminist has appeared! In her defense, if you've come to help someone make a decision about an unplanned pregnancy that VERY OFTEN means the person making the decision wants to have an abortion but is being pressured not to, either directly or indirectly. Otherwise the big struggle is over the financial costs, the social stigma, etc.

Gran DID have a choice, actually. She was an otherwise respectable young woman who could have gone to her doctor and had him perform an abortion. It happened all the time. My grandmother was advised to abort my mother for health reasons (she had hyperemesis gravidarum, her last viable pregnancy had been high risk and nearly a decade previously, and she'd had multiple late term miscarriages since then) but declined. Gran chose to have her baby and it resulted in rushing into a marriage that eventually became abusive and hateful. Anyway, if Gran had been not white or was of a lower social class that option of an abortion performed by a medical provider would have been less likely, but back alley abortions have existed hand in hand with illegal abortion since forever.

Don't worry, the abortion-pushing Straw Feminist shows up again to tell Amos that his love is doomed. What a buzz-kill.

Fetishes, Various Types:

Edda sexualizes her mother so often. It's really deeply gross.

Is McEldowney aware that diving boards have a rough, gritty texture and aren't pleasant to lie on? Because he has his women (and girls) reclining on them frequently, sometimes having over, the edge of the board pressing into their guts, making out with men. Sometimes the men are gripping the tip of the diving board and pulling it downward. It's stressful.

And here Edda once again praises her mom's hotness. But also Juliette isn't "zaftig," which means curvy and is often used to mean "plump" or "chubby" (but sexy).

Juliette praises her minor daughter's legs. I should pull all the legs examples out and make their own section.

Is this the first tango strip? He's aggressively a tango fan.

The start of the Knee Thing (go back a few days and her knees nearly un-gay Mark)

98lb weakling can support full weight of grown woman wrapped around his shoulders/neck

Mentioning The Leg Thing is like mentioning water to a fish. It's just everywhere. But this dude has airbrushed the shine on her tights while it's still (allegedly) a rough sketch. He focuses on that before deciding on arm placement.

Big Words

McEldowney is so committed to the thigh slit that goes up to the abdomen that he even includes it on t-shirts Edda got from Amos that she sleeps in

They used to CONSTANTLY go to tango salons. CONSTANTLY.

Making out/having sex in a concert hall/theater auditorium, amongst the audience

While they're not ACTUALLY having sex on stage it LOOKS to the audience like they're having sex as Amos squirms around on top of Edda, her legs splayed.

McEldowney's whole THING is being an artsy fartsy comic strip guy who loooooooooves words but this is, like, the ONLY sexy poem he ever quotes. He fetishizes language without loving language.

First of all, nobody uses the term "bimboid." Second of all, McEldowney HATES any attractive women that aren't one of his sexy yet somehow virginal leg babes who fuck on diner tables while still being pure and unsullied.

McEldowney was born in 1952. Every one of these actresses peaked before he was born or when he was a very small child. When "9 Chickweed Lane" debuted, Edda and Amos would have been born in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Since time moved very slowly in-strip, if you look at their ages now they would have been born in the 1990s. For some reason McEldowney has young characters be obsessed with film stars from their grandparents' time... or great-grandparents, frankly, based on the ages they are depicted as being now. Edda and Amos and their sere elite private school experience aren't the only ones with this affectation, either. All of his young characters are like this. All of them. ALL OF THEM. It's more than just McEldowney being a fan. It's a weird obsession... as is his obsessive revisiting of WWII. He's had 3 different story lines about a war that ended before he was born.

This is LITERALLY nothing but Edda crossing and uncrossing her legs (and showing off her crotch to the audience). Absolutely nothing else is going on. Why. WHY.

He does this thing where a man and a woman are together being sexy and the man keeps picking up the phone to have a conversation while still being sexy and it's... he has a whole conversation on the phone while the person on the other end of the phone snarks about the sex noises until the woman in the pairing destroys the phone. Like there HAS to be a witness to the fucking?

Speaking of witnesses, here's a different couple in a different building being spied upon by people in another building as they have sex.

Edda and Amos: Two Subs In Search Of A Dom(me) (especially Amos).

They start figuring it out pretty quickly. This explains a lot about their later relationship, actually.

Edda and Amos make out wildly in front of the congregation at their wedding ceremony before the ceremony even begins.

This is the second time McEldowney has depicted people fucking on top of a grave.

