Stephan Pastis - Pearls Sells Out: A Pearls Before Swine Treasury

Other Pearls Before Swine Collections

The Saturday Evening Pearls

Macho Macho Animals

The Sopratos

Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata

The Ratvolution Will Not Be Televised

Nighthogs

This Little Piggy Stayed Home

BLTs Taste So Darn Good

Treasuries

The Crass Menagerie

Lions and Tigers and Crocs, Oh My!

Sgt. Piggys Lonely Hearts Club Comic

Gift Book

Da Crockydile Book o Frendsheep

For Staci, who does all the responsible adult things
so that I can be a kid. I love you.

Some cartoonists have wonderful stories about getting their first cartoon published when they were just a kid. Take Charles Sparky Schulz for example. As a child, long before he created Peanuts, Sparky drew a great picture of his dog Spike that was published in the nationally syndicated feature Ripleys Believe It or Not.

The story of my first published cartoon is not as wonderful.

The story of my first published cartoon is one of incompetence and fraud.

You see, the local paper in my community was called the Pasadena Star-News. And one page of the Sunday comics section was devoted to the drawings of young local kids. It was called P. Wellington Woofs Kids Korner, and if they printed your cartoon, you got the thrill of seeing it in print plus a check for two dollars.

As a baseball fan, I decided to draw a member of my hometown team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, sliding into second base. For reasons unknown, the judges picked my drawing for publication and printed it at the top of the page.

The first thing to note about my drawing is that it is by far the worst drawing for someone my age on the page. While kids younger than me were drawing cool race cars, robots, and roller skaters, I had this strange big-nosed man vibrating his way into second base.

But thats not the incompetent part.

The incompetent part is that after drawing this wonderful picture titled Go Dodgers and going to all the trouble of drawing two Dodgers logos and a Go Dodgers sign in the background, I then wrote Angels on the players uniform.

This is no small error in a drawing titled Go Dodgers.

But incompetence alone was not enough for young me and my publishing debut. So I decided to throw in a little fraud.

You see, if you look carefully at the caption under my cartoon, youll see theyve included the age I gave them: Stephan Pastis, 11.

But I wasnt eleven.

I was twelve. I had been twelve for more than eight months before the drawing was published. Id like to say it was an accident on my part, but it wasnt. I lied.

Im not sure why I lied. But I strongly suspect I did it to score a few more points with the judges. After all, an eleven-year-old is not expected to be quite as good an artist as a twelve-year-old.

Most important, the ruse worked. The drawing got published and I got my check, whichas you can see belowI inexplicably never cashed.

Id like to say it was a twinge of guilt that kept me from cashing it. But Im sure it wasnt. More likely, I was arrogant enough to think that one day Id be a famous syndicated cartoonist and could publish the check in the introduction to one of my treasury books.

So if youre scoring this whole little early career venture at home, Id say it came out:

Stephan: 1.

P. Wellington Woof: 0.

Oh sure, I suppose it could be argued that my admission of this fraud twenty-nine years after the fact could jeopardize my winnings. After all, the check still has not been cashed. But as an ex-lawyer, I would argue that nothing in the P. Wellington Woof Rules printed at the bottom of the page expressly prohibited a twelve-year-old from saying he was eleven. The only age rule was that you had to be fifteen or under. Which I was. So there.

I guess all I can ask of you is that if you enjoy Pearls, please dont hold the inauspicious beginnings of my career against me. I was young. Mistakes were made.

Just set the whole ugly episode aside, enjoy the book, and relax.

Which is more than I can do.

Ive got a check to cash.

Stephan Pastis

August 2009

Rats line in the first panel (throw ourselves upon the gears) is adapted from the words of a famous 1960s activist, Mario Savio, who once stood upon the roof of a police car and delivered this speech to a huge crowd of Berkeley students.

I think this is one of the few times the crocs have ever succeeded in eating a person.

In my adolescent years, my two cousins and I used to drive around in a Camaro doing things my mother would not have approved of. Thus, the reference to three teens in a Camaro.

There was a little bit of discussion from one of my syndicates salesmen about the wisdom of reworking the words of a prayer and the negative reaction that might provoke. Fortunately, there were few complaints.

When Bil Keane (creator of Family Circus) was writing the intro to Macho Macho Animals, he asked if there would be any strips in the book making fun of his strip. He wanted to know so he could include a discussion of those particular strips in the intro. I said yes. He asked me to describe them to him. That put me in the somewhat awkward position of saying to Bil Keane about his beloved characters: Okay, well lets see, Dolly and Jeffy are alcoholics in a bar, and oh yeah, Jeffy is wearing a wife-beater undershirt.