9 Chickweed Lane

Publication

Design

Characters

• Edda van Hoesen – Independent and intelligent with a heroic fantasy life as Superlative Girl, she is a talented, attractive ballet dancer and a skilled piano recitalist who has done modeling for the fictional ladies apparel line Nicolette Cignet. Edda graduated early from her Catholic high school and moved to New York City. Although she had frequently displayed sexual attraction to her ballet partner Seth, she married her longtime sweetheart Amos on September 11, 2017. On December 12 2019, she found out she is pregnant with twin girls, who were born in the first week of March 2020.
• Juliette Martine Kiesl – Divorced and the single mother of Edda, she is the daughter of Edna O'Malley. Juliette has a creative fantasy life but is competent at achieving her goals in reality. After being a biology professor at a New Hampshire university, she followed her dream of owning and operating a farm. She later married Elliott Greene in a ceremony officiated by Thorax, and eventually returned to the school in a part-time position. She learned she is the product of a brief relationship her mother had with an Austrian opera singer, Peter Kiesl, and later taking on his family name; plus was also named, in reverse, after her stepfather's first wife.
• Edna "Edie" Ernst O'Malley/Eva Kiesl – Mother of Juliette and grandmother of Edda. "Gran" is irascible and argumentative, though loving. In her youth she was a beautiful, talented USO singer and spy for Allied Intelligence during World War II. Much of her life is told in an extended year-long flashback sequence, begun in October 2009, that has been described as "ambitious, moving, and still often pungently funny" and "one of the most engrossing and well-told stories from this year". During that time she had a relationship with Lt. Peter Kiesl, an Austrian Wehrmacht POW in England, which they rekindled ten years later in New York City when he was a visiting singer for the Metropolitan Opera; this led to a very brief engagement and the conception of Juliette. Afterward, Edna married Bill O'Malley, with whom she had a second child, and was later widowed. After Kiesl, whom she thought had recently died, visited her in New Hampshire to express his continued love for her, Edna moved to Vienna and married him.
• Amos van Hoesen – A geeky, talented classical cellist and Edda's husband, who occasionally accompanies her in performance. Best friends since childhood that blossomed into love, he graduated from the same school as she and went on to study at Juilliard. They finally consummated their love after Edda performed a dance with Amos providing a piano accompaniment in November of 2004, renewed their love at a music competition in Belgium and wedded after a lengthy courtship and engagement. They have since become parents to twin daughters Polly and Lolly.
• Thorax – Formerly Gran's gentleman friend, he is brilliant and odd beyond all description. Apparently a large, amiable elderly farmer, he does not appear to be quite human, and has a quantum anomaly in his tractor shed. Thorax and Edna dated a few years until Edna's reunion with Kiesl. He also appears in McEldowney's online strip Pibgorn. On Oct. 4, 2017 he was revealed to be Sven's father.
• Pap – Thorax's father is aged beyond reckoning, with a classic Yankee-farmer acerbic mien.
• Elliott Greene – Juliette's love interest, and her co-worker at the university. In January 2006, Juliette accepted the most recent in his long series of marriage proposals, and they were married by Thorax.
• Seth Appleby – Edda's dancing partner and housemate, a physically imposing, handsome homosexual with a boyfriend and an occasional indulgence with a female partner.
• Mark – Seth's boyfriend, an artist and gallery owner.
• Fernanda Jons – Seth's former female friend-with-benefits, a ballerina from Argentina who was temporarily partnered with him in the ballet company.
• Janice – A friend of Edda's from the ballet company. She has a crush on Mark, who remains her friend while gently rebuffing her advances.
• Isabel Florin – A pianist who accompanies Amos' practice on cello, she likes Amos and has been in conflict with Edda over this. She is of Portuguese origin with a slight accent.
• Burkhardt Kriegl – A violist from Vienna. A womanizer regularly rebuffed by Edda, he took up with Isabel.
• Fleurrie Spocket – The veterinarian who came to treat Juliette's sick bull and was once a student in her biology class. She married her longtime veterinary technician, Sven.
• Sven Spocket – Fleurrie's tall, sweet and handsomely hulking, if slightly naive, veterinary technician, formerly a gutter cleaner. They eventually married. He is fluent in four languages and has a Ph.D. in art history. As of the October 4, 2017 strip, he is revealed to be Thorax's son.
• Sister Steven – a Mother Superior who runs the Catholic school Edda and Amos once attended. An archetypically strict nun with no sense of humor and nicknamed as "Sister Caligula" by her students, she does occasionally show a human side to her nature and was once called Florence Anne.
• Diane Durly – Formerly Sister Aramus, a nun who used to teach English at the Catholic high school that Edda and Amos attended. She left her vocation after falling in love with Francis Durly. They married in the October 30, 2007 strip, after a long courtship and became parents to a daughter, Florence Anne, in the October 6, 2011 strip and has since become a mother to five more children, according to the March 10, 2020 strip.
• Francis Durly – A former Catholic priest who left his vocation after falling in love with Diane, whom he married.
