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"Calvin and Hobbes" Creator Bill Watterson Looks Back With No Regrets
With fifteen years separating us from the last appearance of "Calvin and Hobbes" on the comic pages, reclusive artist Bill Watterson gave a rare interview reminiscing about his legacy. "The only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip. What readers take away from it is up to them. Once the strip is published, readers bring their own experiences to it, and the work takes on a life of its own. Everyone responds differently to different parts. I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can't explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don't think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once."
If you think about it, it is actually quite hard to say what makes a good comic. Humor plays some role, but it isn't so straightforward either. Calvin and Hobbes was definitely my favorite comic as a kid. I did read Donald Duck too (obviously, as everyone did), but apart from that I can't remember any other as good comic. And I went to library solely to read Calvin and Hobbes. I didn't like the alien parts, but otherwise it was great fun.
RSS programs today make it really nice to read comics too. I am reading Cyanide & Happiness, Pearls Before Swine, a few local comics and xkcd. I actually have some others in my rss program, but a lot of times I skip them because they're not that up to quality and not that funny.
Now a days I like Pearls Before Swine for its good humor and references to other comics, culture and politics. The random appearances of Stephan Pastis himself and being self-satiric also make it great. I remember there being some reference to Calvin and Hobbes sometimes too.
I'm glad he was able to create something that he is pleased with and has brought happiness and pleasure to those around him. May we all be so fortunate.
I wish someone had mentioned that to Matt Groening.
Consider Garfield and Peanuts. After a while, they just don't have anything new to say.
No regrets? That's like asking Bill Gates if he regrets dropping out of Harvard and becoming a billionaire. Yeah, I'm sure he regrets it daily.
The regret in question would be the one where you regretted quitting early. Because Watterson quit early. It's a very short 'interview' but to all artists and people in general out there who start something very good, take note:
Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved -- and are still grieving -- when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?
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.
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.
I've never regretted stopping when I did.
As someone suffering to find anything even remotely watchable on American TV, I wish more people would adopt this kind of attitude.
My work here is dung.
As an amatuer author, I understand some of where he is coming from. Stories have a beginning, middle and end. The end generally signifies the part where writing about it any more would be boring. Which little girl truly wants to hear about how Snow White had to change dirty diapers for her children? Or who really wants to hear about how Wendy and the lost buys grows old while Peter Pan is all alone with tinkerbell?
Yes, sequels are instant money makers, because we all want to read/see MORE from a good writer, but the truth is if you have said all you had to say, then there is no more.
It's kind of like going to the Grand Canyon and tring to dig it deeper with a shovel. Yeah, it's 'more', but it's not the same thing, and quite frankly, the quality of workmanship goes down.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And that means you can't appreciate any other comic? A bit limiting don't you think?
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Meh. Seriously, no questions on "What are you doing now?" "Have any new projects?" "Are thee any comics you are looking at now a days?"
All these questions are just rehashed from previous side remarks he has stated. He has always been a recluse so why is he doing an interview now?
These things drive me up the wall. Fine, its a puff piece because you don't want to scare the guy off, but I am truly interested in what he has done in all that time.
Those last couple questions were really wasted. Why not ask him what he's been doing for the past 15 years? Does he ever think about doing another strip, or any sort of art again?
You know, he could do one strip a week, any subject he wanted, any format he wanted, post it on the web (editors? who needs them?) and it would be huge. He'd have complete creative control. Would that sound appealing to Watterson? Or would that cut too much into his golf time? We'll never know because this journalist squandered this opportunity.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"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."
Hear that, Crapfield and Family Crapcircus?!?
That bit about leaving the party early resonates with me. A very long time ago, I couldn't look at a Peanuts strip without laughing. Then after a decade or so, I couldn't look at it without grimacing.
Still, I do miss that young sociopath and his tiger.
Another brave thing Watterson did: no licenses for animated cartoons, coffee cups, etc. He said he couldn't stand the idea of some voice actor doing Hobbes. Neither could I, but I'm not sure I could have walked away from the millions of dollars those licenses would have paid.
