The Comic-Con Interview
A Pearls Before Swine daily by Stephan Pastis. Sunday. If you try to pad it into a Sunday and it’s not working, you’ve got a daily and then vice versa you might have a little choo-choo idea on your hands where you can link one to another and build on it (as a series of dailies). The Sundays can be more fun sometimes, but it’s just a lot more work and you have to color them, too. SP: It’s like the difference between a short story and a novel. Just because you’re good at one doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good at the other. Each has their own rhythm. To give you an example I’m really ahead on my strip— Richard loves this by the way—I’m like seven months ahead. I don’t submit all seven months to my syndicate, but recently I submitted through April 2009. But I’m not ahead on the Sundays like that. There’s three months on my shelves now beyond April that I could submit to the syndicate but they’re all dailies; there’s no Sundays to go with them. And the reason is it’s a whole different rhythm. When I start writing Sundays, they tend to come in bunches and then I only write Sundays for a while. They’re two separate animals. Sometimes I’ll start writing a daily and there’s just too much there and so it just morphs over into a Sunday. But by and large, if I’m in a Sunday mode I have to stay in the Sunday mode and I’ll write a whole bunch of them. And also if you’re an artist versus not an artist— Richard’s a good artist, I’m a mediocre one at best—Sundays are tough because you got to really show it on Sunday. So the talking heads don’t always work. You got to get a little more stuff in there. So for someone like me it’s a challenge.
28 Comic-Con Magazine • Winter 2009
CCM: Which current strips do you both admire? RT: Definitely Stephan’s. That’s one of the few that my whole family reads and laughs at. My wife has very particular taste about what makes her laugh and she sees enough of my stuff that she doesn’t need to see anymore. SP: That’s how my wife is. She does not think I’m funny. RT: I don’t read as many as I used to somehow, now that I’m doing it every day. Besides Pearls Before Swine, I read Lio [by Mark Tatulli], We The Robots [by Chris Harding] . . . I’m trying to think now and I’m blanking, and actually I do read them all in the paper when I get a chance to. SP: Well other than Cul De Sac, I like Lio, F Minus [by Tony Carrillo], Get Fuzzy [by Darby Conley], Dilbert [by Scott Adams], Brewster Rocket [by Tim Rickert], and Pooch Café [by Paul Gilligan]. You know who’s superbly talented but he’s not syndicated? That Perry Bible Fellowship guy, Nicholas Gurewitch. If he had been syndicated, he would have been one of the best guys—if not the best guy—on the page. CCM: There’s been a lot of bad news concerning the newspaper industry in the past few years. What do you both think is the future of newspaper comic strips? RT: I try not to think about it. There’s some future for them, and I’m not sure what it is, just like there’s some future for newspapers and nobody knows what that is either. I’m the wrong one to ask, you know. I’m just trying to draw these things everyday.
SP: We’re just catching this news every single week and we’re not even in the worst case. The editorial cartoonists are really, really taking it. But I come back to a couple of key things. Number one, there will always be a need for local news. That is just a given. How it’s delivered to you I don’t know, but that survives somehow. Number two, my parents’ generation— people in their ’60s or so—are still getting the paper every day. They’ve got another 15 years or so left and that’s just enough time for me to get my kids through college, so that’s all I’m going to worry about. CCM: If newspapers went away would you both consider doing something online for an eventual book or would you consider some kind of original book publication? RT: I would do that, I think. I’ve talked to a few publishers about that. But you’re talking about like what Nicholas Gurewitch did [on the web]. I was also thinking of Achewood [by Chris Onstad]. There are a string of good ones on the web, I read in bunches, too. CCM: Both of you have book collections going so how important is licensing? Is anybody interested in marketing toys and such from your work? SP: The outside perspective is that all these cartoonists have licensing. The truth is three of them do: Peanuts is heads and tails above everybody, then Garfield and then Dilbert to some extent. I’m just starting. They just made plush toys of the Pearls Before Swine characters, which I just saw a final sample of last week. But I think it’s more of a challenge to get licensed now. If © 2009 Stephan Pastis. Distributed by United Features Syndicate, Inc.