Pearls Before Swine (comic strip)

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Pearls Before Swine
The four main Pearls Before Swine Characters. From top to bottom: Rat, Zebra, Pig, Goat.
Author(s)	Stephan Pastis
Current status	Running
Syndicate(s)	United Features Syndicate
Launch date	December 30, 2001 (Orlando Sentinel) December 31, 2001 (The Washington Post) January 7, 2002
Genre(s)	Humor

Pearls Before Swine is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Stephan Pastis, formerly a lawyer in San Francisco, California. It chronicles the daily lives of two anthropomorphic roommates, Pig and Rat. Although created in 1997, it was not published until 1999, when United Features Syndicate ran it on its website. Its popularity rose after Dilbert creator Scott Adams, a fan of the strip, spread the word to his own fans.^[1]

United Features launched the strip in newspapers beginning December 31, 2001, in The Washington Post.^[2] On January 7, 2002, it began running in approximately 150 papers.^{[citation needed]} As of early 2007, the strip appears in more than 400 newspapers worldwide.^[3]

Contents 1 Cast 1.1 Pig 1.2 Rat 1.3 Zebra 1.4 Goat 1.5 The Fraternity of Crocodiles 1.6 Guard Duck 1.7 Recurring characters 1.8 Minor characters 2 Meaning of the title 3 Style 3.1 Crossovers 3.2 Substitutions 4 Trivia 5 Books 5.1 Regular collections 5.2 Treasury collections 6 Awards 7 Footnotes 8 References 9 External links

[edit] Cast

Pearls Before Swine has a few central characters, supplemented by an array of minor figures. All characters are subject to death and to subsequent unexplained return.

[edit] Pig

Naïve Pig (debut: Dec. 31, 2001) is childlike and dim, but also well-meaning and kind, all of which leads to constant ridicule by Rat. Pig's jokes generally involve his incompetence and not knowing his true surroundings. Pig has a hot-tempered girlfriend named Pigita. Pastis says that Pig is the easiest character to write for: "He just has to misunderstand everything that he hears, then when it's explained to him, he has to misunderstand that too."

[edit] Rat

Rat (debut: Dec. 31, 2001) is a megalomaniacal rat. He is frequently critical of the strip's style and artwork as well as the other characters in the strip and all living things. Often self-employed, most of his businesses involve either punishing or defrauding people for their ignorance, much in the same vein as Dogbert, though with a darker humor.

Rat writes "children's books" and romance novels that are typically dark and bloody in nature, or contain bizarre twists and endings. He sometimes works as a columnist, writing often absurd and inadequate articles. Most recently employed as an antagonistic slacker barista at "Joe's Roastery", where he couldn't be fired due to his "minority status", Rat reveled in giving his customers horrible service (if they get any service at all) and insulting them. Despite his dislike for Rat, Rat's employer could do little other than attempt to minimize Rat's tirades on those he considers fair target for his opinions and wit. In March of 2007 Rat made several clones of himself, all of which had nice personalities. In an attempt to get rid of them he sent them to the crocodiles to be used as food. The cloned Rats severely beat the crocodile, escaped, and took over Rat's job at Joe's Roastery, at which point he was promptly fired.

Rat is the most insensitive character in the strip, except when it comes to his love for Pig's sister Farina. Rat's interactions with others are typically sarcastic, condescending, insulting and sometimes violent, particularly when dealing with what he considers to be exceptionally annoying people and their habits. Rat frequently breaks the fourth wall in order to berate his creator on his jokes, artwork or general content of the strip itself.

[edit] Zebra

Zebra (debut: Feb. 4, 2002), also known as "zeeba neighba" ("zebra neighbor") by the comically stupid Fraternity of Crocodiles next-door (Zeeba Zeeba Eata), is a zebra who is often seen trying to patch up relations between his herd back home and its predators. His troubles include various encounters with the Fraternity of Crocodiles. He also serves as a less-irritable version of Goat, and is also the only character Goat can put up with.

Because Stephan Pastis cannot draw lions, these particular predators are never shown in the strip, although they are the second-most mentioned, behind the crocodiles. Zebra has been seen corresponding with them via letter, attempting to give them more culture than just eating zebras and establish a friendship between their species. Instead, the lions' replies are always terse and stupid responses, often featuring them taking his advice the wrong way by eating a zebra.

