Stephan Pastis Blurs Boundaries in Comic Strip 'Pearls'

Allen Pierleoni - Sacramento Bee

Recently, "Pearls Before Swine" cartoonist Stephan Pastis was on trial as a character in his own comic strip.

Which was around the time he was waiting in his real life to find out whether he had to serve as a trial juror.

"I got called all the way to the courtroom, but the defendant must have pled guilty at the last minute, because the judge dismissed us," he said on the phone from his home in Santa Rosa.

And the "Pearls" courtroom scenes?

"I had advocated revolution in the strip, and had made an agreement with the federal government to have a more family-friendly strip," he explained. "I was 'on trial' because I'd broken the plea agreement. Isn't that funny?"

Yes, it is. And telling. It's one more tweak in the fine line that separates Pastis' actual world and the cartoon world of "Pearls Before Swine."

It's not unusual for the two to cross boundaries, he said.

Pastis is a former attorney and award-winning syndicated cartoonist whose strip appears in 650 newspapers, including daily in The Bee. His latest "treasury" -- a compilation of 18 months' worth of "Pearls Before Swine" strips -- is "Pearls Blows Up" (Andrews McMeel, $16.99, 256 pages). It's the Bee Book Club's choice for September.

His "trial" in "Pearls" aside, the notion of a cartoonist regularly including himself as a character in his own strip is ... well, unusual, no?

"I tell readers it takes a special kind of egotistical ass to do that," Pastis said. "A comic strip is just an artifice for a person. No matter which strip you're reading, you're seeing one person. He just comes to you through his characters. So when you do it as a character yourself, you're breaking down a wall between the cartoonist and the reader. But if you're not self-deprecating about it, it doesn't work."

Pastis describes his "Pearls" alter ego as a "fat, cigarette-smoking, backward-hat-wearing, 5 o'clock-shadowed loser. I guess I want to look like more of a grungy degenerate than I am."

It's not uncommon for fans to confuse the real Pastis with the cartoon Pastis, he said.

"We were visiting (recuperating American soldiers) at a hospital in Germany, when one guy -- he turned out to be in charge of the hospital -- said, 'Hey, you don't look like you're supposed to look.' I said, 'I don't really look like that.' "

The hospital visit was part of USO-sponsored tours of Afghanistan (2009) and Iraq (2010), in which selected members of the National Cartoonist Society entertained troops.

"Those trips were the highlight of my career," Pastis said.

Though his childhood dream was to become a cartoonist, he first worked as a defense attorney in the Bay Area while simultaneously submitting ideas for strips to national syndicates.

United Syndicate (purchased in July by Universal Syndicate) finally picked up "Pearls Before Swine," a conglomeration of characters and situations from several of Pastis' other proposed strips.

After a couple of years as a Web-based strip, "Pearls" appeared in print on New Year's Eve 2001. It was named best newspaper comic strip in 2003 by the NCS and was nominated by that group for the Oscar of cartooning -- the Reuben Award -- in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

All of which was well- deserved, said Andrew Farago, co-president of the Northern California chapter of the NCS and curator of the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.

"I'm working on an exhibition of outstanding cartoonists of the new millennium, and Stephan is on my short list," Farago said. "Newspaper readers have certain expectations about the contents of the funnies, but 'Pearls' is one of those rare strips that challenges those expectations."

Like so many cartoonists, Pastis says his major influence was the late Charles Schulz and his iconic "Peanuts" strip. Fittingly, Pastis and his wife, Staci, and their two children live "about three miles" from the Charles M. Schulz Museum. Charlie Brown makes an occasional appearance in "Pearls," and "a lot of my background scenes are right out of 'Peanuts,' " he said.

"I got his 25th anniversary book in 1976 and there were photos of Sparky (Schulz's lifelong nickname) drawing in his studio," Pastis said. "I really wanted to do that. The greatest day I ever had as a lawyer is nowhere near as good as the worst day I've had as a cartoonist. It's like a hobby somebody pays me for."

What was so traumatic about the legal profession?

"I really couldn't stand it," he said. "It's a life of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. Every lawyer I've ever talked to has an out -- they're either going to open a winery or write a children's book or something."

That said, Pastis mentions his own "huge project -- a novel for middle- graders. I'm on page 170. It's illustrated in the genre of the 'Wimpy Kid' books."

As for the mechanics of creating "Pearls," it takes him 90 minutes to two hours to draw a daily strip, and four to five hours to draw a Sunday strip.

"But the writing is always a crap shoot," he added. "If I write for three hours, typically I will have at least two strips. Sometimes I'll write eight hours and have zero."

The art and the writing have to work together, he emphasized, but "it comes down to the writing. The big question is: Can you write?"

Pastis admires Scott "Dilbert" Adams for his writing skill and calls Gary Larson's "The Far Side" the "gold standard when it comes to being funny."

What about the sources of Pastis' own material?

"People assume you see something funny and go do a strip. That happens, but very rarely," he said. "What it really is, I try to do and see as many things as I can -- travel, reading, movies -- and let them stew in my subconscious. And when I go to write, I try not to think about anything. That's why I write to loud music -- if I try to concentrate, I've got the music distracting me."

For that scenario, his go-to groups are U-2, Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and the Las Vegas rockers the Killers.

"It's moody music, not upbeat," he said, then added dryly, "I would never play show tunes."

Out of nearly 4,000 "Pearls" strips submitted to his syndicate, only two were rejected.

"One of them made fun of another cartoonist in a pretty harsh way," he said. "You can imagine how harsh that was, given what I get away with. The other was when Pig went to Mel Gibson's door to welcome him to the neighborhood with a big bowl of bagels, and Gibson went off on Pig."

"Pearls" lampoons current affairs, revels in misunderstandings between characters, reduces the pompous to the piteous, is irreverent and rude, and possesses a violent streak. What, exactly, is Pastis' point?

"My only goal is to make people laugh," he said. "If I wanted to, I could be touching and make them cry all day long, that's not hard. Funny is what's hard."

But Pastis has another goal, too.

"I want to be somebody who influences some younger cartoonist," he said. "Sparky's creative legacy is: He influenced everybody. I would just like to influence somebody. That's the biggest sign that you've mattered."

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