Stephan Thomas Pastis ( ; born January 16, 1968) is an American cartoonist and former lawyer who is the creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. He also writes children's chapter books, commencing with the release of Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made. The seventh book, It's the End When I Say It's the End, debuted at #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list for Children's Middle Grade Books.
Background
The son of Greek immigrants, Pastis was raised in San Marino, California. He started cartooning as a child; his mother brought him pens and paper to amuse him when he was "sick a lot" and had to stay in bed. He attended the University of California at Berkeley, earning a B.A. in political science in 1989. The next year, Pastis attended law school at UCLA, where he received his J.D. He kept drawing during this time, coming up with the first Pearls Before Swine character, Rat, during what he said was a boring class in law school. When I wrote for him [Rat] it seemed pretty honest. It was the first character where I could really say what's on my mind. When I put it on paper, it's my voice. So it works for me.
From 1993 to 2002, Pastis was an insurance defense litigation attorney in the San Francisco Bay area, but he quickly became disenchanted with the legal profession. He did not like its adversarial nature or "the anxiety and tension it produced", so in the mid-1990s he revisited his earlier ambition of becoming a syndicated cartoonist by submitting various concepts to syndication agencies. The Infirm, Rat, Bradbury Road, and others were repeatedly rejected.
Pearls Before Swine
The character Rat came from Pastis's earlier strip, Rat. The character Pig, who is Rat's opposite, had been featured in The Infirm, which was about an attorney who numbered an evil pig farmer among his clients. Although Pastis had developed the characters, they were still just stick figures with jokes. One day in 1996, Pastis drove to an ice rink in Santa Rosa where Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, had his coffee every day. The meeting did not begin auspiciously, as Pastis blurted out: "Hi, Sparky [Schulz's nickname], my name is Stephan Pastis and I'm a lawyer." Schulz turned pale, thinking Pastis was there to serve him with a subpoena. But he recovered, and Pastis remembers Schulz's graciousness: I was a total stranger to him, and he let me sit down at his table and we talked for an hour. I took a picture with him. He looked at some of the strips that I had been doing and gave me some tips. Man, I was on cloud nine.
In addition to Peanuts, Pastis drew inspiration from Dilbert. What worked for me personally was to study the writing of Dilbert. I just bought a bunch of Dilbert books and studied how to write a 3-panel strip. Then I showed them to a group of people who were acquaintances (but not quite friends) in order to get their honest assessment of which ones were funny and which ones weren't. As to the ins and outs of getting syndicated, I bought a book called Your Career in the Comics by Lee Nordling.
Pastis drew about 200 strips for the new comic and selected 40 of the best, but fearing more rejection, let them sit on his basement counter for the next two years. Only in 1999, when he visited the grave of a college friend who had been a free spirit and had encouraged him to be the same, did he overcome his fear and submit the strips to three different syndicates, including United Features. United took the unprecedented step of first running the strips on Comics.com to gauge reader response. When Scott Adams, Dilbert'''s creator, whom Pastis had never met, endorsed the strip, the response "went through the roof".
Pastis also credits Get Fuzzy cartoonist Darby Conley with contributing to the strip's development. They met through their syndication attorney, and Conley taught him how to color the Sunday strips and add gray tones to the dailies, which people call “halftone”.
Eight months later, Pastis gleefully quit his law practice. He considers his dissatisfaction with law helpful insofar as "humor is a reaction to and defense against unhappiness", and wanting to leave his job gave him the impetus to create better comic strips so that he could get syndicated.
Fifteen years later, Pearls was still one of the fastest-growing comic strips, appearing in more than 650 newspapers worldwide. Pastis generally works five to nine months ahead of deadline, a rarity in the world of newspaper comics.