The first show I time-shifted with my new video recorder was Letterman, when he was fresh and inventive, and I’d watch it with my kids, who were in elementary school, over breakfast. I never heard of very many papers actually using it, but, linked to Bramhall’s commentary, I do kind of suspect that it wouldn’t take a very sophisticated program to crank out the monologues for Carson’s last several years when he was phoning it in. Coaches already called in the material and this was supposed to replace the poor sod in charge of writing it all up. It couldn’t cover the league championships, but if you fed in the final score, the leading scorer and a few other standard details, it would crank out one of those one-paragraph wrap-ups that fill the pages of local papers. It reminds me, though, of a minor breakthrough in the ’90s, when someone developed a computer program that would write local sports stories. In the three subsequent strips, she draws imaginative scenes replete with Martian robots and rich detail-features that, in retrospect, are clear indicators of Watterson’s work.There is some serendipity in WPFD coming along with the Writer’s Guild strike, which latter occasion Bill Bramhall marks with a reminder that AI is a threat to writers and is part of the mix in the Guild’s attempts to come up with a fair contract. The idea is rooted in Pastis’ signature self-deprecation-he often pokes fun at his own drawing ability in Pearls-and Watterson’s guest art is set up with an amusing conceit: Libby, a precocious second-grader introduced in two recent strips, boasts that she can easily best Pastis’ stick-figure style.

Pastis, who said the collaboration was “like getting a call from Bigfoot,” instantly agreed when Watterson suggested guest-drawing Pearls and donating the originals to raise money for Parkinson’s research. The work represents Watterson’s first published strips in almost 20 years. So it’s something of a revelation that Watterson, in three strips from the past week, served as a guest artist on Stephan Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine. The man was reclusive when drawing his legendary Calvin and Hobbesstrip, but since retiring in 1995 he’s basically disappeared: He’s made few public appearances, given even fewer interviews, and produced only one or two drawings.

Pearls before swine pastis