If Stephan Pastis didn’t hate the law so much, “Pearls Before Swine” might not exist.
For nearly a decade, Pastis — a full-time comic artist who writes and illustrates a satirical strip that has run in American newspapers for 25 years — worked as a lawyer, defending insurance companies in court.
“I hated being a litigator, because you’re always fighting with people,” he said. “I never felt good.”
Seeking relief, Pastis would draw comics at night and on the weekends. He’d loved the genre ever since discovering paperback “Peanuts” collections at his aunt’s house when he was five years old.
“I don't even think I could fully read everything, I was too young,” he said. “But I just loved the world.”
Pastis’s dream was for the comics he drew to be “syndicated,” or picked up by companies that would get them into daily newspapers. He submitted to company after company.
“It got rejected for years and years and years,” he said.
Then one day, he submitted a strip that featured two original characters: self-centered Pig and his dim-witted roommate, Rat. Both characters had appeared in previous strips Pastis had drawn, but he had never put them together.
It was his lucky break.
Pastis recalled that he was eating takeout Chinese food at his desk when he got a letter from United Media. At the time, the company syndicated “Peanuts” and “Dilbert.”
“I think [the letter] said, ‘I just want to let you know I got your submission and it’s a lot funnier than the vast majority of submissions I receive,’” Pastis said. “And I was like, ‘Holy smokes, this is amazing.’”
Pastis quit his job and took up cartooning full time.
Twenty-five years later, Rat and Pig still anchor “Pearls Before Swine,” along with a cast of other characters. The strip itself changes with the news cycle, offering Pastis’s trademark biting commentary on the events of the day.
Pastis’s creative process has evolved along with his comics. He now works eight months ahead of deadline. Experience has also taught him not to force it.
“You recognize early the signs that you're not going to be funny that day, and you give up at a two-hour mark, as opposed to the early days when you will lose the whole day,” Pastis said.
His new book, “Pearls Jubilee,” is a collection of significant “Pearls Before Swine” comics from the past 25 years. At first, he wanted to put together a book that ranked his best strips, then decided that wasn’t enough of a challenge.
“I had this further crazy idea,” he said. “What if you did a list of the worst in order? And what if you did a list of the riskiest ones, or the spiciest ones, or the ones that got the biggest reaction, or the ones that drew the most complaints, or the ones that got the attention of famous people, or — on and on?”
Categorizing and selecting “Pearls Before Swine” strips from the more than 10,000 that have been published was a monumental task.
“That definitely took a while,” Pastis said.
In the end, though, Pastis takes pride in the book he created. Now, he’s excited about the tour that will promote it.
He is set to speak at Spokane’s Garland Theater Saturday at 3 p.m. on Saturday, November 14, as part of the Spokesman-Review’s “Northwest Passages” Program.
“Every time I sit there and there’s anybody in the crowd, it's just this amazing wonder,” Pastis said. “We're not stand-up comics that perform live on stage to a group of people. We're people who are in a spare bedroom in our house drawing. In theory, there's an audience out there, but you don't see them. You don't hear them laugh.”
He added: “And then you go to something like a book tour, and they're there. And it's like a sense of wonder, like, ‘Oh my gosh, people actually read it.’”
