9 Chickweed Lane

No, the first panel doesn't say "ovulation." I can see why you might think that, as it's a dark haired woman standing on a stage holding a stringed instrument and the last time we saw that a dark haired woman holding a stringed instrument waved around a urine-soaked pregnancy test and then had a long conversation with her husband about her being pregnant.

As David Willis pointed out on twitter she looks basically interchangeable with multiple other dark haired women, all of whom are paired with men who look distinct which is how we can tell them apart most easily.

This man is not recognizable. The only gray-haired male characters McEldowney has are Elliot (Juliet's husband) and Arthur Peel (oh GOD please don't ask).

It's possible she's Isabel Florin, I suppose, but Isabel Florin has curly hair, like so:


Also, Isabel plays piano. It's possible the gray-haired man is her long time accompanist who plays the viola she's holding. They've been in a relationship for quite a while. But we've never seen him with gray hair, and Isabel's hair isn't curly.

So... who are these people?

Are they new characters? Random characters? Incredibly minor characters dredged up from nowhere? Did he get tired of the rotating cast fucking and brought in new blood?

I guess it's possible this is Edda's childhood/high school friend Mary Rosenzweig, who Amos used to stalk. I don't remember if she was a violist though. Reintroducing her, having her actually interact with Edda and Amos, might be interesting. But the last time she visited Edda she didn't really do anything except talk about trying to become a ballet dancer as an adult in one strip which was a bad horrible thing for her to do because ballet blah blah blah the arts blah blah blah blah. The entire short story mostly involved Edda worrying Amos would cheat on her and Amos reassuring her that she was the sexiest person in the entire world.

I'm hoping this story doesn't last another full week, unless it explores who these two people are.