cowbirds in love

I finished another 24 Hour Comic but I am too sleepy to scan all the pages right now.

The comic is called “Addicted To Ghosts”.

I hope you like it.

Cowbirds in Love has a pretty poor link page.  I haven’t updated it in forever.  But, starting soon, that’s all going to change.

I’m going to wipe the page clean and profile a different comic every day.  This should be very exciting.

I also haven’t updated the store page in a while.  Don’t buy anything.  I’m out of shirts!

I’m not doing one today.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT, HUH????

I’ll finish Musical Theater Week tomorrow.

It might not be up until well into Valentine’s Day.  I’m going to be busy tonight because I’m going to go see Jekyll & Hyde AKA the Ultimate Romantic Comedy Musical.

Just saying.

We have new small things eating big things at my site Small Things Eating Big Things.  Ducks and afros!

To read more about it, visit the project’s LiveJournal page.

I kind of underestimated the number of blues parties I would be going to last night, and I’m just getting back now.

I’m gonna sleep a bit then give you guys your comic.  I’m not going to cheat you out of another one though.

We have a new one!

By the amazingly charming and lovable Michael Firman, no less.

I know I’ve been dragging my feet with this project lately, but this is just what I needed to kick us back into hyperdrive!

Lauren and Stuart Taylor of the wonderful comic Chain Bear got married on the 17th of October.  Since they aren’t drawing comics during their honeymoon, they asked a couple of people to do a guest comic, and I was one of them.  Check it out.

This is an absolute honor because Chain Bear is one of my favorite comics.  If you’ve never read it before you should.

Kind of tired after a visit with some excellent friends to see an excellent move, “Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus”.

Good attributes my friends have:

*Fun
*Funny
*Nice

Good attributes the movie had:

*Ridiculous
*Implausible
*Giant Octopus

Hey Bird Brains!

There’s no comic tonight because I got back much later from hanging out with friends than I expected.  The fact that I had a good time is probably little consolation to you not having a comic.

Did you guys see the Left-Handed Toons guest toon I did a few weeks back?  It’s here!

Left-Handed Toons is one of the finest comics on the internet and I’ve been a huge fan for as long as I have been doing comics, so this was an amazing honor for me.

If you haven’t checked out L-HT, do yourself a favor and check it out.

I am going to be at SPX Saturday and Sunday.

Since I’m small time and everything I’m just going as a fan, but if you are going too we should totally meet up and high five.  Look for me.

On Saturday I’ll be wearing one of the latest shirts from the amazing Left-Handed Toons (the one about instant oatmeal) and on Sunday I’ll probably be wearing something I get on Saturday.  So you could use that information to find me.

Or you could just look for someone carrying themselves with the air of webcomic excellence.

In other news, an artist named Lauren R. Tharp has drawn a box with fan art of her favorite comics.

Check it out and see if you notice anything familiar.

What I notice is that one of my characters is on the same friggin’ box as Jughead!  Right below him!  So awesome.

Lauren is auctioning off the box to raise money for a Children’s Hospital.  And also a Savings Account, which isn’t a bad cause either, honestly.

So to wrap this all up, I am too small-time to pay for a table at SPX, but am on the same level as Jughead.  Don’t forget it.

Ahoy, birdbrains!

I’m taking the night off tonight and I’m not gonna draw you all a comic.

If you are absolutely starved for comics in the meantime, maybe you should check out some of these excellent ones that are made by excellent people:

Drawing Board
Buttersafe
Left-Handed Toons
Moe Comics

I kind of wanted to make the news more visible, so I asked for Gabe to make it so.  And Gabe totally rules, so that’s what he did.

I’m also looking to get the news posts added to the RSS feed.  I hope you don’t mind too much.  There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening all over the internet and I want to point you to it.

For instance, did you know I did a guest comic for Tumble and Fall?  It’s true!  There’s a whole guest month going on over there in September and I was the opening act!

Last night, around 2 AM EST, we finished transcribing the entire archive.  This was the last one to get typed up.  Now you can search the comics simply and easily, and we also have a new random comic button to play with.

Together, in four days, we typed up almost two years of daily updates.  I’m so grateful for your support and delighted this comic has such a fantastic bunch of readers.

I also continue to be grateful to our site designer Gabe Boning, who added the searchability functions and has gotten this site looking better than I could ever have hoped to.

I’ll keep trying my best to make good comics.  Always feel free to drop me a line and let me know how I’m doing.

Thanks so much,

Sanjay

I want Cowbirds in Love to be searchable.