• Mary Rosenzweig – Edda and Amos' classmate from their Catholic high school. Amos used to pursue her for affection, and was always rejected.
• Solange – Edda's Siamese cat, who appears in ongoing thread of strips focused on her, Hallmarks of Felinity. The cat who would become Solange first appeared on March 23, 1999. Originally, the animal characters in the strip consisted of a whippet named Rudyard, succeeding a greyhound named Divot, and a spot-eyed cat, Ambrose. Rudyard and Ambrose often held mental conversations regarding their human owners, when Rudyard wasn't chucking insults at the cat's naïvete. Solange soon replaced Ambrose after her introduction, and the greyhound disappeared from the strip as well.
• Monty – God in the form of a bald man wearing a suit or else a delusional man who has convinced Thorax that he is indeed God; a test of Monty's powers made him appear to be embarrassed at his inability to pull off even a minor task.
• Earl William "Bill" O'Malley – Gran's late husband and Juliette's stepfather. As a young lieutenant during World War II, he saw Edna perform for the Allied troops and helped recruit her for a spying mission at a British POW camp housing German prisoners. Seriously injured on D Day, he suffered severe amnesia, met and fell in love with his French Resistance contact Martine Clocqueur, and was briefly married to her. Years later he married Edna and moved to Omaha, Nebraska, to have a long, unfulfilled marriage. Bill is the father of Edna's second child, Roger, who is rarely mentioned and was not seen in the strip until November 22, 2010.
• Martine Juliette Clocqueur-O’Malley – A beautiful, feisty French Resistance operative who worked as a double agent with the Nazi German forces during the occupation of France during World War II and was Bill’s contact during D-Day. She and Bill fell in love and were married within days of the Liberation of Paris. She was mortally wounded very shortly afterward.
• Roger O'Malley – Son of Bill and Edna, Edda's uncle and Juliette's half-brother. He is married and has eleven children. While he has a long-standing heterosexual relationship with his wife, he was accused by Seth of being a closeted homosexual, despite a complete lack of evidence. He has since come out of the closet, placing considerable stress on his marriage.
• Peter Kiesl – A professional opera singer from Austria and former officer in the German Army in World War II, he had a romantic liaison with Edna while he was a prisoner of war in England and she was a USO singer working undercover for American Intelligence. Years later in New York City they briefly resumed their romance. He is the biological father of Juliette. Decades later, he visited Edna in New Hampshire, expressed his continued love for her, and the two married and went to live in Vienna together.
• Xiulan Ha'penny Yuan - a highly regarded Hong Kong Chinese cellist from a wealthy family who once challenged Amos at the 2008 Brussels competition as a runner-up due to the online popularity of his and Edda's makeout session and graciously lost to him, but not before being touched when he gentlemanly presented her with a rose for being a good sport. She was reintroduced into the series on September 14, 2015, this time as a Juilliard student who understands English and has an affinity for cheeseburgers with a brief crush on Amos. Quickly making friends with Edda, she also became engaged after a whirlwind romance with Hugh Godalming within three days after meeting him and later married him. She is also an accomplished pilot and a major stockholder of the fictional airline Canton Airways.
• Hugh Portwhistle Godalming - a British pianist at Juilliard and Xiulan's husband. Accomplished as a child prodigy at the piano with a large ego, his first encounter with Xiulan was mostly confrontational when accidentally kicked her cello case without apology until he was forced to become her accompanist for her student audition when Edda was a no-show. At first very antagonistic with a lot of sexual tension between them, their relationship blossomed into love after a very passionate Brahms duet and were engaged after only three days of meeting each other. Usually wears a heavy overcoat as an alter-ego persona as Sherlock Beethoven.
• Ginger Ouyang - a Canton Airways airline steward and Xiulan's friend, who also is the de facto CEO fronting for Xiulan as a figurehead of the airline.
• Arthur Peel - An English composer in his mid-60s hired by Xiulan and Hugh to score her project for Korean television. A celibate and somewhat emotionally-distant man all his life, he wrote a piano piece for the production entitled “Reverie” that sends people into a fiery romantic flurry upon hearing it. After meeting his assigned assistant Nan-Lin Peel began an awkward courtship, he finally professed his love for her despite his self-depreciating insecurities and age and later married her.
• Nan-Lin Peel - a Korean-American woman in her 30s and Arthur’s wife. Originally was hired by Xiulan to be an assistant to manage Arthur Peel, she became the inspiration behind his erotically-charged “Reverie” and after a quick if complicatedly frustrating courtship, became his wife despite their age differences.

  Awards

Spin-off

Collections

• Hallmarks of Felinity
• Out Whom Shall We Gross?
• Sonata for Piano and Armpit
• The Day my Puberty Detonated
• Rita Hayworth, the Father of Relativity
• CRUD From Outer Space, and Other Causes of Postnasal Drip
• Cat Breath Takes No Prisoners
• On Alternate Thursdays, I Surrender My Body to SATAN
• Dumpster God
• We'll Always Have Brussels, or The Bösendorfer Heard Round the World
• Edie Ernst, USO Singer – Allied Spy