There is no background so it's hard to tell but they are in a church in front of an altar and a priest and all of their wedding guests. The back of her dress is green because they interrupted the ceremony to run outside, have a heart to heart talk, and then fuck on top of a grave. A very large audience is being forced by good manners to watch this.

Their formal, official, paid-for wedding portraits are post-coital and McEldowney made sure we all know that Amos didn't use a condom.

Why are they walking through a playground in evening wear? Although he's done a bit with seesaws/teeter totters McEldowney has a real thing for swing sets.

Oh look, people in other high rises can see them when they fuck. Ginger (the CEO fondling her subordinate Gerald) is involved in later "subordinates being required to enter into a relationship with someone as part of their employment" stuff. Ginger's boss/the company owner goes on to leave Gerald reliant on his boss and lover for housing.

People being sexual on a pier leading to a small private pond? Sure, whatever. Fine. People being sexual on the gritty, raspy surface of a very flexible diving board in a public pool? Uh...

That Mouth Thing (you know, with all the teeth):

One-way privacy mirror

Stage Moms

Negotiations

Reaction to Fernanda Jons

Getting Dumped (Approximately) (I like how she's holding onto the gutter, actually.)

Now I'm creeped out

McEldowney is in the wrong business and should instead make a career drawing monsters. Sexy monsters are fine.

The truth about my sexual being

She looks like she inhaled Joker Gas... and found she liked it.

That Mouth Thing, With Bonus That Tongue Thing

Thorax is an alien (or was, when originally written) so you might think "Ah! He's got an alien mouth! He isn't human!!" but if that's the reason his mouth is terrifying then Juliette and Edda are also aliens.

How do you like your smile?

Encouraging Nod

Another big mouth lotta teeth grotesque tongue thing. McEldowney's constant objectification of men via women is really gross and disturbing, frankly.

Edda and Amos, A Formal Photo Portrait

That tongue thing (covered in food) and that mouth thing (with all the teeth).

Bales of Straw, Everywhere:

Political correctness is... inhuman somehow?

Oh no! Safety gear!<'a>

McEldowney is terrified you can't wish someone a Happy Thanksgiving any more. This is probably referencing something topical but if it is, it isn't showing up in a quick search via google.

You can't tell jokes because people find everything offensive

It's 2009 and McEldowney managed to find a way to whine about political correctness (the military still uses sexy young women as entertainment for troops bc they're sexy young women, btw)

A Wild Straw Feminist has appeared! Abortion-flavored

McEldowney has a hard time thinking of jokes that aren't harmful to people who aren't him.

Something something women changing their name after marriage something.

Flashback! Edda and Amos as small children who want to have babies:
In late 2022 McEldowney started heavily featuring flashback comic strips to when Edda and Amos were younger, ranging in from from six (or younger?) to early teen years, where they just... talk about having a baby/babies. Sometimes "Yeah, let's have kids when we're older" and other times "Let us now shake hands upon our agreement to conceive and bear X number of children of these genders." And asking Juliette to describe an orgasm. As I was going through the archives I was surprised at how long ago he started doing this.

Young teen Edda finds Amos tormenting their teacher and principal alluring and worthy of childbearing.

The Bad Woman:

Edda is shown regularly attacking the piano, but whatever.

It's hard to tell if this is character drift or hypocrisy, but here Edda implies that Isabel's piano playing was too sexual. Edda regularly looks like she orgasms as she's playing piano. Edda drifts between being a wholesome girl-next-door prude and being someone who fucks on table tops in diners and is fine with having her toes licked in public.

Diane... DATED (gasp) before joining a religious order, leaving it, then dating another guy

Again, Edda regularly orgasms while playing the piano and/or fucks while playing the piano, but when Isabel does it she's Bad and Wrong.

Regionalism, I guess:

"Belly Whopper"?

Not belly flops?

"on detention" instead of "in detention"

Apartment house?

"Wongbonga"

Popcorn dud? Kernel? Husk?

Queering the Strip:
McEldowney is deeply homophobic although I'm sure he thinks of himself as even handed and not a bigot, and he apparently doesn't know that bisexuality/pansexuality/etc exist. He plays with gender in interesting ways sometimes, though. Men wear high heels, or panty hose, or dance with each other, and it doesn't quite feel like THEY are the punchline. The fact that it's unexpected is the punchline. It doesn't feel cruel. This predominantly concerns Amos, but sometimes Thorax. I might go through and do a post about this, specifically.