Cleveland.com, which sounds like the website of the whole city but is actually the site of two newspapers I’ve never heard of – The Plain Dealer and Sun News – has an interview conducted via email with Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. The site claims it’s the first interview the reclusive artist has granted in 15 years. It’s pretty great:
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.
And just in case you once heard that Bill Watterson is a Mormon, I’ve been researching that on Google for the past hour and it’s not true. So don’t worry; you can buy the books without worrying that you’re contributing to keeping gay marriage illegal. (Or, conversely, if you want to keep gay marriage illegal: sorry, but you’re not contributing by buying the books.) That rumor likely got started after that series of strips where Calvin’s parents were pressuring him to get married soon.
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