News Release

Stone Soup to Celebrate 10th Anniversary

Kansas City, Mo.  (11/10/2005)  Stone Soup, a daily comic strip created by Jan Eliot, will mark its 10th year of syndication with Universal Press Syndicate on Nov. 20.

Stone Soup is Eliot’s take on modern families that don’t fit the stereotype of the perfect family with a mom, dad, 2.5 kids and white picket fence. The strip focuses on the slightly chaotic life of Val, a single parent juggling her day job in a cubicle with her night job as the mom of a 10-year-old tomboy and a 13-year-old drama queen. Her opinionated mother lives upstairs, and her sister, Joan, a work-at-home mom with a two-year-old son, lives right next door.

“I try to create a comic strip that respects non-traditional family situations, that has empathy for imperfect people, that has empathy for people with less than enough money and less than enough time and sometimes less than enough patience,” Eliot says from her home in Eugene, Oregon.

Now with her fifth Stone Soup collection in print, Not So Picture Perfect, Eliot has an exciting new adventure ahead for her characters. Her characters will be used by Habitat for Humanity International to raise visibility and awareness for their Women Build and Girls Build programs, and to encourage the involvement of more women in Habitat’s efforts to help families in need.

Cartooning became a therapeutic outlet for Eliot, a single mom raising two daughters, who was trying to pay bills, keep a full-time job and have a little fun. Writing and drawing comics let her vent frustrations and laugh at adversity. Her first comic was Patience and Sarah, a strip featuring a single mom and her daughter. It ran five years in 10 weekly and monthly papers.

Eliot was working as a copywriter and graphic designer while she developed her second strip, Sister City. The strip appeared weekly in the Eugene Register-Guard for five years. In 1995, Sister City became Stone Soup and Universal Press began syndicating it nationally. The success of Stone Soup let Eliot become a full-time cartoonist.

It wasn’t easy for Eliot to break into a male-dominated profession. In a speech to the American Association of University Women in April, Eliot recalled the response of one syndicate representative to her comic: “The industry has Lynn [“For Better or For Worse”]. We have Cathy. Why do we need you?”

Fans of Stone Soup have answered that question emphatically. In reader surveys, Stone Soup always makes a good showing. Stone Soup recently ranked fourth out of 44 features in a poll by The Atlanta Journal Constitution. Eliot has received numerous recognitions, including most recently an Alumni Fellow Award from the University of Oregon's College of Arts and Sciences.

Eliot bases the situations in Stone Soup on her own memories of raising daughters and on the lives of her unsuspecting friends and neighbors.

“It doesn’t take much, if you’ve raised kids, to be reminded of all the complexities and frustrations of family life,” says Eliot. “You’ve got a 13-year-old throwing a tantrum in a department store dressing room. What else can you do but find a way to laugh about it?”

Stone Soup appears in about 175 newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Boston Globe, The Kansas City Star and The Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Creator(s): Jan Eliot

Contact(s): Kathie Kerr

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