Hyenas are the third type of predator that plague Zebra's herd. The only occasion on which they have been seen in the strip was a series in which Zebra was an online advice columnist for other zebras. At one point, Zebra receives an e-mail complaining that when hyenas laugh at him, they hurt his feelings. Zebra recommends telling the hyenas how he feels. However, in the final panel, the "zebra" who sent the e-mail turns out to be a pair of hyenas who are laughing uproariously at what they see as hilarious responses.

[edit] Goat

An intellectual goat who interacts sparingly with the other characters, Goat (debut: Jan. 18, 2002) usually appears whenever there is a small issue dealing with a character or a conflict to be mediated. Goat has an equally hard time dealing with Pig's incompetence and Rat's cruelty and occasional ignorance. Goat maintains a blog that, as Rat likes to point out, receives no hits. Goat in turn tends to criticize Rat's forays into writing, often telling him not to write them at all. In early strips, Goat had a beard; he first appeared without it in the April 26, 2004 strip.

Goat dislikes conversing with the other characters at all; he much prefers reading books. However, it seems that he most tolerates talking to Zebra; he is least tolerant when talking to Rat.

[edit] The Fraternity of Crocodiles

The Fraternity of Crocodiles (debut: Jan. 3, 2005) is usually involved in various (failed) attempts to eat Zebra. The fraternity name is "Zeeba Zeeba Eata" (although one of them called it "Zeta, Zeta, Epsilon" in a botched attempt to fool their suspicious neighbor). The crocodiles are dimwitted and poor hunters (they believe they are hunting prey when they catch plastic flamingos, garden gnomes or carved tofu cows) who usually need to go to the Safeway supermarket or order fast food to eat. At least two have girlfriends or are married, and at least one has a son, Billy. Billy is far more intelligent than his father and he is also a pacifist and a vegetarian, similar to the relationship between the Warner Bros. cartoon characters Sylvester the Cat and his son, Sylvester Junior.

The crocodiles include Bob, Floyd, Fred, Frank, Jimmy, Jojo, and Larry. The crocodiles are frequently killed in the continuity of the strip; some are brought back without explanation, while others are brought in as replacements. A crocodile named Biff, described by Pastis as "the dumbest of all the crocodiles", was unable to fend for himself, so Pastis, in self-reflexive strips, portrays himself as a character who must take care of him. Biff was later eaten by a poodle, but brought back on Nov. 12, 2006.

The male crocodiles, when talking, are often saying words in phonetical style, such as "goowoo" (guru), "nome" (gnome), and "meester" (mister). They also say "me" instead of "I", and refer to themselves as "crockydiles." The male crocodile's opening line usually is "Hulllooooo Zeeba neighba, leesten." Female crocodiles and Billy speak normally.

[edit] Guard Duck

Duck is the the "watchduck" for Pig and Rat's home. He's known for a short temper and a violent streak bordering on stereotypical sociopathy. Pig often locks him in a clothes hamper or wastebasket as a punishment for irrational actions.

His first appearance was March 14th, 2005, when Pig bought him due to the fact that a proper Guard Dog was too expensive. Soon after he was fired for stealing a neighbor's inflatable pool.

Months later, Duck robbed a Bank and was thrown in prison soon after. Though he was awarded release on bail, Duck escaped prison and has been with Pig and Rat ever since.

Recently, Duck staged a coup to become mayor. Once Mayor, he began checking off neighbors of the town he had written down on his "Enemies List."

The December 3, 2006 strip revealed that Duck did not know ducks could fly, never having been taught because he never knew his parents; he referred to himself as "a broken duck." Things became more hopeful for Duck when on January 1, 2007, Maura the non-anthropomorphic female duck companion appeared with him and even kissed him. However, on January 5, she flew away to migrate with other ducks. Since then, several strips have featured Duck coping with his loss. The crocodiles, in particular, made the poor choice of laughing at Duck at which point Duck made one of the crocodiles into a pair of boots January 24, 2007.

Recently, Duck has been acknowledged by the strip as a major character — his personality became a bit more developed, and often appeared alongside the major characters as most recurring characters do not.

