If you think you might like a comic with characters named for “a 16th-century theologian who believed in predestination” and “a 17th-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature,” let me direct you to Calvin and Hobbes, which was drawn during the 1980s and 1990s by Bill Watterson, who was born July 5, 1958.
Watterson was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Ohio. He started early in cartooning, and when he was in 4th grade wrote a letter to Charles Shulz, the artist who drew the Charlie Brown comics. To Watterson’s surprise, Shulz wrote back! That reinforced Watterson’s motivation to become a cartoonist, and by high school he was creating cartoons for his school’s newspaper and yearbook.
He studied political science in college — not because he had any inherent interest in politics, but because he thought it would help him become an editorial cartoonist — at the time (the 1970s in the US) virtually every newspaper printed editorial cartoons.
He got his first job at the Cincinnati Post drawing editorial cartoons, but discovered that since he was new to the city and didn’t know anything about the local politics, he wasn’t able to come up with trenchant graphic commentary. So he left (actually they fired him) and switched to advertising, drawing pictures of grocery products. He did that for four years while he worked on his own cartoons — and in 1985 he published his first Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.
It was an immediate hit, and got syndicated so it appeared in dozens — probably hundreds — of newspapers every day. Most cartoonists whose work is popular license the images of their characters so they appear on everything from coffee mugs to t-shirts. Not Watterson. He felt putting Calvin or Hobbes on commercial products would “devalue the characters and their personalities.” He won — so when you see Calvin and Hobbes images on mugs, shirts, bumper stickers, or anything else, they’re unlicensed knockoffs.
Then on December 31, 1995, the last issue of Calvin and Hobbes appeared. Watterson said his interests had shifted, and that he’d “said pretty much everything I had come there to say.” He dropped out of public life, hardly ever gives interviews, and although he’s said to have become a painter, nobody who doesn’t know him can say for sure. Other than a few books that are compilations of old Calvin and Hobbes strips, he hasn’t published anything at all. And although there have been articles, books, and even a movie made about him, he hasn’t appeared in any of them.
