Pearls Before Swine (comics) - Style

Style

Artistically, Pearls is extremely simple. Most of the characters have either mouths represented by lines or no mouths at all, dot eyes, and stick limbs; those shown with lips are generally big and puffy in this area, and the lips are merely a visual cue that they are unintelligent or ignorant. However, characters do have mouths when yelling (similar to Dilbert), or in the crocodiles' case, open their mouths when yelling. 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. —Stephan Pastis

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, which they often do. Pastis will often employ a shaggy dog story, using a great amount of dialogue to spin an elaborate yarn often resolved with a character's unforeseen death or near death. A variation known as a feghoot builds to an intentionally bad pun in the penultimate panel, with the final panel showing the cartoon version of Pastis as the target of criticism, hostility, or even physical violence from the characters, usually Rat. Once, Rat sensed a bad pun coming, and stopped it with dropping an anvil on Pastis' head. The characters also frequently acknowledge the fact that they are in a comic strip published in newspapers; the strip published on January 14, 2008 had a "roof fish" sitting on top of the panel fishing for the characters, and other strips have had such events as smeared newsprint or beer affected the appearance of the strip or strips in which it seems as if the paginators had laid out the strip wrong. Other comic strips are often the butt of punchlines, and several cartoon characters from outside Pearls have appeared, most frequently the main cast of The Family Circus, and even in one circumstance, Stewie from Family Guy appeared in the strip on April 20th of 2008, holding a candy cane, for a reference to the saying, "It's like taking candy from a baby." During that appearance, Stewie said two of his more famous phrases ("Touch it and you die, fat man" and "What the deuce are you staring at?") to Pig. The presence of the characters often affects the goings-on in the other strips, either directly (through their presence) or indirectly through setting or dialogue, such as when Rat replaced the words of a Family Circus comic with a quote from Benito Mussolini.

Pearls is notorious for its large amount of dark humor; topics such as death, depression and human suffering overall are common themes, and Pastis has recalled receiving complaints, including hate mail and occasionally death threats from people who have been offended by his strips; two strips that portrayed a llama United Nations diplomat named "Ataturk" who spits on other diplomats, prompted a letter to then-President George W. Bush from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States demanding an apology, seeing it as a mockery of former Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Pastis has mentioned in his treasuries that the cartoonists whom he mocks (a trademark characteristic of Pearls) often take the insults in good humor, even occasionally asking for an original strip.