Background
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. He kept drawing all during this time, coming up with the character of the first Pearls Before Swine character, Rat, during a boring class in law school.
"When I wrote for him 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 practiced law as an insurance defense litigation attorney in the San Francisco Bay area, but quickly became disenchanted with it. 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.
Read more about this topic: Stephan Pastis
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