Seventy Percent of lawyers don’t want to be lawyers.
I’m sure I’m underestimating. There’s something about being a lawyer that makes you long to be doing something else. In my experience, that “something” usually is other lawyers.
Your humble servant, for instance, has been toiling in the vineyards of the law for lo, these forty years (39, actually). In all that time, I’ve wanted to be something else: A rock star, an actor, a mystery writer. Indeed, I took my first law job as a Public Defender so that I could see what criminal law was really like in order to write credibly about it.
And it worked! As a regular reader of this blog will tell you, I have published over 40 short stories, many of them about my fictional lawyer Minerva James (one is out this month in the digital copy of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine). Somehow, though, I could never swing it that I could leave the law behind and do nothing but write.
Which is why I am jealous of Stephan Pastis. He worked for ten years as a lawyer on the corporate side (e.g., no trial work) and hated it. Hated.
So he ran away from home to become a comic strip creator.
(This, by the way, was another of my dream jobs. I even drew a comic strip for my college paper.)
He began on the internet with crudely drawn characters: Pig, Goat, Rat. He didn’t even give them cute names. Here, for instance, is the star of the strip, Rat:
Pretty simple, huh? Here is the other star, quaintly named Pig:
As you can see, the strip is not renowned for its artistic merit, though I do appreciate the minimalist style Pastis employs ala Charles Shulz.
What truly makes this a great strip is Pastis’ writing. The humor is sometimes gentle, sometimes acerbic, often canny, always on mark (except when he goes into an elaborate strip where the dialogue contains all fifty states, or the first names of children, or some such puzzle). His puns are awful and awfully good. His self-depricating vision of himself–yes, he often appears in his own strips–is not only funny, it’s transgressive.
The important thing is that he got out of the law while the getting was good. And he hasn’t looked back for decades.
The book title above is his latest “treasury,” where two years of strips are compiled. Even if you haven’t read the strip before (newspapers are disappearing fast, and so are comic strips, though you can get Pearls online at the link I just put in), you can still enjoy this book for its wit, its pathos, and its sharp social commentary. And he does all this without taking sides in today’s ugly political debates.
Stephan, I hate you. You took one of my alternative lives and made it your own. But I’ll keep buying you books because you did that alternative life a thousand times better than I ever could.
Mark Bruce, Writer 