Usually when Stephan Pastis causes tears to roll it’s from laughing too hard.
But occasionally Stephan gets serious in his Pearls Before Swine comic strip.
Sometimes he gets profound.
Sometimes Stephan gets really intense.
Michael Cavna, at the Washington Post, took note that a late 2018 Pearls
Sunday strip about Stephan’s dog dying tugged at his readers so hard,
his syndicate, Kansas City-based Andrews McMeel, announced that the Edee strip was its most buzzed-about comic of 2018, with nearly 500 comments and almost 1,200 “likes.”
Cavna talks to the cartoonist and the syndicate about the very personal strip.
When the strip ran Dec. 9, the immediate response was strong and uncommonly large, the cartoonist says. Many of the readers who contacted him had recently lost their pets.
Wrote one commenter on the syndicate’s GoComics.com site: “Your comic is really hard to read. I can tell because my eyes are starting to sweat.”