From deepest, darkest San Marino (by way of Albany in the Bay Area) comes cartoonist Stephan Pastis, discussing and signing his new anthology, Pearls Falls Fast: A Pearls Before Swine Treasury. An ark of doodles and scribbles used as a delivery device for the trenchant and the ludicrous, Pearls Before Swine is one of the few comics worth reading in the funny pages these days. A former attorney, Pastis has over the past two decades evolved a cast of characters that includes the arrogant Rat, the simple Pig, the knowing Goat, the frazzled Zebra and a host of others in this menagerie of metaphors, which makes the funny pages a little more bearable since Bill Watterson, Ernie Bushmiller and Charles M. Schulz have gone. Irreverent but not irrelevant, Pastis' latest comic collection brings to mind those days when people would stand in line to see exhibitions of Far Side art and unite in their shared scorn of the dreaded Cathy. Vroman's Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena; Monday, March 24, 7 p.m., free. (626) 449-5320, vromansbookstore.com.

Mon., March 24, 7 p.m., 2014
(Expired: 03/24/14)

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