‘Pearls Before Swine’ creator Stephan Pastis finds life is a croc
By WARD W. TRIPLETT III
The Kansas City Star, April 14, 2008
He still has no objections.
“Talk to any litigation lawyer, and 99 out of 100 all have some ‘out’ plan,” Pastis said. “When I said I was leaving, my colleagues at the firm looked at me like a cellmate must look at someone about to go over the wall. It was, ‘You go, brother.’ No one ever questioned me.
“You know how you have to work 40 years of your life? Well, 50 the way things are going now,” he says. “I feel like I’ve stolen the last six years. The profession has its bad points, sure, but it’s like complaining about the lines at Disneyland. Why? Shut up. You’re still at Disneyland.”
Pastis’ personal Disneyland of characters is on display daily in more than 450 newspapers, including this one. Pastis has twice won cartoonist of the year from the National Cartoonists Society. His work between January 2005 and August 2006 is showcased in his third treasury, The Crass Menagerie ($16.99; Andrews McMeel), released earlier this month.
While collections of strips aren’t key to a cartoonist’s survival, they do serve as safekeeping for fans. Pastis said he sees the collections as a record of the strip that otherwise wouldn’t exist.
“Newspapers are read and thrown away; people forget about them,” he said. “(Collections are) another way for people to see the strip. I’ve had people write me who say they just happened to see (the book) at a Borders or Barnes & Noble, looked through it, liked it and bought it, and their newspaper didn’t even carry it. And it can be fortunate, incomewise, if you sell enough of them. I must be doing OK. At least they keep giving me new book contracts.”
NEW Lynne McAdoo, vice president of sales for books for Kansas City-based Andrews McMeel, said Crass is already in the top three among humor books.
“In a relatively short amount of time, he has jumped to the top of the charts in terms of cartoon sellers,” she said.
McAdoo believes that’s due to the wide appeal of the strip. It has the talking animals, which the kids relate to. But the characters often engage in cynical behavior adults identify with.
“Most importantly, the strip is funny,” she said, “Which definitely helps.”
Pastis has some extra fun with his treasuries by adding commentaries to many of them. Sometimes he’ll mock his own drawing ability (“I can’t draw anything round … not too good about squares either. It’s a pretty big world of limitations”), note how characters evolved (the early crocs used to drop all “R’s” from their speech) or point out how human characters are renditions of friends. Pastis can tell from his e-mail that the commentary is the most popular element of the books, and he got the idea from a simple work habit.
“When I draw, I turn on the commentary of a DVD I’ve seen,” he said. “I’ve gone through all of the commentaries from ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ ‘The Office,’ ‘Extras,’ and I’m making my way through ‘Seinfeld’ now. That (running commentary) is what I had in mind (for the books).”
He’ll also deal with the occasional controversies. A popular strip involved tiny crocs that burst out of Easter eggs and surprised Zebra in bed. Zebra crushed them, but not before one told him to “love you enemy.” The original, which appears in the back of the book under “Not Ready for Prime Time Strips,” had the croc quo-ting from a tiny Bible.
Pastis said he gets maybe 35-40 e-mails per day about his strip, and he has learned that mentioning Jesus or religion will get people going. He received nearly 2,500 e-mails — and a letter from the Turkish ambassador — when he had a Turkish guest character a few years ago.“On the big ones, I didn’t see it coming,” he said. “The perception of the younger cartoonists is we like to throw stones just to throw stones, but the truth is less cool. The strip is drawn six months in advance. They go out, and it just hits some nerve.
“I’ve learned to stay away (from certain subjects). Now I use kind of a sliding scale. If I think it’s funny enough … if the funny factor is really high, then I’ll go with it even if it might offend. If it’s not that funny, I won’t bother with it. But you never really know what will get someone upset.
“The funny thing is, the angrier you get about a comic … the sooner you’re going to lose that argument,” Pastis said. “At some point you have to realize it’s pen-and-ink doodles of animals that don’t really exist. Why are you getting this upset about that?”
Pastis has his own sounding board at home. His son Thomas, 10, and daughter Julia, 6, are also the first people to see a completed strip.
“One: I figure if a 10-year-old can understand it, then it must be OK,” Pastis said. “Two: I don’t want to be hypocritical. If I don’t want to show it to my own kids, I shouldn’t show it to anybody else’s. Now I don’t always explain it to them …”
Thomas has also developed an interest in comics in general, though Pastis sounded only half-proud of that.
“He’s not reading mine … he’s reading ‘FoxTrot,’ which makes me glad because that’s a smart, funny strip,” Pastis says. “But he’s still reading ‘Garfield,’ too. That makes me sad.”
Rat: The cynic
Pig: Sweet and humble
Zebra: Smart and vigilant
Crocs: Hungry and dumb
The Pastis treatment
Fans of “Pearls Before Swine” are familiar with the strip’s parody of older strips. And while “Pearls” fans enjoy it, fans of the older strips don’t always enjoy being the subject of the parody.
Case in point: Rat’s concierge job had Ted Forth from “Sally Forth” asking Rat to set up an interesting evening away from his “emasculating” wife. “Pearls” creator Stephan Pastis said he received an intensely angry note from a woman who insisted he had sullied the Forth name and owed its cartoonist an apology.
Truth be told, Pastis contacted Francesco Marciuliano late last fall, told him he planned to make fun of his strip and asked him if he’d help by making some mention of “Pearls” in the “Forth” strip. Marciuliano, whom he had never met before that note, surprised him by timing a strip to the same day (March 27) that had Ted in a hotel, telling Sally he had just talked to the concierge.
“I forwarded the e-mail to (Marciuliano) saying, ‘Hey, this woman thinks I owe you a big apology and, well, you’re not going to get it.’ I CC’d her with it, and he explained to her that he was in on it.”
Fans of “The Family Circus,” “Zits” and “Baby Blues” have seen their characters get the Pastis treatment too and usually don’t respond well. But for the record, “Family Circus” fans, author Bil Keane has been asked to write the introduction to Pastis’ next book — despite Pastis’ plans to imperil little Billy twice in the next few months.
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