What Is Pearls Before Swine?
Pearls Before Swine is a daily comic strip created by Stephan Pastis, a former California lawyer who left law to draw. It debuted online on United Media's website in November 2000, launched in print on December 31, 2001, and was running in roughly 150 newspapers by January 7, 2002. United Feature Syndicate distributed it until 2011, when it moved to Andrews McMeel Syndication, and at peak it appeared in around 750 papers. Pastis's work on the strip earned him the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year in 2018, along with its Best Newspaper Comic Strip award in 2003, 2006, and 2014.
Meet the Cast: Rat, Pig, Goat, Zebra, and the Crocs
Pearls runs on a tight ensemble of anthropomorphic animals whose fixed personalities make the jokes work. You always know how each one will react, which is exactly what lets the strip set up its traps.
Rat
The cynic and unofficial lead — arrogant, selfish, and convinced of his own genius. Most of the strip's darkest and sharpest lines come out of Rat's mouth.
Pig
Sweet, simple, and relentlessly optimistic, Pig is the emotional heart and the perfect foil to Rat. His innocence is the cushion that lets the strip get away with bleak punchlines.
Goat and Zebra
Goat is the intellectual, forever reading and forever exasperated. Zebra is the kind one, who improbably tries to reason with the predators trying to eat him.
The Crocs
A fraternity of dim-witted crocodiles who live next door to Zebra and constantly, hilariously fail to eat him. Their broken-English schemes are one of the strip's most beloved running gags.
How the Jokes Actually Work
Pearls has two engines, and both are unusual for a newspaper strip. The first is dark, absurdist humor: it will go to bleak or morbid places a typical family strip never would, using Pig's innocence and Rat's cynicism to make the darkness funny rather than mean. The second is the signature pun ending, sometimes called a feghoot: Pastis builds an entire strip — sometimes several days of setup — purely to deliver one groan-inducing pun in the final panel. The twist is that Pastis then breaks the fourth wall by drawing himself into the strip, where the other characters beat him up for inflicting the pun on readers. The self-punishing meta-joke is the brand, and it is why fans groan and grin at the same time.
The Time Bill Watterson Came Out of Hiding
The most famous thing that ever happened in Pearls was a secret. In June 2014, Bill Watterson — the famously reclusive creator of Calvin and Hobbes, who had not published newspaper comics since that strip ended in 1995 — quietly agreed to guest-draw three Pearls strips. Pastis set it up with a sly conceit: a precocious second-grader named Libby (shortened to Lib, which is nearly Bill backwards) shows up claiming she can draw better than Pastis's stick figures, and then proceeds to do exactly that in Watterson's hand. The strips ran June 4, 5, and 6, 2014, and Pastis kept the secret until they had all appeared in print. The original artwork was auctioned at Heritage Auctions on August 8, 2014 for a total of $74,090, benefiting the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research.
Where to Read Pearls Before Swine and What It Teaches
Pearls Before Swine runs daily and free on GoComics, with a deep archive, and still appears in newspapers through Andrews McMeel Syndication. For anyone making their own comic, Pearls is a lesson in leverage: a tiny cast of fixed personalities plus a repeatable joke format can carry a strip for decades, because readers come back for the characters as much as the gags. Lock a handful of distinct characters and you have a stage you can reuse forever — which is what a comic character creator is for — and a comic strip generator lets you build the multi-panel setup-and-punchline rhythm that a strip like Pearls lives on.