Stephan Pastis

February 7th, 2014.

No greeting, no how are you, just quote,

If you look at the top of Alice's hair, the very top, you'll see it's a penis and balls.

We were like two adolescents passing inappropriate notes in class, except we were doing it in newspapers in front of 50 million people.

November 20th, 2009, email from Scott.

Once again, no greeting, no how are you, just, I said poop in today's comic.

Next stop, Alice blows Wally.

Or this one from July 7th, 2014, when Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson came out of retirement to draw my strip on the condition that I keep Bill's involvement a secret until the strips were published, which I did.

So Scott wrote to me, once again, no greeting, no how are you, just quote, clearly you can keep a secret.

So I might as well tell you, I stabbed a hobo.

By the way, when Scott wrote something like that, he never added the ha ha ha that normal people add, which always left you to wonder, did he stab a hobo?

And in person, Scott could say some equally wild stuff.

Like the time we were in his kitchen and he was talking about how much smarter he was than his parents.

so much so that he sometimes wondered if he wasn't born the usual way, but instead had been given to his parents by aliens.

I laughed.

Then I looked up.

Guess who wasn't laughing?

Which brings me to one last thing.

When I post publicly about how much Scott has meant to me, I hear from a lot of people who are familiar with Scott, primarily from his more political stuff.

And because of all that, as you might expect in this era, some of them have less than kind things to say.