Comic Strip Influences
Pearls' style and humor are inspired by several comic strips, chief among them being Peanuts, Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County and The Far Side. Pastis regularly puts tributes to them in his strip. When asked in an interview about whether his profession as an attorney inspired the humor in the comic, Stephan said, "I was very unhappy as a lawyer, and humor is a reaction to and defense against unhappiness. Also, the law inspired me because if you dislike what you’re doing to the extent that I did, it gives you the impetus to get out." Pastis also regularly parodies comics he finds stale or unfunny, including Cathy, The Family Circus and Garfield (although in the case of The Family Circus Pastis actually is a fan). The relentless and merciless riffing on classic comics (i.e. a series where Osama bin Laden comes to live with the Family Circus, causing the parents, Billy, Jeffy, Dolly and PJ to be sent to Guantanamo Bay detention camp) has earned Pastis the disdain of many comic artists, which Pastis referenced in a later storyline where the Pearls cast is not invited to the 75th anniversary crossover party of Blondie.
Stephan Pastis has also mentioned that the incongruity between the cute characters and the dark themes surrounding them is a source of humor in the strip.
Read more about this topic: Pearls Before Swine (comics)
Famous quotes containing the words comic strip, comic, strip and/or influences:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“And in a comic mood
In mid-air take to bed a wife.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)