I don’t make a habit of explaining jokes, strips, or punchlines.  But not everyone is going to get this, so read on for an explanation.

The comic community was a-buzz last week with comic speculation, news, and realization.

Gentleman cartoonist Stephan Pastis pulled off a coup that had ever cartoonist both professional and armature envious.  Stephan is creator and artist for a comic strip called Pearls Before Swine.  You can find the strip on GoComics here. He started a story-arc last Monday which featured one of his main character (who incidentally is supposed to be Stephan himself) bringing a second grader into his studio because the second grader claims she can draw Stephan’s comic strip better than he can.  This story-arc can be found here.  Now it’s not the story-arc that had in internet burning up but the artwork the second grader produced.  The style was a huge departure from Stephan’s own style and it was very reminiscent of something Bill Watterson might do (if he still did comic strips).  For those who don’t know who Bill is, he is the creator for the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.  As the strips progressed, more and more people were convinced that Bill was ghost writing Stephan’s strips.  Turns out, Bill and Stephan collaborated and Bill wound up drawing a panel in three of the strips last week.  This story can be found literally all over the internet but you can catch up here.

Let me put this into prospective if I may.

Bill Watterson was the artist for one of the most successful comic strips in comic strip history, Calvin and Hobbes.  In the height of it’s popularity, it ran in a total of 2,500 newspapers world wide.  During the height of the strips popularity, Bill announced he was retiring and the last strip was published December of 1995.  Bill then disappeared into the shadows.  He’s never did another comic strip since and over the years, became reclusive shying away from the public limelight.  He never made public appearances and rarely granting interviews.  However, recently, Bill has begun to resurfacing.  He provided poster and DVD artwork for a comic strip documentary called Stripped.  But the biggest thing he done so far was to collaborate with Stephan Pastis and create a couple of comic strips for Pearls.  For a cartoonist, this is the equivalent for having Ansel Adams grabbing your iPhone and “snapping” a couple of pics.

So that’s it.  That’s where the inspiration for my strip has come from.  Guess you could say my inspiration essentially came from blind envy.