This Little Piggy Stayed Home, 2: A Pearls Before Swine Collection

Kudos to Stephan Pastis on his humorous comic strips. We love the stupid pig and angry rat.

Pastis will go to ANY length to set up what would normally be a semi-lame word play; it ends up being great. He also is the master of writing conversations where each participant consistently misunderstands the other to humorous effect.Rat is funniest at his most threatening. He tells the neighbor to get rid of the kumquats on his lawn--or face Rat's secondhand Soviet missile. Pig is funny just being Pig--only dimly aware of the reality around him. And Zebra's interactions with various potential predators is hilarious. Great book; buy it!

Pastis is witty as ever, and his dry humor really hits home on many fronts. His jokes on married life and silly people really made me laugh. He has a great section where Rat tries to leave the strip, and joins other comic strips. His humor and tie-ins to other strips are really creative and funny. This is a must buy for Pearls fans.

Back before even the first Pearls Before Swine book came out, when I only saw the strip on the internet, I told Stephan Pastis by email that his strip was headed for success. Now that he's made it big, I can't find his freaking email address any more so I'm having to stoop to singing his praises in a public forum like this. His strip has great moments of almost insane humor, making me wonder just how weird his thought processes really are. His little cartoons follow in the footsteps of Peanuts, Bloom County, Segar's Popeye and Far Side in being one of the few strips that can actually provoke a laugh when read. All his collections will be worth reading and rereading. Support this great effort so he doesn't have to ever go back to being a lawyer in San Francisco again, for cryin' out loud! Pig and Rat will thank you for it.

This is the smartest, funnniest new comic strip in years. Pearls Before Swine is a fresh change from the usual world of fifth grade humor that you see in most strips these days. Pearls is the kind of cartoon that you want to show to friends but you're afraid you won't get the book back. The simple but sharp wit of Pastis is what's been missing on the comics pages for a long time. If more cartoonists had this kind of twisted edge we might read the papers more. It's not that the Hagar the Horribles and the Family Circus's aren't good, they've just lost that edge that once made them groundbreaking. Pearls Before Swine will remind you what comic strips used to be known for-- making you laugh out loud.