Act now!

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this comic strip before on the blog, but 9 Chickweed Lane has been my favorite strip for the past year. It's done by Brooke McEldowney, a guy who has the keenest sense of interpersonal relationship dynamics I've ever seen in the funny pages. And the guy's an awesome artist, to boot, and has a wonderful blend of very accessible intellectual humor, slapstick, and playing with the very format of newspaper comics. The strip's backbone, so to speak, is the story of three generations of women--girl, mother, and grandmother--and the life issues they face. Apparently the strip has been around for over a decade by this point--I believe I read that the main teenage girl character was twelve when the strip started. She's about 18 or 19 by now, and I really like the idea of continuity and development in a comic strip. In fact, one of the current storylines is a continuation of something that happened briefly about two years ago (I read about three years' worth of backlog because it's such a great strip). It's a nice change from Family Circus or Garfield or Peanuts. Just recently, the comic has been focussing on major life changes for all of the characters, but right now (RIGHT NOW!) would be a really, really good time to jump on the reading-9 Chickweed Lane-bandwagon. One of the kookier characters, Thorax, has just started an advice column in a newspaper, and all the characters in the strip have been writing to him for advice. This is a really good time to start in because you'd be getting a pretty good (if necessarily partial) summation of who all the players are, their relationships to each other, and where all the storylines are right now. I'd give you a hyperlink, but I'm on a Macintosh, and this browser doesn't give me that option. So, go copy the following link and paste it into your browser window: www.comics.com/comics/chickweed/archive/chickweed-20060510.html . I'm starting you a couple of weeks back, so you'll have to navigate up until the current date. I know I'm not giving you a great deal of information to really sell you on this comic and convince you that it's worth it to check out.

But you trust me, right?