9 Chickweed Lane

1-21-2023

"Da Capo" means "repeat this bit" or "start again," often "start again from the beginning."

"Porte-jarretelles" is a garter belt.

"Start over, wearing a garter belt.

This, again, isn't surreal.

At all.

Even if these were two average random musicians it wouldn't be surreal.

It's literally an excuse to show a woman in a negligee of a formal gown with a garter belt on her exposed thigh. She might as well be in lingerie. Amos, of course, isn't wearing a garter belt. He's not wearing short-shorts with his sexy gams on display. Both of them with exposed, be-gartered legs would at least be INTERESTING and a break from the norm (of predominantly seeing exposed lady-legs).

And once more this isn't surreal because they do this constantly it's their daily behavior all they do is hump on pianos.

I appreciate that McEldowney has been playing with more expressive poses and body language. That flourish with her arm in the first panel? They both look more animated than they have in a while. That said, both her butt and her chest are not drawn great. Her sit-upon in the first panel looks like someone crafted her bum out of a ball of clay and gave up smoothing it out halfway through. It's just a round lump. And her chest? McEldowney's been drawing her boobs a lot more often lately but he doesn't draw them well. He's got like... one good boob and one boob melting off to the side.

I just... really want a return to non-public-fucking story lines and character inter-actions. He has SO MANY characters who, in theory, are doing interesting things. A ballet dancer! Who has wanted children for decades! His former professional ballet star wife who's been injured badly enough she can no longer dance professionally and now teaches! A famous prodigy pianist who's a huge self-absorbed asshole and is about to be a dad! A famous super-wealthy Chinese cello player from Hong Kong who's about to give birth! A country vet wants to have a child with her massive poet-scholar husband! A former nun and her former priest husband have 10 or so children are about due to have another one! Gosh a lot of this strip centers around women getting pregnant/wanting to get pregnant/having kids they barely interact with (in some cases not even remembering their names)!

I want so much to see Edda and Amos actively parenting in the way that human beings actively parent. I want to see their kids interact with other kids and I want to see them interacting with other parents. There is so much low hanging fruit! It's so low hanging that it's on the ground! You can't walk without tripping over it! And yet! AND YET.

Gosh, this went long.

Anyway, the ultimate punchline to this week was "Edda was wearing a sexy garter belt this entire time, surprise!"

1-19-2023

And, I mean, unless I'm missing something here the "joke" is that they're dressed in formal clothing playing classical music and pausing to make out open-mouthed.

It's boring to just repeat the same thing every day but... they do this all the time. This is their daily life. How is this surreal when it's what they do constantly? Are they themselves surreal? Is McEldowney realizing the absurdity of their days, their careers, the voids in which they live? Is this some sort of fourth wall breaking meta-commentary?

Or does he just like drawing them fucking at concerts?

1-17-2023

Plangent can mean "sorrowful" or it can mean "loud" and in this case it means "loud," as in "smash all the keys on the piano at once." "Loud enough to startle Amos into launching his bow across the room." Which is louder, her keyboard banging or her yodeling there?

Because I'm a dork I keep wondering if this is a flashback to her and Amos being younger (but still adults), if this is present time but she's grown her hair out, or if McEldowney has stopped keeping track of silly trifles like that.

1-15-2023

1) I really deeply hate the way that McEldowney's been drawing Amos' face from the front. He doesn't look like Amos, he doesn't even look human. Even considering stylistic choices, it's not great. He's been drawing the women with identical faces, but at least they're faces. The men? Eh.

2) It's been cool seeing Amos play the piano more but it also feels almost like a betrayal of his first love, his cello.

3) Her ass on the piano keyboard absolutely is "their song." I much prefer this to The Hokey-Pokey, thank you very much.

12-17-2022

The whole kiss-under-the-mistletoe thing is a tradition involving both romance and fertility, it's a kiss exchanged between couples that's a prelude to or a promise of sex and everything that entails.

Edda and Amos kicked off the most recent mistletoe story with a swingset while being watched by their young children. We end it with Amos cringing as he plays piano, Edda having mounted it and prepared, perhaps, to spring upon him.

One thing is very clear, though: They are going to fuck on the piano.

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.



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.

9 Chickweed Lane for 11-16-2022

McEldowney colors his own staff and has been for a long time, which means he chose to make Edda's dress a putty-ish flesh color. That's a stylistic choice that he made.

The married pair are, of course, making out at the piano. Amos doesn't normally play piano, he's pretty cello monogamous. This is a defining trait of his. Therefore, the main reason he'd be sitting on the piano bench would be sexual in nature. These two find pianos erotic. Highly erotic. Incredibly erotic. I do not ever want to take a black light to McEldowney's personal piano (he is a professional pianist... or was, he may have retired).

The anatomy isn't terrible here? Edda's got her usual Long Arms but Amos leaning toward her is very believable except for the hand cupping her butt. He's supporting his entire weight on the back of his wrist doing that, unless Edda is holding him up. She also has an actual butt in this strip which is rare.

I guess we're in for a week of un-themed one-off gags as opposed to 5 or 6 days about hot coffee or piano fuckin' or whatever. So just a week of strips that fling us around willy nilly, always coming back to fuckin'.