I love this quote, when he was asked why he stopped making Calvin and Hobbes;
"This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say.
It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them." Link goes to a Cleveland newspaper website. It made my browser all jumpy and ads were trying to pop up and stuff.
Watterson is one of my personal heroes. An immensely talented man who created something brilliant and timeless, who was unafraid to stand up to the Powers That Be when it came to issues he cared about, and who always maintained a level head despite his celebrity status.
I’ll always wish we had more “Calvin and Hobbes,” but I fully agree with his decision to end the strip while it was at its peak. It was and is a principled stand that prevented the painful and gradual decay inevitable with any artist, opened the doors to a newer generation of newspaper cartoonists, and ensured that we will forever remember C&H as the unquestioned pinnacle of its genre.
Q: People are sad you left the strip.
A: Yeah, well…I said what I had to say.
Q: But…don’t you feel bad that they’re sad?
A: …I guess.
Q: No. Really. They’re really sad. It was a great strip.
A: I said what I had to say.
Q: But don’t you miss the fame? The glamor?
A: No.
Q: There’s a stamp with Calvin and Hobbes! Are you going to mail a letter with it?
A: Yes. I’m gonna rush right out and send a check for a subscription to your paper. :rolleyes:
Geez…Watterson gives…what? One interview every 10 years? And these are the questions we get? How about “What strips from other authors influenced you? Do you go back and reread any of them?”, “Are you currently doing any projects? What are you working on now?”, “Any current strips you really enjoy?”, “Do you have any favorite C&H strips which make you laugh to think back on?”, “Did you ever have problems with your editors over any strip?”–these aren’t Pulitzer Prize Winning questions, but at least they’re better than the “Jeepers! You quit!! That makes me saaaaad.” crap in the interview.
And does Watterson look just like Calvin’s dad to anyone else?
From reading just this one interview, it is easy to get that feeling, but I don’t think it is entirely fair. A lot of the questions you have suggested have been asked before, specifically about his influences as well as his problems with his publishers. If the interviewer had asked about the fights he had with his publishers over increasing the strip size or ending it early, I might have thought, “Not again. Can’t we move on to some new questions?”
Honestly, I think any interview with Waterson is going to be a awful (or at least flat) because he really has nothing more to say about C&H. He is down-to-earth to the point of ambivalence. And his desire for privacy requires almost complete detachment.
While I don’t agree at all with his view of merchandising (what harm does it do to have a coffee mug or a t-shirt or something with your characters on them?), I do have to say that I really respect his standing up to his principles. He could certainly have made a ton of money off of merchandise, and chose not to, because he thought it would compromise his art. Even though I think he could have sold stuff without compromising his art, he didn’t, and when he felt he had to choose, chose art over money.
By the way, the Cleveland newspaper is the Plain Dealer. Also by the way, a number of Calvin and Hobbes strips were set in recognizably Cleveland locations.
Given the barrels full of money he could have made (could still make any time he wants) from merchandising, I think it really is extraordinary that he’s never allowed it to happen.
His answers in this interview seem a little churlish, but I think that might have something to do with having been asked “why did you quiiiiiit?” by everyone he meets for 15 years.
I do think his reasoning for stopping the strip was sound. He didn’t want to run it into ground like Schultz did until it became tedious. After another 15 or 20 years, it would have become Garfield or Blondie.
I don’t expect any more C&H (not that I wouldn’t love to see it if he did it), but I would like to see him produce something. The heart and soul and humor and intelligence of that strip is still in him. I would like to see him express it again in some fashion.
I understand he just likes to paint landscapes now. [Sigh]
I just finished a book called “Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip,” by Nevin Martell. It’s an interesting backstory of Watterson told by second- and third-hand sources. Martell spent over a year digging, researching and working on his book but was denied any form of interview with Watterson.
And Watterson gives a lightweight (email) interview to this newspaper columnist instead.
I really admire the caliber of Watterson’s strip and admire his resolve to stick to his values, but I really get the sense that this guy almost goes out of his way to be uncooperative.
Peanuts ran for a good 30 years before it became anything remotely resembling tedious. And quite frankly, I find Blondie still makes me laugh more often than not.
I wonder how one can disappear as completely as Bill Watterson. He has to have neighbors, and even if it’s a well-concealed Chagrin Valley estate, you would think fans might know where it is. Does he venture into town to shop for clothes, or to see a doctor or dentist? If he does, does he have to wait in a waiting room like everyone else? Has he been out of the public eye so long that he can blend into a crowd without being recognized?
It’s impossible to live in the Cleveland Heights area and not bump into Harvey Pekar at some point in your day-to-day life. It’s got to be the same way with Chagrin Falls, where Watterson supposedly still lives; it’s a small, foo-foo quainty-quaint village surrounded by large-lot subdivisions and massive gentleman’s estates. I’ve heard a rumor that he lives in Cleveland Heights, but it’s impossible to stay hidden there; it’s a very urban suburb.
