I believe Pastis is from the Nor Cal area. I saw him over 10 years ago on local access TV in the SF area talking about him starting in cartooning.
He was a lawyer and liked to do cartooning. The world's most famous cartoonist, Charles Shultz (Peanuts), lived in Santa Rosa, CA. Schulz built a municipal hockey rink next door to the Peanuts Museum and would have breakfast at the cafe in the rink every morning. Pastis decided he would like to ask Schulz for advice on starting out. So he went to the rink and walks up to Schulz and starts "Mr. Schulz I am a lawyer...."he said the look on his face was terror for a second until he explained why he was there. Schulz then sat with him for abut 3 hours.
Scott Adams (Dilbert) was also from around where I lived. He worked for Pac Bell at their HQ in the next town over. He started Dilbert in the company newsletter. I sat with two women on a plane who worked with him and they told me that he continued to work there for the first couple years of the strip. All of the characters were based on real people (Pointy Haired Boss,etc) and they "suggested" that he spend full time on his comic strip.
With the money from the strip, he lives in an exclusive , gated community (Blackhawk, CA). He bought a condo in the other end of the town I lived in (Dublin, CA), which he uses as a studio. Next to those condos,a plaza was built. He used to regularly go for lunch at a restaurant in the next town over. He would get the same waitress and when talking to her he asked what she would like to do for a career. She said to open her own restaurant. In the plaza, he opened up a restaurant named after her and made her a partner. He would do commercials for the restaurant where he said to come down there on Saturday at noon with copies of his books of strips and he would autograph them. The restaurant lasted about 10 years before closing.