Okay it’s a local not national but Stephan Pastis was the number one best selling author at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma last week on two different lists.
In a rare feat of cross-audience literary popularity, cartoonist and author Stephan Pastis (“Pearls Before Swine”) has the No. 1 book on both Petaluma’s Fiction & Nonfiction Bestsellers list and the Kids and Young Adults Bestsellers list. The accomplishment comes in the wake of last Friday’s in-store event (the first time Copperfield’s has had an author in for a meet-and-greet/book signing since March of 2020), when Pastis was present to discuss his new graphic novel for kids, “Trubble Town: Squirrel Do Bad.”
At the same time that kids were snapping up copies of the new book, older readers were apparently grabbing copies of 2020’s “Pearls Goes Hollywood,” a collection of comics from Pastis’ popular newspaper comic strip, many focusing on dreams of Hollywood stardom. The book includes and hilarious and deeply evocative essay on his own attempts at writing a screenplay for the big Hollywood Dream Machine.
The Petaluma Argus-Courier has the details.
And some Pastis /Pearls fun and games:
A reader just pointed out that [the August 29] strip has a rather glaring visual error that somehow my editors and I all missed. I will let you see if you can find it.
More Pastis/Pearls fun next month.
All I can scrape up (and I can’t think of it as glaring) is that probably the outside shouldn’t be light blue in the final panel, since it’s apparently daytime (rather than twilight etc.).
I didn’t know crocodiles were so big into lavender and purple (hey, maybe that’s the glitch: are crocodiles color-blind so that they couldn’t have co-ordinated the wall paint jobs so well?).
A drawing error, not coloring (or croc grammar).
It’s really an open and shut case.