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William B. "Bill" Watterson II (born July 5, 1958) is an American cartoonist and the author of the influential and popular comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Bill is known for his controversial views on licensing and comic syndication, as well as for being reclusive or media shy. His career as a syndicated cartoonist ran from 1985 to 1995; he retired at the end of 1995 with a short statement to newspaper editors and his fans that he felt he had achieved all he could in the comic strip medium. During the early years of his career he produced several drawings and additional contributions for Target: The Political Cartoon Quarterly.

Early years and education

William B. Watterson was born in Washington, D.C.marker in 1958, where his father, James G. Watterson, worked as a patent examiner while going to George Washington University Law School before becoming a patent attorney in 1960.

In 1964, when Bill was 6 years old the family moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohiomarker, where his mother, Kathryn Watterson, became a city council member. James was elected as a council member in 1997, holding that position for 12 years before retiring on August 31, 2009 to pursue some artistic "projects and goals".

One report suggests Watterson spent a lot of time in childhood alone, occupying his time with drawing and cartooning. This continued throughout his primary and secondary schooling years when he drew cartoons for the school newspaper and yearbook. During this time he discovered comics strips like Peanuts by Charles Schulz, Pogo and Krazy Kat which subsequently inspired and influenced his desire to become a professional cartoonist. His parents recall him as a very quiet and unassuming child, who would spend hours drawing in his room:

"He was a conservative child, not that he was unimaginative, because of course he was. But not in a fantasy way. He and his brother (Tom) would make time-lapse movies and that certainly showed a certain amount of imagination. And he would draw his characters. By he was nothing like Calvin. He didn't have an imaginary friend like Hobbes and he wasn't a Dennis the Menace." - James G. Watterson


While attending Chagrin Falls High School, Bill drew a representation of the school mascot, the Tigers, for the school newspaper. This tiger was said to be the early inspiration behind Hobbes and the rendering can still be found on school merchandise.

College education

From 1976 to 1980 Bill Watterson attended Kenyon Collegemarker and completed a degree in political science, all the while developing his artistic skills and contributing cartoons for the College Newspaper. Many of the cartoons and pieces of artwork Watterson created at Kenyon can now be found online.

Jim Borgman had graduated Kenyon just before Watterson arrived, but his work as a political cartoonist so impressed Bill that he decided to pursue a career as one himself. Borgman worked at the Cincinnati Post and gave Watterson encouragement and advice throughout his time as a student.

In his 1989 speech to Kenyon College graduates Bill Watterson revealed that during his final year he had painted a copy of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapelmarker onto the ceiling of his dorm room:

“By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book. Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.”


Later on, when Watterson was coming up with names for the characters of his comic strip, he decided upon Calvin (after the Protestant reformer John Calvin) and Hobbes (after the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes) as a "a tip of the hat to the political science department at Kenyon College”.

Early career

In 1980, Watterson graduated from Kenyon Collegemarker with a B.A. in political science. Immediately, the Cincinnati Post offered him a job drawing political cartoons for a six-month trial period:

Bill Watterson designed grocery advertisements for four years prior to creating Calvin and Hobbes.

Rise to success

Inspiration

Watterson has said he believes in his work for the personal fulfillment it brings. As he told the graduating class of 1990 at Kenyon College, "It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves." Calvin and Hobbes was first published on November 18, 1985. Bill Watterson wrote in his Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book that his influences include Charles Schulz, for his work in Peanuts; Walt Kelly for his comic Pogo; and George Herriman for Krazy Kat. (Watterson wrote the introduction to the first volume of The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat.) Watterson's style reflects the influence of Little Nemo in Slumberland, a popular early-20th-century comic strip by Winsor McCay.

Like many artists, Watterson incorporated elements of his life, interests, beliefs and values into his work. For example his hobby as a cyclist, memories of his own father’s speeches about ‘building character’ and his views on merchandising and corporations. Watterson's cat, "Sprite," very much inspired the personality and physical features of Hobbes.

Watterson spent much of his career trying to change the climate of newspaper comics. He believed that the artistic value of comics was being undermined, and that the space they occupied in newspapers continually decreased, subject to arbitrary whims of shortsighted publishers. Furthermore, he opined that art should not be judged by the medium for which it is created (i.e., there is no "high" art or "low" art—just art).

