Meet The Next Big Children's Book Author. He Promises No Smoking, Booze or Bad Words

If you’ve ever walked into a book signing for cartoonist Stephan Pastis, there’s a chance you could mistake it for a rock concert, only one for adolescent boys.

But don’t be mistaken. The artist’s darkly funny comic strip, Pearls Before Swine, does well among most age groups; it’d have to, after all, to be syndicated in 650 papers in an era of declining newspaper readership. But it’s his Pearls collections, more than a dozen in all, that score particularly well among the Lego and Transformer set.