Pearls Before Swine/Trivia

• The Annotated Edition: The treasury collections contain annotations from Pastis which try to elaborate on where ideas came from and detail reactions to the more controversial strips. And tell us which things he found impossible to draw.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Stephan Pastis appears to be this in Real Life.
• Missing Episode: Many books feature comic strips that were never printed as they were deemed too offensive or simply not funny.
• Old Shame: One book has several early strips that Pastis made when Pearls was still a webcomic. He derided most of them for being Out of Character.
  • There are also various strips that were Not Ready for Primetime and those Pastis thought were either too weird or just plain sucked, and ended up getting scrapped.
• Recycled Script: Averted for the most part, but a pair of strips really stand out: September 29, 2011, a daily strip, was recycled into October 02, 2011, a Sunday strip, with an extra punchline from Rat. This was pointed out in some of the latter strip's Gocomics comments.
• Shout-Out / Homage: Lampshades are often shown having the same zigzag pattern as Charlie Brown's trademark shirt from Peanuts. Pastis has said that this is an intentional tribute to Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, whom he actually met and was able to show some of his early work to before Schulz' death.
  • Several of his strips also use the style of some of his favorite strips, like The Far Side, as an homage to them.
  • Garfield Minus Garfield gets a direct Shout Out.
  • In one strip, where Goat gets annoyed with Rat's immature behaviors on the internet and writes him an angry letter, Rat's response is "I know you are, but what am I?".
  • The second panel of the Dennis the Menace Double Crossover mentioned above was drawn smaller than the other two to imitate DTM's one panel format, with Dennis's lines written under the panel instead of in a speech bubble.
  • The published collection whose cover is the image on the main page is a direct shout-out to Gil Scott-Heron's Spoken Word piece, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised".
  • The whole "Feral Ballerina" thing (starts here). See Freefall - Varroa Jacobsoni "deduces" that the deer was killed by a feral ballerina (starts here).