Stephan Pastis, "Pearls Before Swine" cartoonist: Mr. Media Interview, Part 3 (Return to Part 2)

(Return to Part 1)



BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: If you’ve ever had a question you wanted to ask Stephan, now is your chance.

STEPHAN PASTIS: Tell Mark Tatulli to call in. Where are you, Tatulli? Call in.

ANDELMAN: He helped feed me some questions, and of course, he introduced us so I know he’s out there. I know he’s listening. What do we have here? Kirkman answered back. He says, “I haven’t been able to do much because oh, I keep losing the connection.” Several people in the Mr. Media chat room are very fond of the “Baby Blues” parody. I want to ask you: character-wise, you were talking about your fear of dogs, and if I’m not mistaken, I think the only dog in “Pearls” is chained up and never goes anywhere.

PASTIS: Yes. He’s a new character and in fact, I just did like five more of those strips. You won’t see them till May or June. But that little dog, it’s a little dog that sits on a chain, and for whatever reason, he really resonated. You never know what characters will resonate and which ones won’t, but that guy really did. And I think it’s just that chain metaphor. I think everybody feels that, in one way or another, they’re chained to something. That’s one reason, but the second reason is that dog, his name is Andy in the strip, that dog is the only character, I guess Pig is one, but he’s really the only character that is optimistic, like really optimistic. The strip is so cynical, but that little dog really thinks that he’ll get off that chain one day. And I think, I don’t know, I think that sort of resonates.





ANDELMAN: He’s going traveling, as I recall, most recently. Didn’t he have some travel brochures?

PASTIS: Yes. He was gonna travel. And I think, I don’t know when this appears, in February or something, he gets a girlfriend, and well, I won’t give it away.

ANDELMAN: Okay.

PASTIS: I almost said it.

ANDELMAN: Stephan, we’ve got another call here. Did you have a question for Stephan Pastis?

MARK TATULLI: Yeah, dammit, I thought I’d call in.

ANDELMAN: I thought I knew who this was.

PASTIS: Yeah, I do too. I recognize that smoke-filled voice.

TATULLI: Hey.

ANDELMAN: Hey, Mark, is that you?

PASTIS: What’s going down, Mark?

TATULLI: Stephan, let me think if I have a question for you. Can you expand on the whole theory about comic polls?

PASTIS: Yes. Should I say more? Did I not say enough about that?

TATULLI: Did you get it off your chest?

PASTIS: I know. I really went off on that, didn’t I?

TATULLI: No. I agree with you a hundred percent.





PASTIS: Hey, by the way, I’m giving this strip away. Everybody’s gonna know this now, but I did a strip this week, I don’t know when it’ll appear, next summer, and Pig is holding a newspaper, and it’s a newspaper that is for comic strip characters and only comic strip characters. But the headline of the paper, if you use a magnifying glass, it says “LIO Kid Waterboarded, Won’t Talk.”

TATULLI: You made it work.

PASTIS: Yeah, I stuck it in.

TATULLI: I don’t think you can get much more out of that, I’m telling you.

PASTIS: It’s really small, too.

TATULLI: I’m not well known enough, and it would be just too inside. You’re too big to do anything.

PASTIS: I don’t know. Buddy, you’ll see it.

TATULLI: I can insult other comic strip characters with complete immunity right now cause they can’t get back at me because nobody will know what they’re talking about.

PASTIS: That’s really funny. See, Mark’s great because Mark draws more flak than me now, and he runs cover. So that’s terrific.

ANDELMAN: People on the web chat, I can see that they’re kind of wondering who we’re talking to, Stephan. This is Mark Tatulli, creator of “LIO” and also “Heart of the City.” “LIO” is one of the fastest-growing strips of the last couple years. What are we talking now – 250, 300 papers?

TATULLI: Well, let’s just say 400, shall we?

ANDELMAN: Oh, sorry!

TATULLI: Yeah, somewhere in that neck of the woods. I have no idea. It changes month to month, but it’s around the 300 range right now.

PASTIS: I’m in 1,500, Bob.

ANDELMAN: Well, Mark, it’s only been 18 months/two years. Mark, you can see this. If you look, Mark was actually the first cartoonist interviewed on Mr. Media. But, Mark, I know you’re a “Pearls” fan, obviously. You wouldn’t be calling in other than to hassle Stephan.

TATULLI: I think I’m the original “Pearls” fan. I could send it to Stephan Pastis way back when, and they said, “Look at this shit in the paper.” Oops, can I say that?

PASTIS: Can we drop the S-bomb?

ANDELMAN: You can, actually.

TATULLI: Sorry about that.

PASTIS: I would’ve done that an hour ago.

