Charles M. Schulz was born November 25, 1922, in Minneapolis. His destiny was foreshadowed when an uncle gave him, at the age of two days, the nickname Sparky (after the racehorse Spark Plug in the newspaper strip Barney Google).
Stephan Pastis was born on January 16, 1968. He received a B.A. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989 and graduated from the law school at UCLA. Before becoming a cartoonist, he practiced law as an insurance defense litigation attorney for 10 years. He is the creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, which appears in more than 600 newspapers and the author/illustrator of the Timmy Failure series for young readers. In 2014 his title, We Meet Again made The New York Times Best Seller List.