My Crow Brethren

Interesting side-note, trying to spell brethren the way it’s usually pronounced means I misspell it every time.

Mildly Sensational spends a fair amount of time looking at random things on her phone. In most cases I think she starts out looking for something specific, then gets sucked down a rabbit hole of interesting links. Facebook has a similar event horizon that pulls you in and drowns you in posts about kittens, politics, and what your friends ate for lunch two days ago. Whenever she finds something particularly interesting, amusing, or both she’ll wander in to wherever I am at the moment, wait for me to turn around, and then hold out her phone with a smile that says, “look what I found.” If she doesn’t do that, she’ll just read me the story. In this case it was a story from the BBC about a girl that had started feeding the crows on her home from school. Her mother eventually noticed that birds were waiting for the bus to arrive, and her daughter was feeding them with the leftovers from her lunch. Over time this led to them setting up a feeding station and bird bath in their yard for the birds. Then they started receiving little gifts from the crows, which the little girl kept and labelled. It’s an amazing story and worth checking out.

The idea for the comic was already there. It just needed the word balloons. When I described the work in progress to my sister-in-law I told her it was taking this idea to a “ridiculous extreme.” That’s the bar I set, and I think I cleared it.

Mildly Sensational thought the leg hair I applied to my cartoon self was funny.

I feel like I should have worked in a Russell Crowe joke here.

ETA: I’m experimenting with a new layout that I may use more in future comics. In part, I’m practicing for another project that’s been stewing for ages, and I need to get started. It only hasn’t happened yet because, honestly, it’s intimidating as hell and I don’t know if I’m up for the challenge. This strip also seemed well suited for a funky layout kind of like what you might see in a Sunday comic, where cartoonists have a little more real estate to play with.