Tag: calvin & hobbes
On Interviews With Bill Watterson
by John Walker on Feb.02, 2010, under The Rest
As was passed around the internets yesterday, Bill Watterson has done a rare interview with Cleveland.com, of all places, to mark fifteen years since he stopped drawing Calvin & Hobbes.
Watterson’s an odd and excellent chap. Calvin & Hobbes was unquestionably the greatest daily strip cartoon in the last fifty years (I really cannot think of anything this could be challenged by), and made more excellent by his refusal to merchandise the strip. So thankfully we never saw Calvin grinning on birthday cards, nor, as Watterson once wrote, had the reality of Hobbes decided for us by a stuffed toy. Instead we of course had Calvin pissing on VW logos, and horrible knock-off t-shirts of, for some reason, Calvin pulling one particular face. But never anything official. C&H remained pure in its form, a comic strip printed in newspapers, then reprinted in books.
Watterson’s motivations for stopping the comic have changed over the last decade and a half. At the time he made it perfectly clear he was quitting because it was the only way to stop the syndicate from merchandising the strip. He called their bluff. Now he says he had said all there was to say, and it had been time to end before it became repetitive or disliked. Whichever is the case, while I would dearly love for there to be new strips to read, I think he’s right that it was best to end at its peak. The idea that Calvin & Hobbes might have gone on to become as tired and unlikeable as so many of the daily strips is too terrible to bear.