I’ve always been a huge fan of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comics. There was something about the series’ tone — sarcastic, yet strangely innocent — that always attracted me to the little boy and his stuffed tiger. And now that I’ve got an entire household of my own “Calvins,” I can see that the man was even more insightful than I though in my early encounters with the strip.
Over at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, features reporter John Campanelli has gotten his hands on something even harder to find than the proverbial hen’s teeth: an interview with Watterson himself.
The interview with the famously reclusive Watterson, which arose (I think) out of an article Campanelli was writing in honor of the 15th anniversary of the strip’s demise, focuses exclusively on Watterson’s involvement with the strip and with his decision to “walk away” at the height of its popularity rather than on any details of Watterson’s personal life or current projects — a focus to which Campanelli attributed the interview’s very existence.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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I found this question and response particularly interesting, especially given the entertainment industry’s current obsession with sequels:
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.