[edit] Recurring characters

• Stephan Pastis (debut: June 1, 2003) — Pastis appears self-reflexively in several strips as the cartoonist of the strip, usually exhibiting ambiguous feelings toward his characters (and an exasperation with Rat in particular). He is often seen smoking, although Pastis has mentioned in his books that he does not smoke and has no idea why he drew himself that way to begin with.
• Staci Pastis (debut: May 22, 2003) — Stephan's wife.
• Pigita (debut: Aug. 19, 2002) — Pig's on-and-off girlfriend, known for her wild mood swings.
• Farina (debut: Aug. 18, 2002) — Pig's germophobic sister who lives in a bubble, although that doesn't prevent her from dating characters from many comic strips. Rat had dated her years before (in backstory), and remains in love with her, though he denies it. She has a habit of telling Rat he is not manly enough while at the same time dating an otherwise geeky character like Dilbert or Ziggy.

[edit] Minor characters

• Chuckie, the Non-Anthropomorphic Sheep, appears several times in the strip. He is introduced as being a friend of Goat's. He is non-anthropomorphic, meaning that unlike the other animals he has no human-like characteristics. Also, notably, Chuckie is killed or prepared to be killed by various characters (including Pigita and Rat), only to inexplicably return. Chuckie has not appeared in a few years, possibly because of the rise of more recently added characters, such as the crocodiles and the guard duck.
• Leonard — a short-lived character who once moved in with Rat and Pig. He works at Kiddieland as Tatulli, the Self-Esteem Building Bear; however, when Pig sees him in his costume, he thinks Leonard is being devoured. However Stephan Pastis states in his book "Lions and Tigers and Crocs oh my!" that Leonard was a "failed experiment". Leonard was later killed when Rat had him drowned in a toilet. The Tatulli costume is named after cartoonist Mark Tatulli, creator of the comic strips Heart of the City and Liō.
• Pepito — Rat's violent sock puppet.
• Toby the Agoraphobic Turtle — an agoraphobic turtle who was afraid of public places, so he stayed home, kept his head in his shell and guzzled beer from a "beer bong". When Pig said that "beer isn't the answer", Toby karate-chopped him. Pastis stopped using him, saying he had no licensing potential,^[4] but Toby appeared again once afterward, having broken into the garage of Pig and Rat to steal a giant can of beer.
• Wee Bear — A little bear with a social conscience. "Wee Bear" is a nickname; he's actually named Moses Savio Chavez, after Robert Parris Moses, Mario Savio, and César Chávez. In a treasury, Pastis wrote that Wee Bear was an attempt to have a Linus-like character in the strip.
• The Vikings — A set of Viking toys. Rat believes that they love violence, but in reality they enjoy watching Oprah and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. They also enjoy styling their hair, picking daisies, writing in their diaries, and painting their nails. When fighting, they resort to scratching and hair pulling. They've also referenced Brokeback Mountain and Broadway musicals such as Cabaret.
• Alphonse, the needy Porcupine (debut: July 6, 2004) — Loves to grandstand in order to gain attention. He once threatened to throw himself out a window (three feet above the ground) if Rat did not help him. Pastis eventually stopped using him in strips after receiving complaints from anti-suicide groups about him.
• Angry Bob (debut: Sept. 15, 2002): A character in a book series by Rat. Each strip concerning these books starts off with a disgruntled Angry Bob eventually finding true happiness, before meeting an untimely death.
• Danny Donkey — A character from the illustrated children's books Rat occasionally writes. In September 2006, Rat created a talking Danny Donkey doll that came to life (like Hobbes in Calvin and Hobbes) and burglarized a liquor store. Danny Donkey usually talks about beer and even asked for it on Halloween.
• Jonathan and Jennifer Seal — Two seals who moved into the neighborhood unaware that a killer whale also lived nearby. Unlike the comic's other predator-and-prey characters (calm Zebra and the largely incompetent Crocodiles), Jonathan Seal is highly excitable and often outraged by the patient, stalking nature of the killer whale. Since the death of the Killer Whale, they have not appeared again.
• The Killer Whale — A character who lived near Jonathan and Jennifer Seal and made failed attempts to get them to leave their home so that he could eat them. He is deceased as of May 2006, accidentally killed by Zebra when given food laced with explosives. (Zebra got the food from Pig and Rat, who got it from the Anemone Enemies.)

