Some of you may be wondering about Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy. These are two newspaper strips which may or may not be in your local newspaper, both from the same syndicate. Monday's Get Fuzzy (which you can see here) featured a phone conversation. Someone named Alex called a gent who I guess is supposed to be Darby Conley, who draws Get Fuzzy. And I guess Alex is supposed to be someone who works at the syndicate. Alex tells Darby, "I think the FedEx you got last week accidentally had some unpublished Pearls Before Swine in it. Go ahead and destroy those." Darby, who's been busy playing a videogame, is late with his strips for the week…so he gets a fiendish idea.
The rest of this week, every Get Fuzzy strip has been the same day's Pearls Before Swine strip but with the Get Fuzzy characters badly pasted-in over the Pearls Before Swine characters. As an example, here's Tuesday's Pearls Before Swine and here's Tuesday's Get Fuzzy. Furthermore, in Wednesday's Get Fuzzy, we have Stephen Pastis, who draws Pearls Before Swine, making a guest appearance to call Conley and inquire about the duplications.
This is a very funny idea, especially with the bad, obvious pasteovers. Or at least, it's funny if you're reading a newspaper that carries both strips. As Len Wein and I were just discussing on the phone, if your local paper carries only Get Fuzzy — and there are at least a couple that do — you've got to be going, "Whaaa–?" I think I admire the guts that Conley is exhibiting not only to risk alienating a chunk of his readership for the sake of a good joke, but the courage to keep it going all week. Wonder if there's a further pay-off ahead.