9 Chickweed Lane is an American comic strip written and drawn by Brooke McEldowney for over 30 years, which follows the fortunes of the women of three generations of the Burber family: Edna, Juliette, and Edda. 9 Chickweed Lane is the address of the characters' former family home. There is occasional overlap of characters between 9 Chickweed Lane and another comic by McEldowney, Pibgorn. The strip is syndicated by United Feature Syndicate (a division of Andrews McMeel Syndication). It debuted on July 12, 1993. It won the National Cartoonists Society Award for Newspaper Strip in 2005, and has been given Genesis Award Commendations for bringing attention to animal rights.

Publication

Syndicated by United Media, 9 Chickweed Lane debuted on Monday, July 12, 1993, though comics historian Don Markstein notes that some sources erroneously give August 2, 1993. McEldowney's comic strip primarily focuses on the relationships between its multigenerational female characters, beginning with a single mother, Juliette, and her teen-aged daughter, Edda. Although he did not originally intend to have the characters age, they have done so, though not at real-time. The comic has dealt with a number of difficult issues including pregnancy out of wedlock, a school shooting, and the impact of sexuality on religious vocations. It has been criticized for addressing such topics, to the point of being removed from some newspapers. It has been both acclaimed and criticized for its "libidinous hot-plot lines" and the enthusiastic sexuality of its characters. In a column entitled The Unbearable Horniness of 9 Chickweed Lane, critic Nathan Rabin criticized the strip's recurring sexual themes, writing "It feels like the only 'gag' in 9 Chickweed Lane is how unbelievably horny all the characters are for each other." Rabin is also critical of the strip's "intellectual pretensions" and McEldowney's "unspeakably pretentious, self-satisfied, endlessly masturbatory" content.

Design

9 Chickweed Lane was originally drawn by hand in black and white. Around 1995, McEldowney moved to digitally-based production, using his computer as a drawing tool. The comic eventually introduced color at the publisher's insistence. McEldowney trained as a musician and incorporates dance and music into his drawings: several of his characters are dancers, singers, or musicians. One reviewer writes "Dance strips or strips involving just hands, hands hold hands, arms moving, legs moving, are gorgeous and dynamic." Another comments on the Zen-like slowness of McEldowney's sequences, describing his work as lingering on the page, as he often draws out the action across multiple days. Even reviewers who dislike the comic for other reasons have applauded its design qualities: "9 Chickweed Lane has more intriguing layouts and paneling decisions than anything else in newspaper comics of the last twenty years. It has that one thing going for it, and it is really going for it. Read it for the layouts. For the pacing decisions. For how he arranges panels and why he puts in them exactly what he puts in them."

Characters

Awards

9 Chickweed Lane won the National Cartoonists Society Award for Newspaper Strips in 2005. It has also received 2 Genesis Award Commendations, for bringing attention to animal rights in a sequence involving the adoption of a greyhound.

Spin-off

Brooke McEldowney is also the creator of the webcomic Pibgorn, a spin-off. The strips appear to share the same universe, with the character Thorax appearing in both series regularly, and almost the entire cast of Pibgorn showing up as guests at two Chickweed weddings in the strips of October 29, 2007, and August 28, 2017.

Collections

9 Chickweed Lane has been published in several hardcopy collections, most available from Pib Press. These include:

Controversy over anti-Asian language

On December 1, 2021, a strip including an anti-Asian slur resulted in GoComics pulling that day's strip. It was part of a series set during World War II, when the Japanese fighter plane Mitsubishi A6M Zero was often called a "Jap Zero" in contemporary usage. In more modern times, the term "Jap" has become considered a racial slur. On December 9, The Los Angeles Times announced that they were removing the strip after receiving "hundreds of letters" from readers. In their statement, they stated "Our decision was based not on one offensive comic but on an evaluation of the strip overall, and more broadly an evaluation of our entire comic catalog." GoComics did not publish the strip for December 1, nor for December 3 in which the term "queer" was used in a derogatory way.