9 Chickweed Lane

For a number of years one of my favorite comic strips has been 9 Chickweed Lane, drawn by Brooke McEldowney. It's the story of a woman named Juliette Burber, a biochemistry professor and dairy farmer, her mother Edna, her daughter Edda, a ballet dancer, and their various friends and relations. McEldowney doesn't write down to his audience --- he assumes some knowledge of music, he casually dropped a riff on Rupert Brooke into a strip a while back, he doesn't bother to translate German word bubbles. He's also willing to take the time to actually tell long stories: In 2009, over the course of several months, Edda's boyfriend Amos (a cellist at Julliard) was travelling to a competition in Europe and Edda came along as his accompanying pianist. Complications ensued, but Amos won on merit. Chickweed Lane is part of my daily reading, and I wouldn't miss it.

     The quality of storytelling reached what I thought was an apogee at the end of September 2010 when we finished eleven months of learning what Edna did in the war --- she was a spy for the USO, which is how she met her husband and Juliette's father. It was a wonderful story, with amazing subtlety and detail, and every morning for 271 weekdays and Saturdays (and frustration on Sundays) I woke up wanting to know what happened and was annoyed that I'd have to wait 24 hours to find out more.  That story was collected by McEldowney in a stand-alone volume Edie Ernst, USO Singer -- Allied Spy.

     What causes this reverie, though, is that we are now about a year into the parallel story of Edna's first husband, Bill, lost behind enemy lines between D-Day and the liberation of France.  He's been shot, hit on the head, shacked up with a French resistance operative, outrun retreating Germans, and is suffering from amnesia.  I have no idea how this is going to end, but it should be interesting, particularly given what we know about Edna's journey back in England and (after the war) in the States.

Man of Steel (revisited)

For the record, we went back and watched the part of Man of Steel after Kal-El gets off Krypton.  I’d heartily objected to the first part of the movie earlier. While Kevin Costner as Clark Kent's Earth dad is a little over the top, and Zack Snyder's direction means the fight scenes go on forfreakin'ever, on the whole, the thing didn't suck. Alexandra Katherine, my local speaker-to-comics-fans, tells me that this is all in service of starting a Justice League movie franchise, since the Marvel Avengers movie was so successful.  [Spoiler warning] I note that we will start that franchise with an interesting retcon: Lois already knows Clark’s secret identity. 

zen pencils

For a couple of years, the excellent Australian free-lance artist Gavin Aung Than has been producing a several-times-a-week cartoon, zen pencils, each illustrating an interesting quotation. Not only are the quotations inspirational, so is Gavin’s own story: he quit a regular job to do this because he was getting no emotional fulfillment out of commercial art. He landed a syndication contract with Universal Press, and now appears on their web site, though he's still available at his own site zenpencils.com. Now many of his cartoons are collected in a volume of the same name, which I bought not only because the work is good and the illustrations add amazing depth to the text, but to encourage Gav to continue doing this. I recommend it to you for the same reasons.