Within the first few minutes of talking to comic strip writer and artist Stephan Pastis, you can tell he’s extremely excited about his trip to India.
The creator of pun-a-plenty comic strip Pearls Before Swine , which appears in over 700 news publications across the world, is more than well-prepared for his first trip to India.
He will be here to speak at BITS Pilani’s Goa Campus on February 6.
Pastis says over a video call from his home in San Francisco, “The last two months have been nothing but India. I’ve read about six books and am watching one Bollywood film after another. I think I’ve watched like 30! You know what I did last Friday night? I watched the entire Gangs of Wasseypur .”
Pastis is hilariously candid about everything from the process behind creating Pearls Before Swine to meeting the comic strip world’s greats such as Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert ), Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson ( Calvin and Hobbes ).
And of course, coming to India. Excerpts:
This is your first trip to India – how did it come about?
Really, the trip is just tourism. I want to see India and was supposed to speak in Goa one day and I turned it into a nine-day vacation. I’m going to be in Mumbai for three nights and Goa for five nights.
What have you heard about India?
Oh man, the last two months has been nothing but India. I’ve read about six books – I don’t mean guide books. I read two on Mumbai – Maximum City and one called Behind the Beautiful Forevers . Then I read a huge history of India. I read one about religion called India’s Sacred Geography .
It’s about all the places that are important and why. I’m reading one now called The Last Mughal , which is really good. The other thing I’ve been doing, I’ve been watching one Bollywood film after another. I think I’ve watched like 30. I’m watching Chak De! India right now. I watched Queen , 3 Idiots , Swades .
I’ve been going through tons of them. I really like them. It’s a great way to learn about India. In people’s films, they contain people’s aspirations – not necessarily what they are, but what they value and want to be. I think that’s instructive.
When did you start seeing the global popularity of Pearls Before Swine?
I noticed it when they started selling it in places like South America, couple of places in Europe like Spain and Portugal and then India. But usually, it doesn’t do that great, because they don’t speak English and so much of the strip is puns.
You can’t translate puns, it just doesn’t work. The beauty of India is that so many people speak English. It works. I noticed when I was on the Facebook fan page analytics. I noticed one day that a city had four times the number (of fans) of the greatest US city and that was Mumbai. Also in the top 10 were Bangalore and Pune. There were three cities in the top 10 and one of them was the biggest by far. So I thought, ‘Wow, that’s cool. If I ever get a chance, if someone invites, I’m going there’. That’s sort of how I realised it.
You said earlier that your process for writing the strip involves going to a café and listening to loud music on your earphones. Is that still the same?
Yeah, every morning I go to a café. I’m very fussy about which café, because it has to have a lot of specific things – the music can’t be too loud. I can’t be too close to people. It’s so stupid. I don’t want to worry about parking, so I can’t go to a café where I have to use a parking meter.
Because then I’ll focus on the time left. It’s totally weird. There’s all these things – if it fits all these criteria, I go there. I can’t hear anyone, because I turn on the iPhone for music. I can see them, but I just can’t hear them.
Do you feel it’s tough if you had started out today with a web comic?
It’s really a double-edged sword. If your goal is to be in newspapers in America, it is so much harder and it is almost impossible.
They really don’t debut any new strips any more. Very rarely, so that has got infinitesimally harder. But, there are people who come out with web comics that are remarkably successful. I mean, couple of guys I’m friends with are the Cyanide and Happiness guys.
If you look them up on Facebook, they have a zillion followers. The internet gives you that immediacy to build a fan base. But you have to be funny.
What do comic strip writers like Charles Schulz, Scott Adams and Bill Watterson have in common, according to you?
Most really great cartoonists, at least the ones I met, are insecure about their work. It’s almost a hallmark of the great ones.
The ones who are confident about it are really not the good ones. Isn’t that funny? Like if you would complement Watterson or Schulz about a strip, they’d go, ‘Oh, did you like that one? What did you like about it? Oh good’. They are all also crazy smart and intelligent. Especially, Scott Adams and Watterson too, they are brilliant. You sort of have to watch what you say, because they’re listening and they’re smart.
Are there any plans to take Pearls Before Swine beyond the comic strip?
I just got approached by a studio that works with The Simpsons and they asked me about that. I thought that’d be really fun, to do like a 12-episode series for Netflix, where I got a lot of control. That would really be tempting for me. I’ve been approached twice for Pearls for movies and it’s not worked out either time because I didn’t get the control I wanted. I was also approached to make Timmy Failure (Pastis’ children’s book series) into a movie and that is going to happen. I would talk more about it, but I’m not allowed to. You’re going to see an announcement in about four weeks from a very large studio that bought the film rights. We have the director and he’s really good, so I’m excited.
