New interview with Bill Watterson — first in 20 years

 Posted by on 1 February 2010  Vintage/Retro
Feb 012010
 

Wow — reclusive Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson has given an email interview. It’s kind of short, but insightful. Says Watterson on the fact that fans still “grieve” for Calvin and Hobbes:

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.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

Read the full interview here. It’s part of a story that ran in on Cleveland.com marking the 15th anniversary of the final strip.

So how did writer John Campanelli score an interview with Watterson, considering that the cartoonist hasn’t done an interview since 1989? Well, according to this piece, he just sent an email and asked.

Wish I’d thought of that!

Grant Hamilton

  • thebanana

    C&H are still a pretty big deal around our place :)

  • Colin

    Scott Adams took a funny (mild) swipe at his retirement in his first book, “The Dilbert Principle”.

    He said he hoped that someday he could be “tired” and “retire”, as well. The implication being that drawing cartoons wasn’t quite as deep philosophically as maybe advertised.

    • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

      To quibble, perhaps, I think you can get more out of Calvin and Hobbes, philosophically, than you can from Dilbert. Cartoons, as a medium, are perfectly capable of being deep. It’s just most of the Saturday funnies aren’t.

      But mostly, if you read about Watterson, I think it wasn’t so much the philosophy of the cartoons that tired him out, it was dealing with the constraints put on him by the syndicates. And, he was locked-in to those characters. I mean, I can’t think of a more prolific author than, say, Stephen King — but imagine if he had to churn out a new short story about the people in Pet Semetary each and every week — and make it funny, to boot.

  • Colin

    Obviously can’t speak for a guy with as much success as Watterson (and really, who wouldn’t want to be able to walk away and go live your life that young?) but I am guessing he could have quite a lot of swing with the syndicates.
    I respect him for going out on top and doing a quality strip…quite a contrast to, say, Garfield.