But there is one problem.  Computers can’t read comics and transcribing 541 comics is a lot of work for one person to do.

The solution is you!  If everyone transcribes a few comics, this could be done really quickly.

Here’s how to help:

1) Find a comic that hasn’t been transcribed yet.  Try this to find one.
2) Click on the ‘transcribe this comic’ button to the top left of the comic.  I’ve heard people with Safari were having trouble seeing the button, but hopefully you don’t.  The transcribe button disappears when a transcription is made, so if you don’t see it, hopefully that’s a good thing.
3) Transcribe away!

Here’s some extra notes on making a good transcription:

*Include mouseover text and the text under the comic.
*Put the title of the comic in the “Title of comic” field.

I have a lot of unnamed characters so if you want to give one a silly name or name it after yourself feel free.  I might change it if I already had a name in mind, but otherwise, why not?  Just stay consistent.

Lastly, I already announced Oh No Robot on my twitter account and to the facebook group this evening, and we already have over 50 transcriptions.  Thanks so much to everyone that has taken the time to improve my little webcomic.

-Sanjay

I wanted to thank you all.  Thanks especially to everyone who bought a shirt, thanks to everyone that gave me feedback, and thanks for everyone that put up with all the t-shirt plugging.

If you did buy a shirt and there are any problems with it, let me know and I’ll do what I can to make it right as soon as I can.

I felt comfortable taking down the big banner ad on top of the site sine I now have enough money to pay for hosting for the next year.  I’m talking to Gabe about what else we can fill all that nice new open space with.

Two years ago, Alex Culang and Raynato Castro had a vision.? A vision of a beautiful webcomic.? That vision became the comic Buttersafe.

One year ago, they had another vision.? A vision of pizza.? That vision became the event BSX.

But BSX is in California, and if you don’t live close to California, it is far away.? Luckily for us, however, satellite BSXs have popped up all around the globe.

I’m going to BSX-Philly.? And If you want to come hang out with me and eat pizza, you should to.

BSX-Philly is going to be at 4-6 PM at Allegro Pizza.? I haven?t told Allegro Pizza about this because I didn’t think a lot of people were coming, so RSVP (either to me or on the BSX forum) so I can alert Allegro if we are going to show up with a big crowd.

First things first:

I make a comic called Cowbirds in Love.  Okay.

You maybe have noticed that while the title emotion of my comic shows up A LOT, the title animals shows up very little.  This didn’t bother me so much until Mike Hazeltine pointed out to me that someone had added my site to the “Cowbirds in popular culture” section of the cowbird article on Wikipedia.

My heart really goes out to all those cowbird lovers that notice my comic on the Wikipedia page, check it out, and all they get are a bunch of humans giving hearts to each other.  To partially remedy this situation, tomorrow I’m starting Ornithology Week.  Seven days of comics about birds.

I only have two comics drawn so far and I only have two other ideas, so let’s hope this is a good week for thinking about jokes about our feathered friends.

Firstly, if you are reading this, I finally wrested control of my site back from web designer and site-jacker Gabe Boning.  Let that be a lesson to all that doubted my hacking skills.

Secondly, the comic Rock Paper Cynic is having a fundraiser to build a school in Sierra Leone.  This is a good cause so I thought I would suggest some good ways to help out:

1) You can donate to the cause.
2) You can get some advertising at Rock Paper Cynic until Sunday.  All the money that doesn’t go to Project Wonderful is going straight to the cause.
3) You can click the advertising to make it more attractive or something.
4) You can have a semi-successful webcomic and tell people about the fundraiser.

My first piece of news:

The brain behind the comic turrbull interviewed me.  It was fun to be interviewed and Patrick seems like a real swell guy.

My second piece of news:

Michael Firman’s Moe Comics is really fantastic.  It displays a wit, humor and economy that I could only dream about.  Everyone should check it out.  This one is my favorite, I think.

A bit of a funny story how Moe Comics came to my attention.  I was checking out
isitfunnytoday when I noticed this comic.  Seems awfully like the less well crafted Cowbirds in Love comic Love bites?, I thought.  I called this to Mr. Firman?s attention and I got this real swell email apologizing for the similarity.

He speculated that perhaps he read my comic and subconsciously used the same joke, but I prefer to think that this was just a case of two geniuses of webcomics coming across the same great joke concept.  And if you check out Moe Comics you will discover that, in fact, Michael Firman is a webcomic genius.

My third piece of news:

Spam bots were spamming up the comments on news feeds, so Gabe added this swell anti-spam question.  As far as I know, “yes” is an acceptable answer.

