The Unbearable, Insufferable Horniness of 9 Chickweed Lane, a Comic Strip for Pretentious Perverts
When I was a very strange child, I was obsessed with newspaper comic strips. I adored Calvin & Hobbes and Bloom County and the Far Side and Peanuts and devoured them in daily form and in big collections. Heck, when I was a boy I dreamed of having my own nationally syndicated comic strip.
I even wrote letters to all of my favorite creators asking for advice on how to break into the business and/or autographs. As I got older my obsessive comic strip fandom faded and was replaced by newer, slightly less dorky enthusiasms. I still read comic strips from time to time but as I now largely see comic strips, like newspapers, as a beloved component of my past rather than part of my present or future.
Oh sure, there are still cartoonists that I really dig, like Tom Tomorrow and Ward Sutton, but the comic strips I am most associated with, and write about the most tend to be on the bad and tacky side: ancient anti-marriage manifesto The Lockhorns, deathless uber-mediocrity Garfield and the insanely patriotic, patriotically insane political cartoons of Trump super-fan Ben Garrison.
I write about things that I love, but also about things that are terrible. My writing on things that are terrible tends to do a whole lot better than the articles I write about stuff I adore. So it is perhaps not surprising that I was recently added to a Facebook group devoted to 9 Chickweed Lane, a comic strip I was only vaguely familiar with.
At first I resented it. I did not choose to be part of the group. It did not seem to speak to my interests, random and masochistic as they might be. But it wasn’t long before I came to understand why fate had pushed me in the comic strip’s direction.
The members of this group were mortified and horrified by the world of 9 Chickweed Lane and its erudite fop of a creator, Brooke McEldowney, a cartoonist/classical musician and graduate of Juliard who brings the full force of his academic credentials and intellectual pedigree/pretensions to every unspeakably pretentious, self-satisfied, endlessly masturbatory panel he creates.
According to Wikipedia, “McEldowney's comic strip primarily focuses on the relationships between its multigenerational female characters, beginning with a single mother, Juliette, and her teen-aged daughter, Edda. Although he did not originally intend to have the characters age, they have done so, though not at real-time.”
To my philistine, uncultured eyes (I’m a Juggalo, for the love of God), however, every comic strip seems to be exclusively about how unbelievably horny the men in the strip are for their impossibly willowy, leggy, ethereal partners and how equally horny the women are for their dorky yet erudite and urbane husbands.
The characters in 9 Chickweed Lane are the sort that describe their husband or wife as their “lover” because they think that makes them sound scandalously sensual and also because they want other people to think about them fucking their partner.
It feels like the only “gag” in 9 Chickweed Place is how unbelievably horny all the characters are for each other. Today’s strip for example, features a gorgeous yet clearly educated and cultured woman in a tight mini-skirt drinking coffee in a diner with her clearly educated and cultured partner. She slides her hand over to his underwear area and, judging from the expression on his face as he spills coffee all over his face in surprise, jerks him off to completion.
If you’re wondering how a comic strip could get away with something like that it’s probably because McEldowney is so self-consciously “artful” and “elliptical” that only the most sophisticated and observant of readers, those with Ivy League educations and extensive knowledge of classical music, will even discern that one of the strip’s many total hotties is yanking her partner’s crank under the table until he jizzes in his trousers in ecstatic appreciation.
Many of the comic strip’s characters are highbrow artists of some sort, dancers and classical musicians like 9 Chickweed Lane’s creator, and undoubtedly bring the same passion, artistry and grace to giving world-class hand jobs that they do to performing the work of Mozart.
9 Chickweed Lane’s double-barreled combination of horny and pretentious is what makes it so morbidly fascinating as well as creepy. It’s not hard to imagine McEldowney gazing with reverence at a particular sexy strip and throwing himself a little one-handed pants party in appreciation of his own genius.
I had hoped that McEldowney was an anomaly in an otherwise sexless comic strip world but that is apparently not the case. Luanne has similarly somehow evolved, or de-evolved into a similarly over-sexed strip, albeit with less faux-sophistication. Heck, even Arlo & Janis apparently regularly delves into semi-raunchy territory.
I can’t unsee or unlearn what I have seen and learned about 9 Chickweed Lane. Now neither can you. The comic strip world seems to be going through something of a sexual revolution and I, for one, don’t like it one bit.
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