I have no idea what inspired this, though most likely it's the fact that I've been reading Jim Davis by John Masefield recently. It is, incidentally, the story of how Jim Davis's life intersected with Pirates, first helping them, then trying to stop them before being drafted into their ranks, which is where I am currently in the book. Just if you were curious what it's about.

The idea was to actually do a full strip, which would not have been that much more effort artistically, but it turns out to be much harder to write Moosefield strips than I would have thought. Part of it is that it's hard to shift the characters into that context, but the other part is just that writing a (good) Garfield strip is actually kinda hard. In three panels you have to have an expectation, an upset to that expectation some explanation of why that happened and a reaction. To my eye that's four panels of material crammed into three panels, and it's interesting to see what gets crammed together or dropped.

Actually, looking at recent strips it seems to be either the set up or the explanation that gets dropped every time, which might go a long way to why they're so crap these days.