Stephan Pastis
| Stephan Pastis | |
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Pastis at the 2011 Helsinki Comics Festival in Helsinki, Finland.
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| Born |
Stephan Thomas Pastis January 16, 1968 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University Of California, Berkeley; UCLA School of Law |
| Occupation | Insurance defense litigation attorney (1993–2002) Cartoonist of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine (2000–present) |
| Spouse(s) | Staci |
| Children | 2 |
| Website | stephanpastis.wordpress.com |
Stephan Thomas Pastis (pronounced stɛfən pæstəs) (born January 16, 1968) is an American cartoonist and the creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. He has begun writing children's chapter books, commencing the release of Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made and the second and third Timmy Failure, which debuted at #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list for Children's Middle Grade Books.
A second-generation Greek-American, 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 following year Pastis attended law school at UCLA, where he received his J.D.. He kept drawing all 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 quickly became disenchanted with the legal profession. He didn't like its adversarial nature, nor "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 and Bradbury Road, as well as others, were repeatedly rejected.
The character of Rat came from Pastis's earlier strip, Rat. The character of 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 didn't begin auspiciously, since Pastis blurted out: "Hi, Sparky [Schulz's nickname], my name is Stephan Pastis and I'm a lawyer." Schulz turned pale; he thought Pastis was there to serve him with a subpoena. However, he recovered, and Pastis remembers Schulz's graciousness:
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Wikipedia