9 Chickweed Lane
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Copyright 2005 Brooke McEldowney and United Features Syndicate
9 Chickweed Lane is a comic strip by Brooke McEldowney which began in 1993. 9 Chickweed Lane is the home of the women of three generations of the Burber family: Gran, Juliette and Edda. All three are all highly intelligent and imaginative, with strong personalities, and the strip tends to reflect the complications of their relationships between themselves and other characters in a very wry fashion. The strip is syndicated by United Features Syndicate and is available online at [comics.com]; it won Best Newspaper Comic at the 2006 National Cartoonists Society Awards.
Brooke McEldowney is also the creator of the comic strip Pibgorn.
Characters
- Edda - Independent and intelligent with a truly heroic fantasy life as Superlative Girl, sexy and self-assured except when she's not. She is a very talented ballet dancer (and also a skilled pianist) who has just started to take the steps she has to develop her skills into a career, now that she has graduated early from her Catholic high school and moved to New York City. She is also very unsettled to be finding that her feelings for her friend Amos are perhaps not quite as platonic and friendly as she'd thought.
- Juliette - Divorced single mother of Edda, daughter of Gran, Juliette has an impressively creative fantasy life (her alter-ego is the leopardskin-clad Panther Woman) but is quite competent at achieving her goals in reality, though her mother can still push her buttons maddeningly. She has recently resigned her position as a professor at a New Hampshire university and followed her dream of owning and operating a farm. Her family was initially dismayed, but seems to have adjusted. In February 2006 she married Elliot in a ceremony 'officiated' by Thorax.
- Gran - Irascible and argumentative, her main joy in life seems to be having the last word - though she does have a dear companion in Thorax and does seem to genuinely love her family.
- Amos - Geeky, adorable, with an intense musical talent and devotedly in love with Edda who has been his best friend for years. He has also just graduated from the same school and left home to develop his talents by attending Juilliard.
- Thorax - Gran's gentleman friend, brilliant and odd beyond all description but utterly sweet. Apparently a large, amiable elderly farmer, he is... not quite human, and has a quantum anomaly in his shed. It is uncertain whether Thorax uses this quantum anomaly to break through the barriers of space, time and dimension in order to appear in McEldowney's other online strip, Pibgorn, but he plays a significant role in several story arcs there.
- Pap - Thorax's father. Tiny, aged beyond reckoning, with a classic Yankee-farmer acerbic mien, he nevertheless seems to take Thorax's otherworldly peregrinations in stride.
- Elliot - Juliette's love interest, and her co-worker at the university. He appears to be the least developed of the long-term characters. In January 2006, Juliette accepted the most recent in his long series of marriage proposals. In February 2006 they were married by Thorax.
- Seth - Edda's new dancing partner and housemate, a handsome hunk with a steady boyfriend and a bit of a crush on Amos. Likes to play matchmaker.
- Mark - Seth's boyfriend, an artist. He is small with a goatee and untidy brown hair.
- Janice - A friend of Edda's from the ballet company. She has a severe crush on Mark, who remains her friend while gently rebuffing her advances. Janice and Edda briefly got into a love triangle when Janice's sometime beau made a pass at Edda (and was flatly rejected).
- Isabel - A pianist that works as an accompanist to Amos's practice on cello. Likes Amos and has been in conflict with Edda over this. Of uncertain European origin with a slight accent.
- Solange - Edda's Siamese cat, the very quintessence of Cat, and a popular enough character to spawn an ongoing thread focused on her - Hallmarks of Felinity [link].
External link
- [Hallmarks of Felinity] - collects the strips that are specifically oriented around the family's Siamese cat, an ongoing thread. The collection is also available as a book by the same name. ISBN 0-7407-2199-2
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