Thread by @JeanLuc_Lemur, Spending my Saturday night trying to identify the precise moment Nine Chickweed [...]

Spending my Saturday night trying to identify the precise moment Nine Chickweed Lane got horny.

Haven’t found it yet. Afraid to say I laughed at strip from 2003.

Now I’m at a point where they’re doing pretty scathing commentary at the health insurance industry. It’s like I’ve entered some kind of bizarro world.

Despite a Pibgorn(?) cameo as of yet Nine Chickweed Lane is still not horny

January 12th, 2004 borderline case of Brooke McEldowney being horny, but the strip is still more a cute middle, or even upper-middle, tier newspaper comic.

Yes as of early 2004 *Brooke* is definitely horny under the guise of toying around with the newspaper comics/black and white printing aesthetic (i.e. an artsy excuse to draw Edda over and over again), but the comic’s actual storyline? Still not horny.

Also blessedly still free of those gradient backgrounds. I know we’ll be in real trouble when they start.

The rare (intentionally) anti-horny 9 Chickweed Lane, cherish this moment (6 March 2004)

Now we have incipient horniness at Nine Chickweed Lane. At first the Amos sleepwalking seems like another goofy naïve Amos’s gets rejected by Mary (girl in the black bob), but…hmmm.

Backgroud gradients—comorbid with terminal horniness start up a little later.

Horniness continues to advance—we soon get Edda pretentiously talking about her (first?) kiss, a priest and nun from school toeing the second deadly sin line. Still more or less intermittently horny, though.

We’re the sort of “cutesy” stuff the strip does a lot of now, but it’s about kissing, not sex, so it’s closer to actually being cutesy (also they’re ~50 so it’s less bad). Is Edda being a bit creepy here? idk, my parents are still together so I don’t have a frame of reference.

Amos is in a weird transition period (well he’s an adolescent of course he is). He’s still infatuated with Mary, and the second strip certainly seems more a paean (ugh, now I’m picking up Brooke’s language) to Platonic love. July-Aug 02004

McEldowney likes these sort of playing around with these sort of “only works in ink” things. They usually strike me as excuses to draw Edda, but here we get one with Amos, still innocently pining over Mary. 18 August 2004.

Amos’s balls drop. Okay I also found this one funny. Amos I wish I had your talent for pretentious BS. He’s been a pretentious BSer since the beginning, so I wouldn’t count this as part of the strip’s decline. That’s when that the strip itself became pretentious BS. 17 Aug 04

Amos still in his early, funnier stage. I’m not entirely unserious about that, for different reasons. 24 Aug 04

At least they’re both seventeen. Anyway this is the beginning of terminal *story* decline, even if the strip’s in a (surprising!) horniness remission. 07-09 Sept 04

And here we have it, ballet, classical music, Amos’s hair is in place, and there’s not just a gradient background, but a gradient tux. This isn’t where 9CL becomes helplessly horny, but where it becomes *bad.* Amazed at the speed it happened. 02-03 Nov 04

Also I can’t think of anything by Prokofiev that would qualify for this—he’s too playful and doesn’t make me retch. I saw this and now you have to. 05 Nov 04

Ugh don’t get okay again 9CL. Juliette’s easily the best character, and hangs up on Edda when she gets pretentious in Feb and, unlike Brooke McEldowney, not a Voyager fan. You and me both, Juliette. 26 Nov 2004

Ugh they’re both at Julliard and it’s &way* more soapy than horny—all horniness is in service of the plot. And it’s much better than “Muse” above—stuff that could end up bad like “an older woman is interested in Amos” is not done at all like you’d expect it to in 2020 9CL.

Also (begrudging) credit for going further with gay affection than a lot of media today. Now I’m sucked in. I’m on 9 Stockholm Lane—will have to get back to this

I usually find 9CL’s depiction of classical musicians kind of offensive but

1. I know exactly what Amos is playing

1. Damn correct from conservatory friends (even if it’s not really productive—Piatigorsky said you should only practice, intensely, for a few hours in the AM)

^^^ Also is that the only time when McEldowney’s gradients make sense? It might be.

Anyway Amos and Edda get back together after a tango class. What 18 year olds are getting hot after tango classes? Terminal horniness at bay, but terminal Brooke-ism is here.

Wait they didn’t fuck after Muse? Actually this feels pretty realistic, as in it happened to me (well, not the twee pajama thing, but the other stuff). Damn your not-dead-yet connection to reality, McEldowney! 25 May 05

(to the tune of “By Mennen”)

♩von Heusen ♫

(lol no but earlier, funnier Amos would have totally tried that—this also happened to me, also unintentionally, no kiss, though, just awkward annoyance). 27 May 05

L: Continued flashes of self-awareness from McEldowney, still not terminally horny. 31 May 05.

Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

1. That is a gerund

2. McEldowney’s doing a “having your cake and eating your cake” self-awareness (which I usually like, and would find okay here if I didn’t know the horrors to come). 05 June 05

Wait I think I actually read these when my family was on vacation somewhere (déjà vu from the Umpire Rock, “this is stupid,” “you first”). I clearly remember these two even if I had no context with them until now. The week of 20 June gets insuffereable as it progresses

While I’ve been finding Amos embarrasingly relatable, if someone voiced this theory to me my feelings for them would end then and there.

Also Edda and the older woman fight over Amos in October which is some combination of cliché and Marty Stu, I think

Horny priest from years ago reappears in 2006, but in a melodramatic-sentimental way rather than a horny one. Really was not expecting 9CL to be a relatively character-oriented soap strip, honestly.

Brutal self-own by Brooke McEldowney

Horniness—and bad gradients—de rigeur for Sunday features in early 2007. Gradients are much less common in regular strips and still more soapy there, too. Except for the Thorax ones. Easy to skip weeks at a time when he appears.

Not sure exactly what he’s trying to say here but dancing is absolutely a job and a very rough one at that. That doesn’t mean it can’t be immensely and specially rewarding but it is absolutely work. 14 May 07. Beginning of a solid two months of unicorn comics.

On its own it appears kind of pretentious but in a lot of ways this one strip is nice callback to the early dynamic of the strip so it gets an aww from me. Gradients still restricted to Sundays and night scenes. 20 Aug 07. See also 16 Oct 07

Anyway this is all about the culmination of the priest-nun (now ex-priest/ex-nun) that I thought was a little sidebar years earlier. The month+ culmination length is long long even by soap strip standards bc of McEldowney’s pacing and plot anti-devices (Thorax particularly).

So mention waaay earlier that there’s a Marty Stu aspect w/two beautiful women (Edda and his older accompanist, Isabella) pining for him. They also hate each other, which makes it bearable. 25 Feb. 08

Feel like the callbacks to the strip’s early (or really very early) dynamic is foreshadowing the strip’s complete abandonment of innocence, so now they’re less cute and more foreboding. 6-7 Mar 08