In an exclusive interview, Stephan Pastis told GalleyCat that he is in negotiations with an unnamed studio to create an animated feature about his popular comic strip, Pearls Before Swine. As his eleventh comics collection "The Saturday Evening Pearls" arrives this month, the cartoonist talked about the fine art of building a comics anthology.

"It's a lot of work, because in addition to doing the covers, I write comments below many of the individual strips," he explained. "The comments involve what I may have liked/not liked about the strip, feedback I got from readers, mistakes, etc. The comments take a fair amount of time, but they seem to be readers' favorite part of the book."

Pastis explained more about his upcoming projects: "We are currently beginning negotiations with a film studio (which I cannot yet name) for a Pearls animated feature. Also, this month, Aurora is releasing plush versions of Pig, Rat, Larry the Croc and Zebra."

He concluded with some advice for aspiring comic strip writers: "Well, if you're just starting out, my advice would be that things are reallly tough out there right now, given the state of newspapers, so if you're counting on being a big success out of the gate, you might be unpleasantly surprised. I think the future will involve getting animated in some capacity and distributed on the Internet."