[edit] Meaning of the title

The title Pearls Before Swine refers to the admonition "Neither cast ye your pearls before swine" that Jesus gave to Peter according to Matthew 7:6 in the Bible. In the context of the comic strip, Rat, who considers himself a genius, must cast his pearls of "wisdom" before Pig, who is the only one naïve enough to listen to him.

[edit] Style

Artistically, Pearls is extremely simplistic, with minimal art, similar to Dilbert. Most of the characters have no mouths, polka dot eyes and stick limbs. Pastis stated, "People say that they like my strip's simplicity, but I'm doing the best I can to just to get up to that level. I'm not dumbing the art down."^[5]

Pearls Before Swine has proven controversial, largely due to its dark humor. Despite the simple drawing style, topics such as politics, murder, suicide, and depression are common themes. The jokes themselves are often based on puns and wordplay. Pastis also employs the format of the Shaggy dog story, particularly with Sunday strips, relying on a great amount of text to spin an elaborate yarn that is ultimately resolved with an unforeseen and abrupt ending (such as the character’s random death, or an intentionally bad pun, which is sometimes identified as such by the characters).

Pearls is also a "meta-comic" in that it often satirizes the comics medium, and allows its characters to "break the fourth wall" and either communicate directly with the author or with characters from other strips. The strip takes place in Albany, California.

[edit] Crossovers

Pearls Before Swine interacts with other comics, as in a story arc that featured members of The Family Circus sheltering Osama bin Laden, unaware of his identity. The children from Baby Blues once drove a car to get beer for Rat and ended up running over and killing Jeremy from Zits. Baby Wren from Baby Blues was portrayed as a an extreme "bad-arse" whom one does not mess with. It is this attitude that results in her killing several members of the fraternity of crocodiles when they try to eat her. (The following Monday in the Baby Blues strip, baby Wren was seen playing with a crocodile stuffed animal with X-out "dead" eyes, an allusion to the storyline.)

Characters from Cathy, B.C, Dilbert, and several others have made guest appearances as well, in which they are often mildly mocked. Garfield has also been the brunt of many punchlines, though only once has a character from the strip appeared in Pearls.

During Blondie 's 75th-anniversary sequence of strips in September 2005, which was referred to within some 25 other, generally more well-established comics, Pig and Rat were among the comic strip characters not "invited" to the event; Pastis in his strip had Pig and Rat complain for weeks. To console them, in a self-reflexive sequence, Pastis set up a competing party in his own strip for other comic characters not invited to the Bumstead home in Blondie. Opus from Bloom County was the only other attendee.

On one occasion, the Pearls characters left the strip one by one, in an event popularly referred to as the Pearls Labor Dispute.^{[citation needed]} In this series, the strips The Family Circus, Love Is..., Get Fuzzy, "Rose Is Rose", and Garfield were visited (as well as the Jumble puzzle). The characters Marmaduke and Nancy and Sluggo made guest appearances as temporary replacements for the departed characters.

Pastis' use of characters from other strips has occasionally irritated established colleagues.^{[citation needed]}Others, particularly other young and newly established cartoonists, have collaborated on these meta-comic exchanges. On April Fool's Day 2005, Pastis, Get Fuzzy creator Darby Conley and FoxTrot creator Bill Amend published the same storyline, involving a Ouija board, using each strip's respective characters.

In 2006, Conley used a week of Pearls Before Swine strips verbatim in place of his own comic, pasting pasted stock illustrations of Get Fuzzy characters over the Pearls Before Swine characters, leading to a comically nonsensical Get Fuzzy sequence. A similar reversal happened in November 2006, when a "disgruntled newspaper layout artist" inserted random Get Fuzzy panels into Pearls. There have also been other allusions: Satchel from Get Fuzzy once had a Pearls book next to his beanbag, as Rob asked about a phone call from "an annoying lawyer named Stephen"(Pastis was a lawyer before becoming a cartoonist), and Pig has attended at least one evening class led by a "Professor Conley". FoxTrot referenced Pearls Before Swine by having Jason Fox redraw the Crocodiles to look like his sister Paige.

In 2005, Rick Stromoski's strip Soup To Nutz introduced a short-lived character, a big-headed kid named Stephan Pastis, as a friend of Andrew Nutz. This was a response to a storyline Pastis drew featuring a frog named Stromoski. While Pastis drew the storyline first, it ran months later, due to the cartoonist being ahead of deadline by several months.

