9 Chickweed Lane

1-26-2023

Yeah, I still don't know why Edda thinks the girls need to be scolded about this and I also don't know why she wants Amos to do so if she's the one with the issue.

Nice to see them interacting as a family, though.

12-23-2022

It's the day before Christmas Eve and we finally see Lolly and Polly! The two adorable scamps are dressed in matching green dresses, because their parents have decided to lean HARD into the creepy twin thing and not permit them to have distinct personalities, and Amos is there in the same sweater he's been wearing all week. So presumably he's been hanging out chatting with the talking cat who wrote a novel, and also his breath I guess still smells like a shit-smeared anus.

Edda, a former professional dancer and model who apparently supports herself and her family now by playing piano in concerts and sometimes... working as a temp floating from place to place to play piano?... and who turned down a job offer to teach a music class at a prestigious private school, doesn't attend conferences. So why would she claim to "be at a conference"? It's a poor setup for the punchline.

And the punchline is, apparently, Edda at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in some warm and sunny place with green grass and a blue sky? This is very obviously not NYC in December. Yet there she is doing that weird peppy march that dog handlers do when Showing their dogs, and there's Daphne (the white dog) being put through her paces.

Daphne, like Solange (the Siamese cat) and a few other cats (like the black cat that speaks English and wrote a novel) shows up a few times here and there but it's unclear who she belongs to. When she's depicted it's usually in a nature setting, like the open green spaces that Juliette lives in.

That's a bit of a digression, though. The main issue here, seriously, is that it's December and she's cavorting in a place with green grass and blue skies. There's a blizzard coating most of the USA right now and she's out and about prancing in the sunlight.

Merry Almost Christmas!

3-16-2012

McEldowney had his first "Edda Might Be Pregnant" strip in 2012.

She and Amos weren't married, and she was working as both a ballet dancer and a model, two incredibly physically strenuous professions that require being slender. As it turned out, she wasn't pregnant and might actually have fertility issues. Although a pregnancy was completely unplanned, and at a terrible time in her life, she was still deeply affected by not being pregnant. It was a mournful time for her.


5-21-2022

And knowing that it might actually be an issue?


5-24-2012

Personally, I'd prefer if this exchange hadn't occurred during them fucking - especially as several previous strips had been very sweet. But it raises the specter of infertility between a young couple who apparently have everything else going for them.

They eventually marry, enjoy not having children for a while, then plan to have their first baby.

Xiulan and Hugh decide to have a child at the same time, although they don't wind up conceiving until after Edda and Amos' kids turn... two? Six? Some indeterminate age. That doesn't stop McEldowney from making "men are tired from too much fucking" jokes though. ("jokes") (Xiulan and Hugh may or may not have stopped trying to conceive at some point?)


7-24-2019


3-26-2019

It doesn't happen right away, which is pretty normal! But it keeps not happening despite them actively trying including charting ovulation. I do want to point out that most people can't just tell when they're ovulating - some people can feel the egg bursting free but that isn't super pleasant. Usually you tell by a variety of methods including charting your cervical mucus and/or using urine test strips. You don't just suddenly... know. Life would be so much easier if that were the case.

Also the rest of this week involves security guards watching them fuck in an elevator. Let me clarify this: they start fucking in an elevator at which security guards monitoring the elevator via security camera stop the elevator between floors, trapping them in the elevator. Two security guards literally make popcorn and watch them fucking. When their supervisor walks past she joins the security guards in watching two people, who they've trapped in an elevator, fucking.


7-26-2019

I don't know why she'd need to tell him "right after the recital" unless she didn't want to bum him out before the recital. Maybe her period JUST started? Either way this is an incredibly difficult thing to deal with and speaking as someone who's grappled with infertility... it really can be hard to bear up under the repeated disappointment. Every month there's the potential, the possibility, the chance to fall in love with something that might not happen. McEldowney doesn't get into it (thankfully) but apparently she's just not getting pregnant as opposed to having miscarriages.

They both go to their respective doctors and get deemed super fertile. Which isn't how it works and is a really abrupt resolution to what had the potential to be an interesting and touching story line - which frankly is a hallmark of this strip. Any time there's some sort of actual conflict or chance to develop a character McEldowney veers quickly to the side to get his characters back to fucking in a tub or on top of a diner table or on a city sidewalk or something.

She gets pregnant literally immediately afterward. There's no more upset or concern or stress. We, the audience, don't even get to see her and Amos realize it and celebrate. She's just suddenly puking and then at the doctor's office. NB: in Chicago unless you're very high risk doctors won't see you until you're at least 8 weeks along. At least that's how it was with my pregnancies.

It is, of course, twins and they are the most dramatic form of twins possible: Monoamniotic twins. McEldowney spins this as not only dangerous to the twins but somehow dangerous to Edda and at one point she responds to her gravid belly that she won't let anything happen to them, she won't make THAT choice. The implication is that someone at some point mentioned a selective or complete abortion and by golly she just won't do it! It comes out of nowhere, there's no lead up to it, and is from the same guy who has Straw Feminist Abortion-Pushers.

Edda actually being pregnant involves multiple weeks of Amos penning letters to his unborn child/ren about how sexy Edda is as well as a lot of flashbacks to them being small children and talking about having babies/conceiving babies.

Edda, of course, goes on bed rest in the hospital and has a C-Section which is MAJOR abdominal surgery. They literally remove multiple organs before replacing them. A few days later she's in her ballet togs in the NICU dancing.


