Pearls Before Swine
The character of Rat came from Pastis's earlier strip, Rat. The character of Pig, who is Rat's diametric 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, 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:
"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, he 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 the counter in his basement for the next two years. It wasn't until 1999, when he visited the grave of a college friend who had been a free spirit and had encouraged him to be the same, that he overcame his fear and submitted them to three different syndicates, including United Features. United took the unprecedented step of first running the strips on its comics.com internet site to gauge reader response. When Scott Adams, Dilbert's creator, who 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 development of the strip. They met through their syndication attorney, and Conley taught him how to color the Sunday strips and add gray tones to the dailies.
Eight months afterwards, Pastis gleefully quit his law practice. Pastis attributes his dissatisfaction with the law in being helpful insofar that "humor is a reaction to and defense against unhappiness", and that wanting to get out of his job provided him with the impetus to create better comic strips so that he could get selected for syndication.
Eleven years later, Pearls is 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.
Pastis' wife, Staci, is sometimes depicted in the strip, usually offering to exchange her husband for a free pizza. They have two children, Thomas and Julia. The family lives in Santa Rosa, California where Pastis is on the board of the Charles Schulz Museum, helping with merchandising rights issues and answering questions about Peanuts. Ol' Steve is also the first Syndicated Cartoonist to feature himself as a regular character.
“Schulz is to comic strips what Marlon Brando was to acting. It was so revolutionary. Before ‘Peanuts,’ the writing was physical, over the top, but Sparky goes inside the soul. His influence on me is enormous. I’ve taken his backgrounds, the front porch, the beach and the TV beanbag. Rat is Lucy, Goat is Linus and Pig is Charlie Brown. Sparky is a template, whether or not you know it, he’s the template.”
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