Cartoonist Bill Holbrook referenced the strip in his own Kevin and Kell.^[6]

On August 13, 2006, Pig and Rat were in a bar discussing a rule that all comic-strip characters needed to age in real-time, a la For Better or For Worse and the first to do this, Gasoline Alley. While this rule, made up by Pastis for the sequence, didn't affect the 5-year-old Pearls, it strongly affected the 50-year-old Family Circus and the 75-year-old Blondie within the confines of Pastis' strip.

For a brief period starting February 22, 2007, Pearls Before Swine featured Jason, Peter, Andy and Quincy from FoxTrot as homeless individuals living on Rat and Pig's lawn. This came after FoxTrot switched to a Sunday-only format.

[edit] Substitutions

Occasionally, due to current events, United Feature Syndicate substitutes an older strip for the scheduled strip if the latter's content might be construed as offensive in the wake of the news. On Sept. 26, 2006, such alternate strips were provided to newspapers due to that day's strip involving Pig playing in a washing machine. Concurrent news involved the Jimella Tunstall case, in which her children were allegedly murdered by a friend and hidden from the authorities in a washing machine. Many papers and websites that syndicated the strip ran the alternate strips instead.

[edit] Trivia

• Cartoonist Darby Conley, creator of Get Fuzzy, helped teach Pastis the technical aspects of cartooning.^[7] The two remain friends, sometimes poking fun at each other in their strips.
• "Pearls Before Swine" was the fifth strip that Stephan Pastis submitted for syndication. Rat had also been the subject of his first attempt, the even darker strip "Rat." In one of the three in between that and "Pearls," a strip called "The Infirm," the main character (a lawyer) encounters some pigs on a farm. This gave rise to Pastis using Pig as another main character in "Pearls."

[edit] Books

For full article, see List of Pearls Before Swine Books

[edit] Regular collections

• BLTs Taste So Darn Good (Publication date March 2, 2003; ISBN 0-7407-3437-7) - Contains strips from December 31, 2001 through October 5, 2002.

• This Little Piggy Stayed Home (Publication date March 1, 2004; ISBN 0-7407-3813-5) - Contains strips from October 6, 2002 through July 13, 2003.

• Nighthogs (Publication date March 31, 2005; ISBN 0-7407-5009-7) - Contains strips from July 14, 2003 through April 18, 2004. The cover is based on the Edward Hopper painting "Nighthawks".

• The Ratvolution Will Not Be Televised (Publication date March 1, 2006; ISBN 0-7407-5674-5) - Contains strips from April 19, 2004 through January 23, 2005. The cover is based on Gil Scott-Heron's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

• Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata (Publication Date March 1, 2007; ISBN 0-7407-6801-8) - Contains strips from January 24, 2005 through October 30, 2005.^[8]

[edit] Treasury collections

• Sgt. Piggy's Lonely Hearts Club Comic (Publication date Sept. 1, 2004; ISBN 0-7407-4807-6) - Contains strips from Dec. 31, 2001, through July 13, 2003, many with annotations by the cartoonist, with Sunday strips in color. The cover is based on The Beatles' record album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

• Lions and Tigers and Crocs, Oh My! (Publication date Sept. 1, 2006; ISBN 0-7407-6155-2) - Contains strips from July 14, 2003 through Jan. 23, 2005, many with annotations by the cartoonist, with Sunday strips in color. The cover is based on characters from the movie The Wizard of Oz. The section "The Good, the Banned, and the Ugly" features strips created between July 14, 2003 and Jan. 23, 2005, that did not run in newspapers, or ran in different forms.

[edit] Awards

• Best Newspaper Comic - 2004 by United Media
• National Cartoonist Society Award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip (2002) Nominee
• National Cartoonist Society Award for Best Newspaper Comic Strip in (2003) Winner

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

• Pearls Before Swine Official Site
• St. Petersburg [Florida] Times (Dec. 13, 2005): "Exactly What Ees that Zeeba-Eating Accent?", by Chase Squires
• "Forum Interview with Stephan Pastis, Creator of Pearls Before Swine" (Summer 2004)

[edit] External links

• Pearlswine: LiveJournal Daily Feed of Pearls Before Swine