When Bill Watterson walked away from Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, he was exhausted. The comic strip had consumed ten years of his life, the latter half of which were spent fighting his syndicate for creative control and warring with himself as he fitfully came to realize that he had nothing left to say about a six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger. And the decision couldn’t have come at a worse time: Calvin and Hobbes was at the height of its popularity. To quit then seemed like career suicide.
It was suicide, the intentional, ritualistic sort. Watterson wasn’t just done with daily newspaper cartoons; he was finished with public life. After his last Sunday strip ran on December 31 of that year, he retired to his home and resolved never again to publish cartoons. Watterson described the experience as a sort of death: “I had virtually no life beyond the drawing board,” he said of the years leading up to the decision. “To switch off the job, I would’ve had to switch off my head.”
For the next five years, he did not so much as touch his drawing board. With each day that he did not draw, he acquired the reputation of a latter-day J.D. Salinger, a tortured minor genius, who, having carried off the highest honors available to a newspaperman, turned from the admiration that haunted his steps and sought for a better and quieter satisfaction in secluded work around the Cleveland suburbs.
Too frequently, however, was his seclusion interrupted by nosy fans. In 1998, a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer staked out Watterson’s house in Chagrin Falls. He caught the cartoonist on the front lawn and the two debated, off the record, the nature of privacy. Watterson made his points forcefully. “He wanted to debate,” the reporter recalled. “It was almost collegiate.” In 2003, Cleveland Scene sent another reporter to Watterson’s neighborhood, who also returned empty-handed. That same year, Gene Weingarten, then as now the Washington Post’s resident nerd, flew to Cleveland and posted up in a hotel room, with a message sent through Watterson’s parents, accompanied by the bribe of a rare comic book, declaring that until he was granted an interview, he would not leave. But Watterson had no interest in comics, rare or otherwise. The next day, his editor at Andrews McMeel, Lee Salem, told Weingarten to fly back to Washington.
www.theamericanconservative.com
It was suicide, the intentional, ritualistic sort. Watterson wasn’t just done with daily newspaper cartoons; he was finished with public life. After his last Sunday strip ran on December 31 of that year, he retired to his home and resolved never again to publish cartoons. Watterson described the experience as a sort of death: “I had virtually no life beyond the drawing board,” he said of the years leading up to the decision. “To switch off the job, I would’ve had to switch off my head.”
For the next five years, he did not so much as touch his drawing board. With each day that he did not draw, he acquired the reputation of a latter-day J.D. Salinger, a tortured minor genius, who, having carried off the highest honors available to a newspaperman, turned from the admiration that haunted his steps and sought for a better and quieter satisfaction in secluded work around the Cleveland suburbs.
Too frequently, however, was his seclusion interrupted by nosy fans. In 1998, a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer staked out Watterson’s house in Chagrin Falls. He caught the cartoonist on the front lawn and the two debated, off the record, the nature of privacy. Watterson made his points forcefully. “He wanted to debate,” the reporter recalled. “It was almost collegiate.” In 2003, Cleveland Scene sent another reporter to Watterson’s neighborhood, who also returned empty-handed. That same year, Gene Weingarten, then as now the Washington Post’s resident nerd, flew to Cleveland and posted up in a hotel room, with a message sent through Watterson’s parents, accompanied by the bribe of a rare comic book, declaring that until he was granted an interview, he would not leave. But Watterson had no interest in comics, rare or otherwise. The next day, his editor at Andrews McMeel, Lee Salem, told Weingarten to fly back to Washington.
Why Bill Watterson Vanished
The creator of Calvin and Hobbes is back, but the mystery is why he disappeared in the first place.
www.theamericanconservative.com