So Greg and I were on a crazy late night adventure and I didn’t update my comic because APPARENTLY there is no app for that. But we were able to make this news update thanks to Steve Jobs and his amazing technology!

I got a letter for a reader wondering why I was taking the week off and being a slacker.

I have a big test this Friday, so that was the deal.

It’s not that bigger than most of my tests I guess, but the message I’m trying to send is that it is never the wrong time to slack off.

Today I was on the Chinatown bus from Philly to DC and a two-thousand dollar electric oud fell out of the sky onto my head.  The person whose oud it was immediately started asking if I was okay, and I immediately started asking if his oud was okay.

I was worried my amazingly durable skull would have destroyed his expensive instrument, and he didn?t know how strong my head was, so he was worried about my brain or something.

But we both were worried for nothing because my brain was fine and the oud was fine.  Then we talked about his career as a musician and he told me about touring.  It was cool.

I wanted to share some sites I found recently:

thingpart: Okay, this comic is really excellent.  As far as I can tell it is already big time and doesn?t need my support, but I am linking to it anyway because it is so good.

Sunshine Pictorum: This isn?t a webcomic exactly.  It?s a collection of a bunch of comics, animations and photoshop jobs done by this one person.  It?s a big archive, but you should be able to find something you like in there.

Literally, A Web Log: Alert reader Jesse sent me a link to this blog.  It collects and chronicles incidences of people misusing the world literally.  It?s kind of excellent.

Check those out and let me know what you think.

I was thinking of putting the banner ad from the top of the site on the bottom of the RSS feed.  For two reasons:

Reason one: I’m planning on doing something fun with the banner ad.  I’ve instituted a minimum bid on the ad, and unless people are willing to fork over the big bucks (ten cents a day), that ad box displays whatever I want.  I’ve asked the authors of webcomics I love if they’d like to put up an ad when there aren’t any bids and several of them are down for it.  So what that means is that some of the time the ad is going to promote my favorite sites on the internet, and some of the time it is going to promote deep-pocketed high rollers.

Exciting!

Reason two: It might make the ad box more profitable.

But I don’t want to just foist ads on you even if I think they are cool.  So let me know what you think.

I forgot about turrbull!

This comic did me a real solid by including me in its collection ”you should also read this in 2009”.  That ruled.

But besides that, turrbull is a really excellent photocomic.

Speaking of things I forgot, I mentioned pictures for sad children a few days ago without mentioning The Hourly Comic, a journal comic by the same writer that puts my update schedule to shame.

A handful of cool sites have linked to me and I just wanted to return the favor and shine some light back at them.  That’s what this news post is all about.  Check these out:

MT Your Mind: This is a new comic by my friend Milton Tan.  You should definitely check it out.  Milton put up a special congratulatory update to celebrate the new site yesterday, which was a really awesome move on his part.

Core Dump: This is a comic my friend Matt started.  I’m pretty positive he was inspired by yours truly.  Actually, I think Milton was too.  Hopefully by the time I am finished I have inspired all my friends to make webcomics.  Anyway, between my comic, Matt’s comic and Milton’s comic, we have quite a faction going.

The Robot is Sad: I am so psyched to be on the links page of this excellent comic.  This is going to be my foothold from which I gain the respect of the rest of the webcomic community.

i hit on you: This is a blog that collects tales of being hit on.  A while ago, Katie, who runs the site, asked me if I wanted to illustrate a few of the tales on the site.  I was totally up for that.  Then I procrastinated for a long time.  Anyway, I finally drew one and it is up there.  Here’s the original story, and here’s my comic.

The Tragic End of Normality: This comic linked to me before everyone else here.  I haven’t checked out everything on the site (it’s not just comics, either), but I am super happy to be on their links page.

By the way, maybe if you run those sites you should check your links page to see if any of the sites on it have recently changed URLs to http://cowbirdsinlove.com.  They might have!

In late November, I got an email from a high school student named Gabe Boning offering to redesign my site.  I was all for that, so over December he put together the site you see now.

I’m pretty happy with it.  Besides a snazzy new layout, let me tell you about some new stuff the site has:

A news page: You are looking at it right now!
An RSS feed: It has the actual comic and all the normal extra text.  You should subscribe to it!
A new banner ad: I wanted to raise a bit more money so I can pay for hosting the site.

Besides that, Gabe made it way easy for me to update the site.  I can do it in a fraction of the time now.

I’d really like to know what you think of the site.  Conveniently, you can leave comments on news items.