1. Stephan Thomas Pastis is an American cartoonist and former lawyer who is the creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine.
20 Facts About Stephan Pastis
1. 2.
Stephan Pastis writes children's chapter books, commencing with the release of Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made.
3.
The son of Greek immigrants, Pastis was raised in San Marino, California.
4.
Stephan Pastis 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.
5.
The next year, Stephan Pastis attended law school at UCLA, where he received his JD 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.
6.
From 1993 to 2002, Stephan Pastis was an insurance defense litigation attorney in the San Francisco Bay area, but he quickly became disenchanted with the legal profession.
7.
Stephan Pastis 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.
8.
One day in 1996, Stephan Pastis drove to an ice rink in Santa Rosa where Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, had his coffee every day.
9.
Stephan Pastis looked at some of the strips that I had been doing and gave me some tips.
10.
Stephan 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.
11.
When Scott Adams, Dilbert's creator, whom Stephan Pastis had never met, endorsed the strip, the response "went through the roof".
12.
Stephan Pastis credits Get Fuzzy cartoonist Darby Conley with contributing to the strip's development.
13.
Stephan Pastis 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.
14.
In June 2014, Stephan Pastis collaborated with Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, on a weeklong storyline in which a second-grade girl, Libby, wrote a few of Stephan Pastis's cartoon frames for him.
15.
Stephan Pastis says that collaborating with Bill Watterson is like glimpsing "Bigfoot".
16.
Stephan Pastis continues to release the treasuries about one every year and a half.
17.
In 2011, Stephan Pastis cowrote the Peanuts special Happiness Is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown.
18.
On February 25,2013, Stephan Pastis released his first book aimed at younger readers, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, from Candlewick Press.
19.
Stephan Pastis was nominated for the National Cartoonists Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 2002,2003,2006,2007,2008, and 2014.
20.
Stephan Pastis was nominated for The National Cartoonists Society Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year for every year since 2008, winning in 2018.