One of the nation’s most popular cartoonists, whose strip “Pearls Before Swine” is carried in more than 900 newspapers, will be making an appearance in Iowa next week.
Stephan Pastis has more than 40 “Pearls” collections in print, but he’s releasing a huge, hard-cover book called “Pearls Jubilee” to mark the strip’s 25th anniversary. In an interview with Radio Iowa, Pastis says he hand-picked everything that went into the 288-page retrospective.
“I guess what most people do is they go through and they find just a good sampling of their career, but I went through and categorized the strips by like the 200 best, and the ten that got the most complaints, and the ten worst, and the ten most popular pun strips,” Pastis says, “so I just categorized them all and then I ranked them because I thought that was more interesting, at least to me.”
Pastis spent nearly a decade as an insurance defense litigator, but became disenchanted with being a lawyer and longed to pursue his childhood dream of becoming a syndicated cartoonist. After introducing himself to “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz in a coffee shop in 1996 and having an hour-long chat, Pastis set a new course for himself, though it took several more years to break into the industry. Pastis calls Schulz “the root of the tree” for modern cartoonists.
“He comes along in 1950 and everything changes. Before him, it’s all kind of slapstick and silly for the most part, and then after him, you can really comment on anything you want,” Pastis says. “So you have all sorts of strips that branch out from that, like Doonesbury and Bloom County, and so I think when I do stuff like that, I’m more in that vein.”
Two of the main characters in “Pearls” are Rat, who’s often smug, self-centered and mean, and Pig, who’s dim-witted, but sweet and earnest. Pastis was asked if each character contains a little bit of himself.
“When I met Schultz, that’s actually something he told me, because I asked him that same question about the ‘Peanuts’ characters, and he said that all of the characters in the strip are aspects of his personality, because all you really know well enough to base a character on is aspects of yourself,” Pastis says. “I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it was true for him, and I sort of followed that model. I think I’m probably mostly Rat, but I try to be Pig.”
The new book contains some “Pearls” strips that never appeared in papers as they were too controversial. Pastis recalls his storyline about overthrowing the government was yanked as it was scheduled to appear during January of 2021, around the time when the U.S. Capitol was the scene of an insurrection. It was a complete coincidence, as Pastis says he’d penned the strip eight months prior.
Many newspapers have struggled to stay profitable in recent years, and some comic strips are only available online now via subscription websites. Pastis says he’s still making a comfortable living from “Pearls,” but he’s also learned to diversify.
“I branched out into children’s books, so I did a series called ‘Timmy Failure’ that was eight volumes and Disney turned it into a movie,” Pastis says, “and I recently did a — it’s going to be a trilogy — these three books based on a He-Man character that Mattel made, so I’m always doing other projects.”
Pastis will appear at 6:30 PM on Monday at Drake University’s Olmsted Center in Des Moines for a free moderated talk.
