Pearls and Pastis: Road to Spokane

Pearls Before Swine comic strip creator Stephan Pastis is returning to Spokane, Wash. and The Spokesman-Review is celebrating the imminent arrival with a series of article highlighting the cartoonist.

Ed Condran speaks to Stephen:

It’s about the past, present and future when Stephen Pastis returns Tuesday for a Northwest Passages Book Club event at the Bing Crosby Theatre.

The creator of the “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip and the children’s chapter book series, “Timothy Failure” will discuss his latest book, “Pearls Seeks Enlightenment,” which features 18 months of daily comic strips from 2020-21, with Spokesman-Review editor Rob Curley. The project was released Tuesday. Pastis will also wax about his forthcoming illustrated novel “Looking Up.”

Pastis’ next book, which will hit shelves in October, is about a little girl upset about how her neighborhood is changing. “She launches a Don Quixote-esque campaign to save her toy store,” Pastis said by phone from his Santa Rosa, California, home.

Condran adds a couple sidebars:

Five things about Stephan Pastis

3. “Pearls Before Swine” appears in more than 850 newspapers worldwide.

and

Pastis toasts Spokane with his latest strip

“How I came up with this is, when I told people here (in Santa Rosa, California) where I was going, they all had a different pronunciation of Spokane,” Pastis said. “When I corrected them, they told me I was wrong.”

Pastis rolls out the variety of ways folks say Spokane.

It is fitting Stephan is appearing at the Bing Crosby Theatre, for after touring the Pacific Northwest (Coeur d’Alene, Glacier National Park, Helena, Butte, Missoula, and a return to Spokane) he plans on following in the footsteps of those Hope-Crosby-Lamour Road movies:

Pastis is off to Cambodia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan after he visits Spokane.