by Bruce Guthrie
I went to both of Stephan Pastis's P+P-related events on Monday. He had an in-store school visit in the morning and then a VERY sold out event at the Takoma Park Community Center that evening. I presume the TPCC will post the video of the appearance there at some point.
The presentations were totally different as they were geared for different audiences. For the morning one, he talked about how he had always wanted to be a cartoonist but went into law. At some point, he had to face just the fact of just how much he hated his law career and ditched it all to try cartooning. While he drew and talked about Pearls Before Swine a bit, the main focus was his new book ("Looking Up") and the Timmy Failure series. I'm guessing most kids don't read his comic strip... But I guess most kids these days have never seen a newspaper either.
The evening one was a trip through some of the various complaint emails he had gotten over time. If you attended his 2014 event at the Washington Post (I remember Nick Galifianakis coming up stage for a hug after one of his comments about the country of Turkey) or his 2015 appearance at the National Book Festival, you had heard some of the stories before. He had added stuff of course including a prescient New Year's cartoon from 2019/2020 about how much of a shitstorm 2020 was going to be. Unlike the morning sessions, Looking Up and Timmy Failure might have come up but just in passing -- it was almost entirely Pearls Before Swine.
Richard Thompson was mentioned several times during the evening session with reverence. Stephan had been at the 2016 National Press Club memorial celebration for Richard that Amy put together.
Carolyn Belefski came to the evening event and got to accompany him afterward.
Another familiar face at the evening event was John Milewski, a friend of mine from Newseum days who now works at the Woodrow Wilson Center and is one of the (probably the lead now-a-days) photographers for Baltimore Comic-Con.
Attendees in the morning included Jonathan Roth, a local school teacher who's been doing kids books for awhile ("Beep and Bob" and now "Rover and Speck") and is presenting at the store next Wednesday morning. ( https://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/jonathan-roth-rover-and-speck-splash-down-conn-ave ) ( Unrelated but Roz Chast is there that evening -- https://www.politics-prose.com/roz-chast )
I of course took pictures:
The morning session:
The evening session:
If you want to relive the past... Pictures from the 2014 Washington Post appearance:
Pictures from the 2015 National Book Festival appearance:
Pictures from Richard's 2016 memorial event were too numerous for one page so I had to split them into two pages. The presentation itself:
And the non-presentation pictures from the event:
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