TATULLI: What is this? Flat characters talking on a wall? And I said, “People, you’re just not reading the strip. It’s great. It’s nothing like it in the paper now.” “Get Fuzzy” came out a little earlier. I think it came in 1999, I believe, and Darby really changed things up cause he had a great drawing style that reminds me of “Tintin.” I think that, if newspapers were more part of the national dialogue now, “Get Fuzzy” would be introducing new words to our vocabulary because he just comes up with new phrases that are just great. But then Stephan came along, and his strip was just so acerbic and so just that he was rude, and it was funny everyday. And that’s what just made it just great, and I thought, “Oh, this is great. This is a new way for comics coming through. This is gonna be huge.”

PASTIS: The thing is too, thank you, and now I gotta be nice to Mark.

TATULLI: I know, and that’s a real struggle for you.





PASTIS: The great part too is, with Mark coming along and like “Cul de Sac” and “F-Minus” and some of these, it is really, really opening things up. When you’re in a newspaper and you’re the only edgy strip, you just get killed. Every complaint is about you. You’re just the most hated thing. And when there’s five or six of you, there’s safety in numbers. And so that’s one great thing about having someone like Mark on the page, and another great thing is the more of these edgy strips you have, the more likely that the paper will draw young readers and all the better for you if you have sort of a young, edgy strip. So, yeah, we need more like that.

TATULLI: And what I’ve noticed, too, is that editors, as they become younger and, I guess, more hip to the kind of strips that we do, is they defend us a lot stronger now. When there’s a comics poll, I’ve noticed, and my strip is not volunteered as one that will be dropped, older readers will call in and volunteer and say, “Why don’t you get rid of ‘LIO’? Get rid of ‘LIO.’ Get rid of that crap. I don’t know what that is.” But the editors will come to my defense so I think they’re catching on. And it’s a tough process because they don’t want to lose their old readers, but at the same time, they want to attract new ones.

PASTIS: To add to what Mark is saying, I do think that change is happening. I do think that newspapers are now pretty much well aware that they are losing, I think it’s about three percent every six months, so they’re losing quite a few readers. And I think what that is, I’m not an expert on newspapers, Bob, maybe your wife could say more about this, but I think what it is is just a factor of the older people passing on and not being replaced by a younger reader. So they are learning that they need to take a shot at really attracting these younger readers. And so you are seeing some of the legacy strips go and some of the younger strips coming along. At a minimum, what you’re seeing is editors who are trying to balance the page. Do a few strips that appeal to older people and some that appeal to younger people. So, yeah, it’s happening.

ANDELMAN: Stephan, let me ask you while we have Mark on the line. I know there was news in the last couple months that “LIO” was optioned, I believe, for a movie, and congratulations to Mark on that. Is there any action, and this came up in the web chat too, is there any action on maybe a “Pearls” cartoon or movie?

PASTIS: It’s really weird. Mark knows about this. I talked to him about it. But in July, August, September, October, for whatever reason, I started to get contacted by producers. And it happened a little bit in the past, but a bunch of them hit all at one time, and I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know if your name gets bandied about somewhere or something, but for whatever reason it happened, and they all seem to want to do the same thing, which is something related to TV. And I think I’m a little more leaning toward movies because I kind of like to write the script, and TV, you almost have to live in Los Angeles if you’re going to do that. It’s a lot more ongoing work. So I don’t know. I’m kind of keeping everything open right now, and I would like to animate it one day. I think that would be pretty fun, and I am, as we speak, trying to write a movie script. It centers largely around the crocodiles, but yeah.

ANDELMAN: Well, then that matches up well with a question that came up on the web chat and that is, “What do the crocs sound like?”

PASTIS: Oh, man. You know I hate to do it because then I influence people, and I know everybody has a different take. I have probably had 60 different ethnicities suggest it to me, and all of them think they know for sure. The most common I hear is Cajun, but to be honest with you, I don’t really know what a Cajun accent sounds like so I can’t say whether those people are right or not. But, yeah, that’s a very common question.

TATULLI: I’m gonna duck out of here now.

ANDELMAN: Alright. Hey, Mark, thanks a lot for calling.

PASTIS: Thank you, Mark.

TATULLI: My pleasure. I’ll talk to you. Bye.

ANDELMAN: Take it easy. Well, that was nice. That’s kind of a twofer for people listening, I think.

PASTIS: That is a twofer. Now if Cheryl Hines will call in, my day will be made. She’s not gonna call in is she, Bob? It’s not gonna happen.

ANDELMAN: I’m working on connecting you. I’ve got the wheels turning on that.

PASTIS: I’ll even take a Jeff Garlin.

ANDELMAN: You need two Jeff Garlins for one Cheryl Hines. In terms of adapting “Pearls” for another medium, what about the comic book like the Bongo adaptation of “The Simpsons”?

