Stephan Pastis

Tomorrow I will get up and I will drive to a cafe and I will write a comic strip called pearls before swine.

And I will try to make people laugh as I have done every day for almost 25 years now.

And that is all due to Scott because 25 years ago I was a litigation attorney

in San Francisco who hated his job.

So I would draw at night and on weekends in the hopes of quitting the law and becoming a syndicated cartoonist.

But as with every cartoonist, everything I submitted was rejected by everyone.

So on my lunch breaks at my law firm, I went to a bookstore in the Embarcadero, and I sat there on the floor in my suit and tie, and I studied the best and most popular strip around, and that was Dilbert.

And I learned everything I possibly could about how you write a three panel comic strip.

to remove every unnecessary word how to remove every unnecessary line and how to bring to the comic that same blunt inappropriate tone that you would use in a note you pass in high school and i tried with the syndicates again after that and after years of getting only rejections i got signed by united media the same company that syndicated dilbert but then in the same in the kind of uh

goofy corporate twist that Scott would write about in Dilbert.

A salesman at United said there was no way any newspaper would ever buy Pearls.

It had no demographic.

It was about a stick figure, rat and pig who never moved and mostly talked about death.

So the same syndicate that signed me canceled me.

My career ended before it started.

And suddenly I was back to being a lawyer for life.

Enter Scott.

The very cartoonist whose work I had studied but did not yet know personally saw the strip online and told all of his fans that he loved it and to go read it.

I remember running upstairs and saying to my wife, I don't know if I'll ever make it in this field, but if I do, this was my big break.

And it was.