Stephan Pastis took an unusual route to becoming a number-one best-selling comics creator: he went to law school. It’s not that he didn’t want to become a cartoonist—as a child growing up in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino, he spent many happy hours off by himself drawing (when he wasn’t collecting baseball cards). He was routinely called on to create cartoons for his school newspapers. But by the time he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in political science, Pastis—a completely self-taught artist—felt it unlikely that his cartoons would ever be syndicated.

So he found himself sitting in class at UCLA Law School, hopelessly bored, sketching the character Rat (who would later become a mainstay of all his future comic strips). Creative inspiration followed him through graduation in 1993 to his first law firm job in San Francisco, where by 1996 he finally started submitting his comics to syndicates. Persisting through an initial spate of rejections, Stephan Pastis created his signature strip, Pearls Before Swine, in 1997 and signed on with United Media in 1999. Pearls was off and running, making appearances on the web, in newspapers, and in many best-selling books.