The above strip above was going to be today’s Cool Jerk, but I had a change of heart. Here’s the backstory:

First, I saw a Garfield comic last year and thought “Holy crap — what the hell happened to his proportions? It doesn’t even look like a CAT anymore!” Over time, Garfield’s eyes had grown so ridiculously huge that I figured at some point they’d sag out of his head like the giant breasts of a 70-year-old stripper.

Then I thought, “Hey, that’s a Cool Jerk.” And I jotted the idea down in my phone. There it sat for months, until last week when I put pencil to paper.

I was pretty happy with it, all the way through the inks. Then it dawned on me, “this is kind of a one-note sight gag, at the expense of Puppy’s… um… physique.” In other words, plain ol’ boob joke. While there’s a time and a place for everything, I grew unhappy with it. I challenged myself to find a better solution that allowed for a sight gag comparing Puppy to that cat’s over-endowed eyeballs without having to recreate the whole strip from scratch.

Thank God I gave Puppy earrings back in 1987.