PASTIS: I would like to do that. It’d be so much work. The other thing that I’m trying to do is I’m trying to write a book, sort of like Scott did with The Joy of Work and all that, sort of my perspective on life but then fill it with a lot of strips that sort of illustrate the stories I’m telling. It’s not what you’re saying, but it is something different. It’s hard because when you’re a comic strip guy, you have pretty much full control. My editors don’t say very much to me. And when you go into any of these other realms, even writing a book, you walk into a little more editorial supervision in terms of, I don’t know, your editor is sort of a partner on the book. When you start doing screenplays, then you really give up a lot of control, and it’s hard. Comic strip guys, if they have one thing in common, well, other than depression, I suppose, is I think we’re control freaks, and we’re all juvenile. We all drink a lot. We have a lot of things in common, but I think we’re all control freaks. I think that’s one of the things. We are all control freaks.

ANDELMAN: You’ve often said that Rat is closest to you, and I assume you mean that personality-wise. So I wondered who do some of the other characters get aspects of their personality from?

PASTIS: In the couple times I ever got to talk to Sparky, I asked him that question about “Peanuts,” and he said that they were all parts of him. And I didn’t really understand the significance of that until I did my own comic strip, and that is so true. What he said to me was, “You can’t write one based on someone else because you don’t know anyone else well enough to really get inside the character. And you’ve got to live with these characters for years.” So, like I said, I didn’t know the significance, but when you start to do a strip, you realize that they have to be sort of based on you. So they’re really all me. Goat is me. I read a lot. I read a lot of history books. I’m a little bit cynical. Rat is the most natural voice. If I had my way, I’d probably write only for Rat all the time. It’s just a voice that’s easy for me. Pig is, I guess, the sweeter side of me which rarely shows itself, but that’s me, too. The crocodiles, I will actually walk around the house talking like that, annoying as that may sound. Zebra, I don’t know who Zebra is. I guess that’s me. The duck is me to the extent I can’t stand a lot of my neighbors. I don’t sit out there with a bazooka but something to that effect. So that’s sort of me. They’ve all kind of got to be you.

ANDELMAN: I think you mentioned that Andy, the dog, was the most recent character added.

PASTIS: Yes.

ANDELMAN: Do you have any other characters coming in the next year?

PASTIS: I keep wanting to do this monkey. Monkeys are the greatest animals. And I have a boy. I have a character who’s a cross between a boy and a monkey, and I love the way he looks, and I just can’t work him in. I haven’t been able to figure out a way to work him in. I think he’s called “The Boy Who’s Just Barely a Monkey.” I think that’s what he’s called. And I really want to work him in, and I haven’t figured out a way to do it yet. There’s a cat who you’ll see more of next year. He’s Zebra’s cat. He was really popular. I’m trying to think. I know I’m leaving somebody out that I just created, and I can’t…

ANDELMAN: I think if you’re going to do the monkey character, you’re going to need as much space for type as the pajama diaries usually has. It’s just that fraction of art, and everything else is text.

PASTIS: Yes. Yes.

ANDELMAN: Hope you get that title in.

PASTIS: That’s true. That is quite a long title.






ANDELMAN: You mentioned that you are working on a book, and you already mentioned Bill Watterson. Do you ever have that day when you think, “You know what? I’d like to take three months off or six months off and not do this for a while.”

PASTIS: Like last Thursday, I really hit a wall. Boy, I’ll tell ya! Any cartoonist you talk to, they’ll tell you this exact same thing: There are days where you look at what you’ve done, you go, “Oh, I will never be able to do that again. It’s over. I cannot think of one idea. I’m in the wrong profession.” I mean it. I’m saying it kind of jokingly, but it’s over. And it is a horrific feeling, and it hits. It usually hits during days when I’m down, and you can’t do anything. And on those days, yeah, you think that. But you think three months isn’t enough. You need a year, but there are other days like Saturday where I wrote, and it just flowed. There were five or six, and it was just a dumb little drawing. I drew a croc in a circle, and the circle looked like he was standing in a sewer. So I thought, you know, I’ve never put them in the sewer lines before. I could probably riff off of that somehow, and that turned into a week of strips where they tried to get into the Zebra’s house through the sewer. By the way, anyone listening, you don’t have to read the strip for the next year because I’ve given away every single plot line. But, no, there are some days where you hit it and you go, “Wow, that’s terrific.” But I will say that, maybe it’s because I was a lawyer for nine years, but I really love doing it. I don’t always love drawing it. Drawing is hard for me, but I really, really love writing it. That process is so…I would do it if I wasn’t paid. I would do it as a hobby. I would do it because I love to do it. That’s always infuriating. If you’re syndicated, you get guys that write to you and say, “Oh, you got this idea from this TV show or this comic strip or whatever and you’re stealing your ideas.” That’s such a strange concept to me. It’s like someone who enjoys fishing, running to the grocery store and buying a salmon. Why would you do that? It’s the act of doing it that you love, and I love writing.

© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: Baby Blues, Cheryl Hines, Heart of the City, Jeff Garlin, LIO, Mark Tatulli, Pearls Before Swine, Stephan Pastis

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