I don’t like to use the word ‘review’ on anything I write here. It sounds too serious for my tastes. A review is supposed to be structured and give reasons for all its opinions, maybe analyze and dissect the subject, and be all serious. It is easy to do badly. I don’t think of myself as a proper critic. I much prefer to simply say, “I like this, you might too,” which is basically what I do with my comics links page. That’s hard to screw up.

Even so, in this post I am attempting a review. Bear with me please.

So, Count Your Sheep. Click that link for the definition of bittersweet.

Count Your Sheep is a strip I’ve been avoiding for some time, for no good reason at all. Seriously, I have no idea why I haven’t read it before. It’s not like I haven’t seen links, on Websnark if nothing else. And it’s not like those links weren’t really, really good. I had just, for some unfathomable reason, decided that I wouldn’t read it. I guess it just has to be chalked up to stupidity.

Count Your Sheep chronicles the adventures of young Katie and her widowed mother Laurie, and their imaginary friend, the sheep Ship, who often helps them fall asleep at night. Counting Ship appears to be far more effective than counting normal sheep.

Count Your Sheep is cute. Very, very cute. Cute and sweet. Seriously, it’ll give you diabetes if you look at it too long. Un-manly though it may be, I actually like cute, especially when it is the kind of cute Count Your Sheep delivers on a pretty much daily basis.

Katie is a pretty believable child, innocent and curious and full of energy, and capable of cause plenty of mayhem. She’s too sweet to actually be a fully believable child. I have two younger siblings, and they both had a screaming streak that Katie seems to lack. This is not a real drawback, as the sweet and innocent Katie is much more fun to read about and more suited to the comic world than a screaming, realistic Katie would have been.

Count Your Sheep is funny. It’s not necessarily spit-take, laugh-so-hard-your-belly-hurts-funny, though there are strips that do that. Mostly, it is a warm kind of funny, that makes you smile or chuckle a bit. Be it from the relationship between Katie and Laurie, from the interactions with their mutual imaginary friend, or from the young Laurie’s relationship with her future husband.

Count Your Sheep is sad. It is heartbreakingly, painfully sad. Even at its most cheerful, there is an underlying melancholy, reinforced by the blue colors, and the purples used for the little Laurie strips.

Laurie is a struggling single mom, who works two jobs trying to make ends meet. As seen in the strip linked earlier, they had to pawn their TV, breaking Katie’s heart.

As I said earlier, this strip is the definition of bittersweet. Adrian Ramos manages to deliver heartbreak and humor, often in the same strip, which is extremely hard to do. Of the top of my head, I can’t think of any other strip I read which manages to do both simultaneously, and certainly not as well as Count Your Sheep does it.

If I was to complain about something, it would have to be the many unrelated sketches you have to flip through in the early archives, but other than that, reading Count Your Sheep is a joy. A teary, heartbreaking, gut-splitting joy. Count Your Sheep is now Highly Recommended.

(Also, it really needs Oh No Robot.)