04.11.07
Link Wednesday: Wooly Blessings
Fair warning: this is going to get a little sappy and overly sentimental. Anyone with severe allergies to saccharine or Type II Diabetes might want to skip this entry… or, alternately, you can go read the interview I did with Backbone Entertainment, who are making the US-centric remake of Tokimeki Memorial. Actually, if you are interested in that please go read that and come back. Hooray for mixed messages!
About a week ago I came across a relatively new webcomic. “New” of course has to be prefaced by “relatively” because while the strip was started in 2003, it hadn’t come to my attention until Friday or so. Anyway. Titled Count Your Sheep, by Adrian “Adis” Ramos. Nominally, the strip revolves around the young Katie and her imaginary sheep friend Ship; the title comes from the first gag of the strip, and the oft-recurring one where Ship can lull anyone to sleep just by himself. Of course, the only people who can see Ship are Katie, her mother Laurie (who had Ship as an imaginary friend during her own childhood), and Katie’s father Marty (who is deceased and never appears in the strip proper, but is referenced many times).
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s basically Calvin and Hobbes taken a couple steps further. Whereas C&H widened the world a little bit, however, Count Your Sheep focuses almost exclusively on the three primary characters. Other people are never seen and seldom named. The strip plays with time quite a bit; switches from Katie’s childhood to Laurie’s happen frequently and abruptly at times. On occasion, strips extend into short storylines, and there are plenty of recurring gags that come up now and again (such as Katie’s love of soccer vs. Laurie’s football fanaticism). The one-shot strips are especially good.
It’s actually very hard for me to define what makes the strip so very compelling. As I’d said, the whole tone of the comic is very sweet and almost cloying at times. Despite this, however, there’s a sincerity in Ramos’ writng and art that makes even the most obsequieous moral completely transparent. It’s unabashedly heart-tugging, and for my part that makes it worth reading. That’s not to say every strip drips with sugary nausea; the touching moments come more frequently than in other webcomics, but the vast majority of the strips have hilarious and off-kilter punchlines that are so very worth it. It tries to emulate Calvin and Hobbes to a great extent, and more miraculously, it actually succeeds in its efforts.
While I certainly would encourage folks to read over the entire archive from the beginning (shouldn’t take you more than an hour or two if you skip the non-CYS strips early on), a few moments stand out as being worth highlighting, in no particular order: The flame of Olympus, gratitude, the best policy, waterbed liquidation sale, the defense rests, in the land of the blind…, (can’t say without spoiling it), enjoy the silence, they both start with ‘d’ (one of my personal favorites, by the by), the only prescription, condensed, and it’s what’s for breakfast. ….so I went a little overboard. Actuially I left out quite a few that kept me giggling for hours, so consider these just a starting point.
Catch you folks tomorrow.