Bob Andelman talks to Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis:
ANDELMAN: “Pearls,” like “LIO” and “Get Fuzzy,” they’re strips created by, I believe, friends of yours, Darby Conley and Mark Tatulli. “Pearls” exists in its own world, a place, for anyone who’s read it, where zebras live next door to crocodiles that want to eat them and a pig and a rat are apparently roommates. Where did this whole world come from?
PASTIS: That’s a good question. To me, I think that the key to creating a strip is to create it from the bottom up rather than the top down. And what I mean by that is just focus on writing individual strips, make them as funny as you can, and let the characters, the setting, all of that flow from those strips. In other words, the jokes should come first, and they will tell you what you need character-wise, setting-wise, whereas if you create it from the top down, you say, “I’m gonna do a strip where the main characters are like this and they have these jobs and they live in this town,” you’re really tying your hands. And you’ve got to do this 365 days a year so you want that canvas to be as broad as possible. So, to answer your question, I really wasn’t conscious of the world I was creating when I created it. I just did strips that I thought were funny. Even now, as a result of that, I don’t know a lot of the answers to those questions. Where do Rat and Pig live? They seem to live together. What part of the country? I don’t know. It does lead to some logistical mistakes. For example, the Zebra lives next to this Fraternity of Crocodiles, but somehow, there is this family of crocodiles with the dad, a mom, and a kid. And they don’t seem to live with the rest of the fraternity, and they’re also next door to Zebra as are the lions. So the only way I told myself that it works is that one of them is the neighbor behind Zebra’s house, one is to the side of Zebra’s house, and one is to the other side. But I’m the creator, and I’m not sure.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I would like to see Stephen Pastis in
Chapel Hill for the month of february on the
16th…please send me information as to where, what time at the University of Chapel
Hill…I have no other information and I
have checked his website with no luck…