He left Calvin & Hobbes while it was still good and he had something meaningful to say. He didn't do what a lot of people do and drag it out so he could suck out every last possible penny. He left a meaningful corpus of work that we can all appreciate.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Are you kidding? Garfield is more brilliantly insightful than ever. You just have to know how to read it.
http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
Calvin's dad looks like Watterson's dad, which would explain the resemblance. Watterson himself looks much more like Uncle Max.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
So incredibly true. Compare the two versions of "The Office." In the UK, they told their story, had some laughs, but when it ran its course, they stopped. I wanted more. I still want more. I'll just have to wait a few years then watch the episodes again. In the US, however, the program is floundering to find weekly topics. And it shows. Once Jim and Pam hooked up, the main tension, the binding thread was gone. Look at "Heroes". Intriguing first season, great climactic moment. But it just...keeps...going. Look at "Lost". I followed the first season closely, but after a while, you start to think that the writers are sitting around going, "Now what can we do this week, without really changing much. After all, we still have 10 more hours of programming to fill." Does anybody even watch The Simpson's anymore?
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
I think a major reason for the Far Side's popularity among science and engineering types is that Larson used science as the basis for many of his strips. Because of this, even when the joke wasn't that good, people in the relevant field would tape them up on lab doors, just because they were amused that anyone would make a comic about their field. Perhaps xkcd is the modern equivalent (although THe Far Side seemed to focus more on the biological sciences, as Larson had a zoology background, and xkcd is more physics/math)
North American media tends to drive things into the ground (not that others don't to, the last season of Monty Python's Flying Circus, sans Cleese, apart from a few moments, was clearly beyond its prime).
I remember the same thing happened to MASH. I look back at the original few seasons when McLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers were still there, and they constitute some incredibly funny moments in TV history. Once they were gone and Alda exerted more control as the "Star", the tendency to be overly maudlin and topical ruined the goon show quality.
Peanuts certainly went past its prime. It's heyday in the late 1960s and into the late 1970s certainly constitutes probably the greatest comic strip there ever was (and I've yet to see a cartoonist that doesn't think Charles M. Schulz was the best the medium ever produced). But clearly the concept had run out of gas by the 1980s, and like anything taken too far, it began to be a terrible caricature of its former self. The whole strip turned into a cliche. If Schulz had walked away in 1980, he would have the left the strip at the top of its game. I don't think it was, in his case, for want of money, with TV and even movies, and the wide syndication, he was probably the best-paid writer in comic strip history. I think it was that he just couldn't leave it behind.
Watterson left C&H in a place where its perfection was never compromised. I've reread my collection a dozen times, at it all seems so perfect. Nothing is stale or reused. It's now art for the ages.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I take it that you are not of the biological sciences persuasion. The Far Side's protagonist was nature her/it self. That was the underlying thread between his many dis separate jokes and themes. I'd put him right up there with the others you mention.
YMMV, of course.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
but I am truly interested in what he has done in all that time.
Just guessing, but: Fishing, watching his (grand)children grow up, changing the oil in his truck. My bet is he's reclusive because he doesn't want to bore us with the details. If C&H is any indication, he's a guy that enjoys *life*, not attention.
I don't count Gary Larson in the same field - he was quirky and brilliant, but there's no continuity in his works - there's 5,000 individual gags, but no heart, nobody there we care about.
Continuity? Why should we want continuity? No heart? We disagree. If you wanted a comic strip with no heart, then just take a gander at Doonesbury. I have no idea why Garry Trudeau bothered with continuity. It's just a political cartoon (like Oliphant) in comic strip format with some extraneous soap opera about people I simply can't care about (technically, so was Bloom County, but that worked). Peanuts provided a better experience (especially, the early years when the strip was actually being creative).
Or how about Bill Griffith with Zippy the Pinhead? He was very sparing in his use of the continuity crutch, yet he somehow managed to come up with likable characters that we can care about.