By Tim Clodfelter
JOURNAL REPORTER
Stephan Pastis, the cartoonist of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, knew when he was a child that he wanted to be a cartoonist. But he was too practical for his own good.
"When I was a little kid, I loved to draw, like most cartoonists," he said by phone from Santa Rosa, Calif. "But I knew going through school and everything that it wasn’t a practical choice. The odds of getting syndicated are slimmer than the odds of being an NBA player. So I decided to do something you can make a living at. I became a lawyer."
Specifically, he became a litigation attorney working for insurance companies in the San Francisco Bay area. That didn’t last long, though.
"I still drew on weekends and at night," he said. "In 1996, I started to get serious about being syndicated. I had been a lawyer for three years, and I just had to get out."
Not that he thinks so little of his former career, mind you. "I had a feeling of embarrassment, of moderate shame," he said. "Not because being a lawyer is bad. That’s too simplistic. But I felt I should be doing something else; I should be doing what I love. When you get to be 70, you don’t want to look back and regret. If you like being a lawyer, that’s great."
At 28, he decided he needed to chuck his first career and dove into cartooning. He developed several failed comic strips before hitting on Pearls.
His wife, Staci, didn’t say much about his decision. "She knew how much I disliked lawyering," he said. "But I didn’t quit right away. I was a syndicated cartoonist in January 2002 in newspapers, but I didn’t quit being a lawyer until August of 2002. I was in 70 papers then."
Now, he’s in close to 450 papers. His strip will get a one-month tryout starting Monday in the Winston-Salem Journal, as we look for a strip to replace Kudzu after the death of cartoonist Doug Marlette.
Pastis’ strip is a fast-paced comic about a small group of talking animals. Leading the cast are Rat, a sarcastic, abrasive rodent, and Pig, a sweet-hearted, dimwitted swine.
The title of the strip is a play on the Biblical passage "Neither cast ye your pearls before swine" and the fact that Rat believes he is sharing pearls of wisdom with Pig.
"Rat was somebody I drew in law school," he said. "He’s the part of you that is unfiltered and wants what you want and won’t be stopped. Pig is the child in most people - the loving part, the sweet part. They work well together. Rat by himself is just overwhelming."
The supporting cast includes Goat, who is smart but impatient, and Zebra, a long-suffering fellow who lives in a house with a pack of lions as neighbors on one side and a frat house full of crocodiles (The Brotherhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata) on the other.
If he had to choose just one character, Pastis said he would go with Rat. "I could write for Rat all day," he said, "but I’d lose half the papers I’m in. He’s my natural voice. That’s why no one wants to meet me."
He also picks on other cartoonists. He and Darby Conley, the creator of Get Fuzzy, are good friends and frequently throw jokes in their strips about one another. And Rat and gang frequently run afoul of other comic strip characters. The other cartoonists generally get a kick out of it - when he did a "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" strip recently implying that Beetle Bailey was gay, for instance, Beetle cartoonist Mort Walker asked if he could have the original art (Pastis complied). But fans sometimes take offense.
One recent source of complaints was a February strip in which Rat got drunk while babysitting the kids from Baby Blues and sent them on a beer run, where they ran over Jeremy from Zits. "The biggest (complaint) was that I was endangering the kids," Pastis said. "Those kids are made of pen and ink. They’re not real. They weren’t in any danger. It’s so weird. I don’t relate to that. News flash, they’re not real. What do I say? What do you do?"
When Pastis was developing his strip, he decided to go to the best source possible for advice on cartooning - a successful cartoonist. And since he lived nearby, Pastis chose the biggest of them all, Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts.
Knowing that Schulz owned an ice rink in Santa Rosa, about an hour north of San Francisco, Pastis took a day off from work in 1996. "I heard he had an English muffin at the same time every day, so I stalked him," he said. "He sat down and talked with me for an hour." Schulz looked over sample strips and made suggestions.
Jeannie Schulz, the widow of Charles, said that her husband always enjoyed being a mentor to younger cartoonists.
"I don’t think he ever thought they were younger than he was," she said. "There’s nothing he liked more than sitting around with other cartoonists and talking about cartooning and talking about the craft."
More than 10 years later, Pastis, 39, is still involved with Schulz’s work.
Three days a week, from Monday to Wednesday, he works at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center, looking over potential licensed products and making sure that they remain true to the spirit of Peanuts. He is also on the museum’s board of directors. "Sometimes, I’ll go sit in his studio," Pastis said.
Then Thursday through Saturday, he draws Pearls Before Swine - six daily episodes, one Sunday installment, and one or two extras so he can stockpile for vacation time. He stays about seven months ahead, a far cry from the many fellow cartoonists who skirt their deadlines and stay only a few weeks ahead.
"I work in my boxers," he said.
"That’s a nice thing you can’t normally do. I go to a cafe in Calistoga, in Napa Valley, the wine region. It’s beautiful. I sit at the counter and write and write."
No, he doesn’t go to the cafe in his boxers. That comes later, at home, when he sits down at the drawing board and illustrates the cartoons he has scripted out.
"It’s a great profession," he said.
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at .