It's been a long time since I'd rendered a piece of 'fan art' devoted to a comic strip or webcomic. Past efforts included tributes to "Peanuts", "Dandy & Company", "Freefall", and "Boomer Express" (all of which can be viewed in my "FA" gallery, of course).

Well, this time I'd decided to 'kill two birds with one stone' by paying tribute to a current popular syndicated strip, and (at the same time) make a reference to one of my 'fat furry' gags from last year.

To be specific, it was my "2012 Roly-Polympics" gag for the Men's Quadruple Sculling event - with four fat rowing cats and one fat coxswain, all of them ending up completely submerged. You can view this classic gag from one year ago by visiting this link: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8620570/ .

I was going to spring a follow-up gag, regarding this event, which lead up to an extremely bad (but classic) pun. But I eventually postponed my plans (for reasons to lengthy to go into detail).

However, I got re-inspired to present my bad pun at an ideal venue for it... in the popular syndicated comic strip "Pearls Before Swine" by Stephan Pastis. Every now and then, a strip features a terrible joke or an excruciatingly bad pun in the penultimate panel, resulting in one of its characters complaining to a caricature of the cartoonist (coincidentally named 'Pastis'). The one who does the most complaining is the strip's resident cynic 'Rat'.

So, long story short, I finally got around to pairing off 'Rat' with my bobcat 'fursona' (since it was 'Rob Cat' who was credited for drawing that "Roly-Polympics" gag last year), and fed the rodent the bad pun fuel needed to go after his own creator in the last panel.

If you are still unfamiliar with this award-winning comic strip (and the recurring 'bad pun' running gag it contains), why not visit "Pearls Before Swine" at this link: http://www.gocomics.com/pearls_before_swine/ .

'Rob Cat' © Jed Martinez
'Rat', 'Pastis', and "Pearls Before Swine" © Stephan Pastis/Distributed by Universal Uclick