Let’s say that I wrote a very popular comic strip for the past 10 years. Feeling that I ran out of ideas, and that the comic peaked a couple of years ago, I decide to stop writing the comic, and retire. I’ve got several million dollars to my name, and book deals will ensure I’ll get decent royalties for the next couple of decades. I can’t live the high life, though, because as time goes by, the royalties will decrease. I really have to live below my means.
I don’t want to be in the limelight, though. I just want to disappear into the woodwork. Mostly total privacy. No interviews. I don’t want anyone to know where I live.
I’m also in the Midwest, and not in Los Angeles or New York, where there are doctors, dentists, and other businesses that offer discreet services to celebrities. I have to use the same services that regular Joes use.
Really, just move into a small town and keep your head down. Most people won’t know you by sight, and your name will fade quickly. Small town living is cheaper, and with decent investments you can while away your time painting or whatever.
Should be fairly easy. Considering that most people (I’m guessing 99.9% of the population) couldn’t tell a comic strip author by sight, even the more famous ones, then you would have no problem blending in. On the off chance that someone might recognize your name, again highly unlikely, just laugh it off and say you have the same name as that comic strip dude. If this becomes a problem, just use a different name, or go and get it legally changed.
Your best bet is a small town where people don’t care about you and to live a quiet life so you don’t attract attention. Brittney Spears could move to Small Town, Idaho and still get followed around for a year…but eventually if she didn’t do anything outrageous, the cameras would leave and people would leave her alone.
But someone like Watterson, with a common enough name and a face that isn’t recognizable to most people could live comfortable anywhere.
The guy who did the “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip. The OP’s question is basically about Watterson - unlike, say, Charles Schultz or Jim Davis, Watterson never sought any kind of celebrity for his work, and never started any kind of franchising or merchandising around the strip. He’s also been quite reclusive, rarely granting interviews. My guess is that this thread was started because Watterson just gave his first interview in something like fifteen years, to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Seems the simplest way to do it would be to subtly alter your appearance…say, shave off your mustache, wear contacts, that sort of thing. If you’re a comic strip writer or an author, it’s likely that your fans will only know you through old pictures or, very rarely, a minute-long TV appearance. They’ll likely only remember that “Bill (or whoever) has a mustache and glasses” and won’t be looking for your clean-shaven, two-eyed self.
It wouldn’t hurt to go by “Will” or “William” in casual conversation either.
I think you have a somewhat mistaken notion of fame in the first place. Most people who are “famous” live fairly regular lives, even in LA/NY. Yes, they have money, and yes some people might recognize them in public, but I’ve stood in line behind a fair number of them in the grocery store buying extra kleenex because they have a head cold.
Granted, there is a level of hyper-fame where the paparazzi follow your every move, but that is a vanishingly small number of people.
Do you want to be an actual recluse or simply be able to deal with the world as a normal, not famous person?
I think either will be easier than you think, and simply come naturally based on not publicly producing anything artistic. As a comic writer you are not likely to be interesting material for tabloids anyway, so I actually suspect this would be achievable even if you were actively producing. I think even really famous actors get to live to some degree in peace and quiet if they have stable (in other words, publicly boring) family lives.
Just live a normal life free of crazy tabloid headline behavior and you’ll be fine. Here, I’ll test you to see how you’ll do: You’re driving to the store to pick up some groceries. Do you
(a) Drive carefully, obeying traffic regulations, purchase the items and drive back.
(b) Drive drunk, get pulled over by a Jewish cop and make horrible headline inducing anti-Semitic remarks?
Get a lawyer, they can arrange for form a corporation or some similar legal entity that can create the ability to isolate your name from trackable purchases, everything routes to your lawyer for contact info and s/he won’t be disclosing anything about you.
Cash, rechargable debit cards, identify yourself by a nickname to new friends and neighbors, keep your nose clean, only your lawyer and the IRS will have any idea.
I’m thinking about the latter; that I’m able to “hide in plain sight”, in a way, preferably without legally changing my name. (Doesn’t the process of legally changing your name change in most states include a public notice in a newspaper of record?
In a way, I think going full recluse might be worse than some some limited public visibility, since you’ll now gain new notoriety for being a recluse. People desperately want to know about Bill Watterson, I think in part because he’s fairly reclusive. If he had the occasional interview here and there, do you think he’d actually blend even further into the woodwork?
You can change your name simply by using a new one, as long as you’re not doing it to defraud anyone. A legal change may be needed for some things (like a driver’s license or passport), but you can set up bank accounts or get credit cards under any name you wish (as long as you use your legal SSN).
There’s no need to move to the country, BTW. There are plenty of big cities where you can easily live in without anyone knowing you, especially if your picture isn’t well know.
Move near another popular comic strip artist who doesn’t have a problem with publicity. Specifically, move to Muncie, Indiana, and let Jim Davis’ popularity be the gravity well for any publicity-seeking people to trek to the area. “Oh - elmwood has an 8 foot fence around his place. Screw it - let’s go hang out with Garfield.”
There was an article about J.D. Salinger in the New York Times the other day. According to it, he lived quietly but quite openly in Cornish NH, attending town meetings, going to church suppers, etc. But the townspeople never bothered him and they actively conspired to misdirect any rabid fans who went looking for his house. So you might follow his example. Live in a small town and don’t go to any special effort to be a recluse. (Or you could be one of many celebrities who manage to live quietly in big cities without being recluses.)
