My name is Stephan Pastis. I’m the creator of the Timmy Failure book series for kids and the comic strip, Pearls Before Swine.
Yeah. I have a very odd transition story. I think it’s pretty unique. I don’t know anybody else who has this same one. I was a lawyer for 10 years in San Francisco and I just didn’t like the job at all. In fact, I hated it. So I would draw at nights after work and on weekends. And the hope was that I could get syndicated. Syndicates are just the big companies that distribute you to newspapers. So if you’re a kid with dreams of getting your comic strip in newspapers, you have to go through the syndicate.
So what I would do is I’d come up with 24 to 30 different strips and I’d put them in an envelope and I’d send them to all the syndicates, and they would always get rejected. Everything got rejected, like every syndicate four or five times. So I thought I was going to be stuck being a lawyer forever. And then in ’99, one strip that I did where I paired this rat and pig, got some traction.
And United Features, which was the syndicate that had Peanuts and Dilbert liked it and so they put it online. They weren’t quite sure it should go in papers, but they put it online at first. And then Scott Adams, who did Dilbert told everybody to go read it and then it really took off. And so then they committed to putting it in papers. So it launched in January of 2002. So that was that transition.