There's even a book! Chicken Thoughts: Comics About Birds will come out on the 1st of November, 2020 but is already available to pre-order. And Sarah has definitely worked long and hard to get to this point. "I've drawn comics for my friends at least since I was 11 years old," the self-taught artist said. "My best friend Jacky and I were in a lot of the same grade school classes, and we would draw cartoons about ourselves and our classmates and show each other. My earliest influence was Calvin and Hobbes, I would read my mom's collections as a child." Now, Sarah is also a fan of other bird cartoonists like Potatopato, A Budgie's Life, and It's A Birb Thing. She also loves animals and thinks they are much more like us than we realize.
Sarah hopes that people who don't have birds can still enjoy her comics, and maybe learn to appreciate birds, too. She definitely does. Besides Chicken and Blue Boy, she has also had another parrotlet, White Boy, who makes rare appearances in the series.
"A lot of people wonder why the cartoon Chicken is a lutino male while the real-life Chicken is a grey female. That's because I just drew the first comic as a one-off about cockatiels in general and posted it in a Facebook bird group. It was such a hit that people asked me to make a page and post more! So the comic Chicken became based on my real-life bird, Chicken."
She said her real birds act much like their comic personas. "They are allowed to roam around the apartment every day, and they mostly like to hang around me and my boyfriend preening, asking for food, and receiving head scritches."
Another thing that's really cool about Chicken Thoughts is how tight-knit the fans of the series are. They're a true community. Last year, for example, the readers of the comic raised $2,500 to help care for a disabled rescue cockatiel. And the critter is simply thriving today! They also raised an additional $1,000 for My Best Friends Animal Society.
