âTimmy Failureâ feeds Stephan Pastisâ success
The last time âPearls Before Swineâ cartoonist Stephan Pastis walked the halls of San Marinoâs K.L. Carver Elementary School, he was an 11-year-old, practical-joke-loving fifth-grader with a penchant for irreverent doodling â things like the Ty-D-Bol Man being flushed down the toilet. And he was always talking.
âThe very last time I was here, 30-something years ago, I was the kid who would never shut up,â Pastis recently told a crowd of third- and fourth-graders gathered in the auditorium. âSo Principal Scrim singled me out and said, âStephan, I know youâre excited because weâre near the end of the school year, but you have to stop talking.ââ
âNow,â the 45-year-old Pastis said, âI can talk as much as I want.â
Pastis, who now lives in Santa Rosa, returned to his elementary school alma mater in late April while in Los Angeles to promote âTimmy Failure: Mistakes Were Madeâ (Candlewick, $14.99), a heavily illustrated novel for the 8-to-12-year-old set that focuses on the misadventures of a clueless 11-year-old detective (the aforementioned Timmy Failure) and his even more clueless sidekick (a polar bear named Total). âTimmy Failureâ arrived on the bestseller list for the genre in February and has remained on it ever since.
âIn my head, when I wrote the book, Timmyâs class and playground were here,â Pastis told the students. âI had a principal named Scrim, and that name became Principal Scrimshaw in the book.... In my next book I actually name Timmyâs school, and itâs Carver.â
After the squeals of 200 super-enthused students subsided, Pastis said that an already completed second Timmy Failure book is due out in February 2014 and that he plans to write and illustrate a third one this summer.
A spindly third- or fourth-grade arm shot in the air. âHow many Timmy books are you planning to write?â the student asked.
âI donât know,â Pastis replied. âFive? Six? Seven? Whatâs [âDiary of a] Wimpy Kidâ up to? Seven?â To which the hive mind sitting on the floor in front of Pastis burbled briefly in agreement.
Jeff Kinneyâs âDiary of a Wimpy Kidâ could almost be the gold standard of recent kiddie-lit success stories, a seven-book franchise that has resulted in three live-action movies to date. Itâs small wonder that âTimmyâsâ book cover closely resembles the first âWimpy Kidâ cover or that Kinneyâs enthusiastic endorsement blurb (âTimmy Failure is a winner!â) appears prominently.
Pastisâ mother, Patti Pastis, who lives in Arcadia, was among the dozen members of the extended family on hand during his recent visit. She said she first started buying him pens and pads of paper because she had a hard time keeping him in his room when he was sick as a child. âWhen he was 7 years old, he looked up at me and said, âSomeday Iâm going to be famous,ââ she remembered. âAnd I said, âOh, Stephan, I know you are.ââ
Although he would contribute comic strips and cartoons to student publications at San Marino High School and UC Berkeley, Pastisâ dream job wouldnât be realized until after a detour through law school and a decade-long stint as a lawyer.
âYou canât just count on becoming a syndicated cartoonist,â he said by way of explanation. âI actually tried to calculate the odds once, and the best I could come up with is a 1-in-36,000 chance. And the odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 7,900 â which kind of shows how long those odds are.â
So in 1993 Pastis embarked on a career as an insurance defense litigation lawyer. Within a few years he was submitting cartoon ideas to the newspaper syndicates â and getting rejected.
His early submissions focused on an arrogant know-it-all rat (named Rat). Pastis said it was only after adding a dimwitted pig (named Pig) to the mix that United Feature Syndicate tried â and ultimately failed â to sell his strip directly to newspapers. But instead of rejecting him completely, United suggested experimenting with a new approach: posting the âPearls Before Swineâ strip at its Comics.com website in an attempt to gauge interest.
âIt did all right, but I donât think it wouldâve gotten syndicated,â Pastis said. But in December 2000, âDilbertâ creator Scott Adams â who, as Pastis points out, âat that time was the biggest cartoonist on the planetâ â recommended âPearlsâ to readers subscribed to his email blasts. âI remember the hits went from something like 2,000 on a Tuesday ... to 155,000 on a Thursday.â
Adams said he saw something novel and different about Pastisâ approach: âHeâs got something slightly subversive about him. Itâs an X factor, an edge that defies easy description.... He loves to push the envelope.â
âPearls Before Swineâ would make its newspaper debut in January 2002, and Pastis has been an enthusiastic and unabashed pusher of envelopes ever since.
That Pig is a pig that loves to eat bacon is just the beginning; over the years, a zooâs worth of smart-mouthed anthropomorphic animals have used everyone from Mahatma Gandhi to Lance Armstrong to skewer mores.
But the strip also has the ability to â without warning â give all the heartstrings a tremendous simultaneous tug, as in the recent strip that paid homage to the victims of the Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre by spelling out their names across a starry, single-panel sky.
Itâs an approach that appears to resonate with readers; âPearlsâ runs in 750 newspapers and has spawned 20 compilation books. Pastis has also won best newspaper comic strip of 2003 and 2006 from the National Cartoonists Society and is currently one of three 2012 finalists for the groupâs highest honor: the Reuben Award for outstanding cartoonist of the year, which will be bestowed May 25. (Pastis is quick to point out itâs his fifth such nomination â and he doesnât think heâll win.)
As his visit to Carver wound down, Pastis sounded reflective about whatâs unfolded over the 34 years since he left. âI had 10 years as a lawyer, Iâll have whatever it may be as a cartoonist; Iâm in my 12th year now. I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter. If we do sign Timmy as a movie ... I want to write that script.â
He said heâs thankful that the 11-year-old kid from Carver has had a chance to realize his dream job. He then described a scene, during a 2009 USO tour in Iraq with fellow cartoonists, in which he found himself aboard a Black Hawk helicopter that started firing its guns.
âAt that moment I wondered what Iâd have thought if, as a little kid, if someone said: âOne day youâll be seated in a Black Hawk chopper across from Garry Trudeau, the creator of âDoonesbury,â and, oh, yeah, youâre in a war zone in Iraq, and youâre shooting at somebody.ââ
âItâs that âHow did I get here?â game. How did that happen?â
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