Count Your Sheep is a comic by Adrian Ramos (better known to his fans as "Adis") about a hyperactive young girl named Katie, her neurotic mother, and their shared imaginary friend, a sheep named Ship.
Originally intended as an endless variation on the joke that when Katie wants to go to sleep she only needed to count sheep — of which she only had one, which made it very easy. Very soon Adis realised that this joke would wear very thin very fast, and began following Katie and Ship in their day-to-day lives instead, introducing her mother Laurie as a character (for six years, these three were the only people to ever appear in the strip; recently Laurie's sister became the fourth (and her newborn baby would become the fifth)). Laurie even started getting her own "Back in Time" strips, flashing back to when she was a kid and she and Ship had the kind of relationship that he now has with Katie.
One of the few G-rated webcomics ever produced (along with Irregular Webcomic!), it mostly focuses on single gags and humorous, epigrammatic observations, although at times it has longer story arcs, and it is gradually establishing a backstory about Laurie's romance with her late husband.
In addition to the regular comic, the artist posts fanart he has done for other comics, and a series of The Far Side-like single panel strips called "Adrianisms."
Seemed to be an Orphaned Series as Adis hadn't updated it since 2011. Until unexpectedly updating in 2014, for about a dozen updates. By March 2016, the site is once more in hiatus.
Can be read here
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This webcomic provides examples of:
- Accidental Aiming Skills: at this page.
- Art Evolution: Taking a look from page 1 to the latest page shows an amazing amount of change throughout the strip.
- Call-Back: Many strips are different pastiches of the original strip. Latest here.
- Cut and Paste Comic: Not very blatant, but fairly often a pose will be recycled between panels, though usually with the expression changed.
- Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Death was one of Ship's teachers, back in the day; and an excellent teacher he was, as evidenced by Ship's incredible capacity to induce drowsiness. In one brief flashback, Ship, having fallen on hard times, runs into his old teacher while on a coffee run. Death pokes fun at the sheep who majored in sleep for taking a job that has him keeping people awake.
- Disappeared Dad: Marty, Katie's father, is known to have passed away before the beginning of the strip.
- Embarrassing Damp Sheets: Subverted here. Ship talks to Katie about her sheets being damp every morning...and learns that she has been keeping popsicles under the pillow.
- Flash Back: The "Back in Time" sequences featuring Katie's mother, Laurie, when she was a child and Ship was her imaginary friend.
- Mistaken for Gay: Played with, in one story Katie gets upset and locks herself in her closet. Ship tells Laurie that she won't come out of the closet. He then has to explain the situation a little more for her.
- That Cloud Looks Like...
- The Tape Knew You Would Say That: Marty's letters to Laurie.
- Tsundere: Laurie as a kid.
- Visible to Believers: Katie's "imaginary friend" Ship is real, but can only be seen by certain people. At first that's Katie and Katie's mom Laurie (whose imaginary friend Ship was when she was Katie's age), but later the strip introduces Laurie's mom — who can see Ship, but repeatedly denies that she believes he exists even when she's talking to him and there's nobody else around — and Laurie's Cool Big Sis — who can't see Ship, even though she believes he exists.
- Will They or Won't They?: Subverted, mostly, because although that vibe is there, we already know Marty's significance to Laurie.