Fight against merchandising the cartoon characters

Watterson battled against pressure from publishers to merchandise his work, something he felt would cheapen his comic. He refused to merchandise his creations on the grounds that pasting Calvin and Hobbes images on commercially sold mugs, stickers, and T-shirts would devalue the characters and their personalities.

Reuben

Watterson was awarded the National Cartoonists Society's Humor Comic Strip Award in 1988 and the society's Reuben Award in 1986; he was the youngest person ever to receive the latter award. In 1988, Watterson received the Reuben Award a second time. He was nominated a third time in 1992.

Watterson wrote a brief, tongue-in-cheek autobiography in the late 1980s.

Thirty-six of his Sunday cartoon strips were exhibited at Ohio State Universitymarker's Cartoon Research Library from September 10, 2001 to January 16, 2002.

Retirement

Watterson announced his retirement on November 9, 1995, with the following letter to newspaper editors:

The last strip of Calvin and Hobbes was published on December 31, 1995. Since retiring, Bill Watterson has taken up painting, often drawing landscapes of the woods with his father. He has published several anthologies of Calvin and Hobbes strips.

Public appearances in retirement

Since ending the strip, Watterson has kept away from the public eye and has given no indication of resuming the strip, creating new works based on the characters, or embarking on other projects. He refuses to sign autographs or license his characters, staying true to his stated principles. In previous years, he was known to sneak autographed copies of his books onto the shelves of the Fireside Bookshop, a family-owned bookstore in his home of Chagrin Falls, Ohio. However, after discovering that some people were selling the autographed books online for high prices, he ended this practice as well. Valuing privacy, he is very reluctant to give interviews or make public appearances.

In 2005, Watterson and his wife, Melissa, moved from Chagrin Falls to Clevelandmarker.On December 21, 1999, a short piece written by Watterson to mark the forthcoming end of the comic strip Peanuts, was published in the Los Angeles Times. In October 2005, Watterson answered fifteen questions submitted by readers.His most recent foray into public life was on October 17, 2007, with a review of Schulz and Peanuts, a biography of Charles Schulz, in The Wall Street Journal.In 2008, he provided a foreword for the first book collection of Richard Thompson's Cul De Sac comic strip.

Attempts to find Watterson

In the years that followed his retirement there were many attempts to locate Watterson in his home town of Chagrin Falls. Both The Plain Dealer and the Cleveland Scene sent out reporters in 1998 and 2003 respectively. They found nothing. In 2005 Gene Weingarten from The Washington Post was sent out with a gift of a first edition Barneby book as an incentive for Watterson's cooperation. He passed this, along with a message, to Watterson's parents and declared he would wait in the hotel for as long as it took Watterson to contact him. The next day Lee Salem, Watterson's editor, rang and told him to just pack up and leave; Bill was never going to come.

In 2009 Nevin Martell did succeed in locating Watterson, now living in Cleveland, however he chose not to confront him directly and instead sent a letter expressing his wish to meet and interview him. He was not successful, but he did locate many friends, family, colleagues and aquaintances of Bill's for his biography "Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and his Revolutionary Comic Strip."

Influence

Changing the format of the Sunday strip

Watterson opposed the structure publishers imposed on Sunday newspaper cartoons: the standard cartoon starts with a large, wide rectangle featuring the cartoon's logo or a throwaway panel tangential to the main area so that newspapers pressed for space can remove the top third of the cartoon if they wish; the rest of the strip is presented in a series of rectangles of different widths. In Watterson's opinion, this format limited the cartoonist's options of allowable presentation. After his sabbatical year in 1991 he managed to gain an exception to these constraints for Calvin and Hobbes, allowing him to draw his Sunday cartoons the way he wanted. In many of his strips, the panels overlap or contain their own panels; in some, the action progresses diagonally across the strip.

Awards



Sources

  1. Neely Tucker, "The Tiger Strikes Again," The Washington Post 4 Oct. 2005.
  2. Joe Milicia, "Calvin and Hobbes Creator Keeps Privacy," Associated Press 22 Oct. 2005.


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