Stephan Pastis is going on a “mini-book tour,” meaning the tour is short not that his book is small
(the newest book is a giant-sized treasury).
Stephan is abandoning The West to visit a number of cities in The South to talk about his Pearls Before Swine comic strip. He’s already adding more cities to the March 2022 circuit.
The Tulsa World chats with Stephan:
“We do these anthologies — they’re called ‘Treasuries’ because they’re so big — about every year and a half,” Pastis said. “And they have about 18 months of strips in them.
“The great thing about the books is that we make them unique,” he said. “I kind of turn it into the comic strip version of a director’s cut. I’ll do comments on just about every strip — the reactions I’ve received, both positive and negative; making fun of the way I draw; explaining why I thought a particular joke was funny when it seems no one else did.”
© Stephan Pastis
From The Arkansas Democrat Gazette article anticipating the stopover:
Pastis frequently dances close to the edge in terms of content and, in the eyes of some of the editors of the papers that publish his strip, taste. He has had two run-ins with Democrat-Gazette editors, one in 2003 when then-Deputy Editor Frank Fellone complained to the syndicate about the use of symbolic depictions of swear words in a Sunday cartoon as having gone over the line, and again in July 2019 when Deputy Editor Kim Christ pulled a strip that contained a punny reference to a male body part and substituted an old strip in its place. Pastis scolded the paper for pulling the strip in a July 23, 2019, tweet that ended, “Curse you, Comic Strip Censor Guy.”
Here’s your chance to get a signed copy of Stephan’s new(ish) Pearls collection.
(Maybe Little Rock residents can turn to page 138 of Pearls Awaits The Tide
and have Stephan sign that censored “test to cull” strip.)
You’d think with a title like that he’d add a visit to Tucsaloosa.
That’s okay. I, in the West, abandoned Pastis long ago.