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9 Chickweed Lane is a comic strip by Brooke McEldowney which made its debut on August 2, 1993. 9 Chickweed Lane was the home of the women of three generations of the Burber family: Gran, Juliette and Edda. The strip, syndicated by United Features Syndicate, 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 webcomic Pibgorn, a spin-off. The strips appear to share the same universe, with the eccentric Thorax appearing in both series regularly, as well as the occasion cameo appearance (the most recent example, as of November 2007, being almost the entire cast of Pibgorn showing up as guests at a Chickweed wedding). However, aside from a story arc adapting A Midsummer Night's Dream in Pibgorn, the strips' characters do not take part in either series' storyline.
The strip follows the fortunes of the Burber women as they try to make their way in the world following major life changes. Edda successfully navigates New York City as an elite ballet dancer, but finds need of a map, or perhaps sonar equipment, in her relationship with childhood friend Amos. Juliette has followed her dream and left the academy for a dairy farm. She puts up with the former owner, Thorax, who haunts the place dropping aphorisms, while part of her yearns for the challenge of inspiring (or just plain humiliating) a new generation of students. Thorax's amour, the Burbers' Gran, looks on bemusedly and sometimes offers advice or a sharp whack to the head.
[edit] Characters
- Edda Burber - 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 necessary steps 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 Burber - 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 initially 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 adjusted. In February 2006 she married Elliot in a ceremony 'officiated' by Thorax. Recently, after encountering a formerly underachieving student who rose to the challenge of higher education due to her scathing admonishments, she felt her efforts at the university were not in vain, and is returning to the school, albeit part-time.
- Gran - (Real name is Edna O'Malley), 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 van Hoesen - 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 musical talents by studying the cello at Juilliard.
- Thorax - Gran's gentleman friend, brilliant and odd beyond all description but utterly sweet. Apparently a large, amiable elderly farmer, he does not appear to be 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. Whether the marriage was legally valid one, given the questionable status of the officiant, appears to be an open question.
- Seth Appleby - 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 Florin - A pianist who works as an accompanist to Amos's practice on cello. Likes Amos and has been in conflict with Edda over this. Of Portuguese origin with a slight accent.
- Burkhardt - A violist from Vienna. Womanizer who has regularly pursued Edda and been rebuffed by her.
- Diane - A former nun who used to teach at the Catholic high school that Edda and Amos attended. She left her vocation after falling in love with Francis. They married after a long courtship.
- Francis - A former Catholic priest who left his vocation after falling in love with Diane.
- Solange - Edda's Siamese cat, the very quintessence of Cat, and a popular enough character to spawn an ongoing thread of strips focused on her, Hallmarks of Felinity.[1] The cat who would become Solange first appeared on March 23, 1999, which happened to be the second Hallmark of Felinity. Originally, the animal characters in the strip consisted of a whippet named Rudyard, which was succeeded by a greyhound named Divot, and a spot-eyed cat; the dog and cat often held mental conversations regarding their human owners, when the dog wasn't chucking insults at the cat's naïvete. Solange soon replaced the cat after her introduction, and the greyhound quickly disappeared from the strip as well.
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