Drawn by Brooke McEldwoney,
9 Chickweed Lane is a popular
comic strip distinguished by intelligent characters, beautifully artistic drawing, and an elegant understated sense of humor.
http://www.chickweed.com/
According to the website, "9 Chickweed Lane is a comic strip about a single mom, her adolescent daughter and gritty grandma", but it is difficult to capture the essence of 9 CWL in a single sentence. Some themes that appear often in 9 CWL are beauty, love and lust, aging, divorce, meaningless measures of academic performance and intelligence, schoolyard bullies, adolescence, peer pressure, being a geek, relationships, "Hallmarks of Felinity", university bureaucracy, ballet, music, a unified theory of the cosmos, and the extraterretrial origins of Gran's beau.
9 Chickweed Lane has received two Genesis Award Commendations for publicizing animal rights in a sequence about an adopted grayhound and was frequently ranked 1st over comics like Doonsbury, Foxtrot and Garfield back when it was on uComics.com.
So far, there has been one 9 Chickweed Lane anthology published, Hallmarks of Felinity, which gathers the first forty-or-so strips in the eponymous sub-strip.
The Artist
Born in Charleston West Virginia, Brooke McEldowney studied biology and art in college, before going to Julliard to study the viola. A former professional violist and music critic, McEldowney lives in Florida with his wife and two daughters.
The Characters
(descriptions from http://www.chickweed.com/)
Juliette Burber -- Juliette is a divorced, middle-aged mother holding a Ph.D. in biology and a professorship at a New Hampshire university. She lives with her daughter and her mother in the house at 9 Chickweed Lane. Despite her professional, academic demeanor, she likes nothing more than to daydream of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and herself as a leopard-skin-clad Amazon called Panther Woman.
Edda -- Edda, Juliette's daughter, studies at St. Camilla's Catholic school and excels in dance, music, all academics, and annoying the headmistress of St. Camilla's, known to most students as "Sister Caligula."
Gran -- Juliette's mother took up residence at 9 Chickweed Lane after the death of her husband several years ago. Gran believes that there is no force on earth that cannot be opposed effectively given an adequate armament of guilt.
Amos -- Amos has been friends with Edda since they were very little. Edda's growing femininity troubles him greatly, placing problems in their relationship that cannot be resolved with a simple exchange of playground noogies.
Solange -- Solange the cat lives at 9 Chickweed Lane, where she brings feline entropy to preexisting
human disarray.
Thorax -- Thorax, Gran's beau, instills a breath of romance into an old lady's life. He runs a nearby dairy and sells strange goods and services at roadside stands when he isn't ruminating on his intergalactic alien origins or dusting off the quantum anomaly in his tractor shed. He lives with his ancient father, Pap.