Stephan Thomas Pastis (/ˈstɛfən ˈpæstɪs/ STEF-ən PAS-tiss;[2] born January 16, 1968) is an American cartoonist and former lawyer who is the creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine.
[5] 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.
[6][7] 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.
[9]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.
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.
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.
[13]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.
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".
[8] He considers his dissatisfaction with law helpful insofar as "humor is a reaction to and defense against unhappiness",[8] and wanting to leave his job gave him the impetus to create better comic strips so that he could get syndicated.
Pastis lives in Santa Rosa, California, with his wife Staci and two children, where he is on the board of the Charles Schulz Museum, helping with merchandising rights issues and answering questions about Peanuts.
On February 25, 2013, Pastis released his first book aimed at younger readers, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made, from Candlewick Press.
Modeled after the popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Timmy Failure follows the exploits of a young detective-to-be and his polar bear friend, Total, as they solve crimes in their neighborhood.
[21] In April 2017, Disney started work on a Timmy Failure movie with Tom McCarthy directing and co-writing with Pastis.
[22] The film was released on Disney's family-oriented streaming service Disney+ in January 2020 with the titular character being portrayed by Winslow Fegley.