11-19-2022

Lately McEldowney has been dragging on a months-long tease involving flashbacks to Young Edda And Young Amos Discussing Conceiving Children so we might find out that she's pregnant again in a year or two real-time despite their discussing Amos getting a vasectomy.

Edda becoming pregnant was A Very Big Deal.

There was a lot of lead up to it, and McEldowney obviously started thinking about it back in 2012. Having kids is a big thing for both Edda and Amos. But their journey to conception was entirely about mad fuckin', no actual details about charting ovulation or altering diet or switching up what kind of underpants Amos should wear.

Once she got pregnant there was no actual discussion of parenting or decorating a nursery (or co-sleeping, which is part of parenting). There was no baby shower, none of their friends made a fuss over her. Seth visited her in the hospital and told her how sexy her legs were. That's about it.

Once the infants were born there was absolutely no exploration at all of what it's like having premature twins in the NICU: having such small, fragile babies; having to leave them there and go home without them. We haven't seen Edda or Amos interact very much with their children. They don't read to them or play music with/to them or play with toys with them. Edda and Amos spend a lot of time at the pond at Edda's mom's place, at various swimming pools, and at the beach, as well as at a playground with swings. Their daughters are rarely shown with them. They're like terribly-drawn accessories.

They don't have any parent friends. Their kids don't interact with other kids. Edda doesn't have siblings, but she has cousins. Are any of them grown? Do they have kids that her daughters play with? What about Diane's kids? What about school? Are the girls in school? Or in day care? Or in any sort of classes? Do they have friends of her own? They exist fleetingly to talk about their mom's tits, or how much hotter she is than other adult women they know, or to comment on the sex lives of those around them. They're like a Greek chorus but really pervy and also intensely creepy and wrong-feeling because they're kids somewhere between the ages of four and eight.

Edda's body has changed drastically since her ballet and modeling days, too. Aging does that, no longer being a professional dancer does that, and pregnancy really does that. Being pregnant absolutely fucks you up: it can leave you with a broader rib cage and larger feet. It fucks up your abdominal muscles, as well as your pelvic floor. It can jack up your back. Your body never really goes back to the way it was pre-pregnancy. And this would be SO interesting to see! How does Edda feel about this? What does she do to cope? We see her dancing, still. We've seen her passed out on the floor after dancing (which nobody in-strip sees as an issue?). She apparently plays piano professionally and accompanies ballet classes. What does it feel like to WATCH dancers but not DANCE? How does she feel about Seth, who's still dancing?

Speaking of Seth, ballet dancers, and homophobic assholes who somehow manage to turn gay men straight, how does Fernanda feel about no longer being able to dance due to a knee injury?

Edda and Amos are both professional artists. He's a cellist who also plays piano. She's a pianist who worked as a professional dancer (and model) and is also an excellent illustrator/cartoonist. She most likely sings, as well. How aggressively do they steer their daughters toward the arts? We've seen flash-forwards of their feral daughters both playing piano and dancing ballet. Is that their choice? Do they love it? How strict are Amos and Edda? How do they interact with the parents of other Art Kids? What happens if the kids have other interests... what if they want to play oboe instead of a stringed instrument? Or drums? What if they choose tap dance or Irish dance over ballet? What if all they want to do is study physics?

We'll never know any of this as long as there's new places for McEldowney to depict his characters fucking. Or the same old places. Yeah, that'll do too.

I don't understand why you'd add children to a strip and then do nothing with them... unless the entire POINT isn't the kids, it's the conception/pregnancy.

11/12/2022

I can just imagine Nelson Muntz or Sherri and Terri cornering the girls on the playground.
"Nice outfits, dorks! Did your mommy dress you today?"
"No, our daddy did!"



It's usually Amos rocking the turtleneck and blazer, I want to say, with Edda sporting a turtleneck dress and cardigan - as she is now. You know, the kind of clothing that an active young former superfamous ballet dancer and supermodel would wear while walking along the beach front on a brisk fall day. It's just as appropriate as a button down collared shirt under a sweater topped off with a duster/rain coat. A camel colored trench coat?

Sartorial choice aside (see how I'm channeling the strip there by saying "sartorial" instead of "fashion"? I, too, am an over-educated dork who went to Catholic school!), this is a prime example of Amos and Edda interacting briefly with their kids then proceeding to get sexual with each other.

This would be cute if:
1) They don't have an established pattern of getting extremely sexual in public
2) They don't have an established pattern of getting sexual in front of their children
3) They weren't grinding themselves together passionately

"Oh look, a humpback whale!" and then a cute little smooch on a nice fall day. Instead it looks like they're about to tear each other's clothing off and come up for air flushed and sticky.

And the overly wordy "punchline"? "Just who do they think they're fooling" is much pithier and sounds more like what actual children would say. And if the expression were an exaggerated eye roll instead of weary disgust? Ok, that's more teen behavior I guess and these girls are somewhere between the ages of four and eight, that nebulous age range so popular in comic strips.

The small children staring out across the ocean with determined expressions, one saying "I don't see any whales!" is its own form of punchline, as well. One that doesn't rope the children in to their parents' sex lives as well as retaining their childlike naivete. They trust their parents, they look for the whales. They don't think about their parents kissing, or humping and grinding in public.

Kudos to McEldowney for drawing a background, though. His hand was forced, I guess, by mention of humpback whales specifically. It would be pretty odd to mention them against a white, or muddy tie dye, void... although he did represent a zoo that way, once.

We'll draw a curtain upon this little family now, leaving the parents to hump and then make the beast with two backs as their small children wander along a spit of sand next to the Atlantic Ocean.

Good job on sneaking that leg in, I guess.