My second guess was correct. Brooke McEldowney’s nine-month-long newspaper-strip tale of parted WWII lovers didn’t end this past month but took yet another lap as Juliette and her daughter, Edda, discover Peter Kiesl — recently revealed to be Juliette’s biological father — alive in Vienna.
Kiesl follows them back to New Hampshire to show up at Edna’s (Juliette’s mother and his lover in New York City) front yard.
Will he stay? Will he go? The story, it seems, continues ….
Read my earlier post on this here.
It appears Brooke McEldowney might be coming to conclusion of his eight-month-long storyline in 9 Chickweed Lane of grandmother Edna’s flashback about her days as a USO singer and spy during World War II.
Or maybe he’s just getting his second wind. After all, the tale ends — if this is the end — with Edna confessing to her daughter, Juliette, that Austrian opera singer Peter Kiesl, whom she met when he was a prisoner of war in England, is Juliette’s father — not Edna’s husband, American war hero (and her handler as a spy) Bill O’Malley.
Surely there’ll need to be long, agonizing talks with granddaughter Edda and just about everyone else in the strip. Not one of these characters seems to be able to keep a secret.
But it was an intriguing story and never flagged. Bravo.
Read my post on the start, more or less, of this storyline here.
Brooke McEldowney’s 9 Chickweed Lane is an odd strip. As an illustrator, he has an excellent eye, especially for the feminine form. Too often, however, the strip is about cats or some old guy in bib overalls named Thorax, who believes he communes with the cosmos. It’s full of too much New Hampshire whimsy.
But every so often an uncharacteristic storyline gets a stranglehold on events, and something, well, truly interesting happens. An earlier storyline followed two characters in a music competition overseas and their own unfolding passionate love story, which to their mix of horror and delight got transmitted on YouTube. (In sibling Pigborn, the characters of Chickweed played out A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
The current Chickweed story is a flashback, in which the grandmother tells her daughter of her WWII days singing for the USO — until she was recruited by U.S. military intelligence to entertain German POWs, hold their hands and listen to their deepest secrets … including, G2 hopes, about troop strength, movement and the like.
“When I reached out and they held my hands, they seemed saddest, and so happy to talk,” Edna recalls.
But her deepest challenge came from non-Germans. “Somehow people knew I had been visiting a POW camp, and I could feel their hostility. I consorted with the enemy … and the enemy were killers as far as they were concerned.”
She also remembers the English anger with the Yanks, who arrived late, again, to the war. “So then I showed up, gliding into and out of POW camps to sing to Germans. I began to wonder whose ally I really was. And I couldn’t explain it to anybody.”
