Why Bill Watterson Vanished

August 18, 2023 8:54 PM

By Watterson’s own admission, he cannot accurately recall a whole decade of his life because of his “Ahab-like obsession” with his work. “The intensity of pushing the writing and drawing as far as my skills allowed was the whole point of doing it,” he says. “I eliminated pretty much everything from my life that wasn’t the strip.” While Watterson’s wife, Melissa Richmond, organized everything around him, he furthered his isolation, burrowing ever more deeply into the strip’s world. There was no other way, he believed, to keep its integrity absolute. “My approach was probably too crazy to sustain for a lifetime,” he says, “but it let me draw the exact strip I wanted while it lasted.” [The American Conservative]
posted by riruro (61 comments total)

His Pearls Before Swine guest spot was such an unexpected bit of joy.
posted by MengerSponge at 9:00 PM on August 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

Great read. Thanks!
posted by brundlefly at 9:38 PM on August 18, 2023

Such a good read, with such great insights into the sacrifice that comes with artistic monomania. So this is based on a new interview with Watterson? It must be, given all the quotes and details, but it's strange the article doesn't explain the background on that, given how rare access has long been. Were I the writer, I'd be busting at the seams to share every detail of the encounter!
posted by flod at 9:55 PM on August 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

So, the opposite of Charles M. Schulz then?
posted by fairmettle at 10:01 PM on August 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

I... I am afraid. The publication is the American Conservative. Watterson has a new book coming out in October, the first in 30 years. Has he curdled? Will he milkshake duck? Please please please no.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:04 PM on August 18, 2023 [90 favorites]

I too was worried about the publication. It doesn't come across in the article, so I don't know.
posted by brundlefly at 10:05 PM on August 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I admit I am troubled by the thought that Bill Watterson agreed to an interview with a publication that’s unabashedly singing RFK Jr.’s praises, and denouncing feminism, in the same issue.

Is this where I find out Bill was always Calvin, and Hobbes was supposed to be the comic foil?

I did skim TFA, but the main whiff of conservatism I got was the implication that workaholism = bad NOT because it rewards greedy executives and bleeds us all dry, but because it limits our time for procreation, which I guess is the only true path to fulfillment.
posted by armeowda at 10:11 PM on August 18, 2023 [13 favorites]

The problem with this level of control is that it's ultimately self-destructive for the creator, especially when it causes the creator to get out of their strengths and wind up floundering. Watterson's media was beneficial in that regard as he only had himself to deal with, but when creators with this sort of hyperfocus are working on projects that require concerted group effort, the results can go awry, as The Thief and the Cobbler sadly illustrates.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:20 PM on August 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

I really want that album.
posted by brundlefly at 10:27 PM on August 18, 2023 [16 favorites]

Yeah I am trying to figure this out, I initially assumed the interview quotes were from prior publications but it seems they may be new. Weird thing to be coy about

Watterson's legend rests to a large extent on the presumption that he was a guy who did it for art/love and who resisted the depredations of capitalism and the market, and then walked away from limitless wealth and fame in order to preserve a certain set a values that he is presumed to still hold, and this article (interview? unprompted email? drunk texts?) seems to want to demolish several of those presumptions, and there's definitely a possible ideological recalibration behind that.
posted by anazgnos at 10:27 PM on August 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

It seems like a lot of the quotes are from the printed foreward to the Complete Calvin & Hobbes. I don't own it myself. Here is basically the same article with many of the same quotes from 2005.

https://www.chron.com/entertainment/books/article/why-bill-watterson-quit-calvin-and-hobbes-1952901.php
posted by anazgnos at 10:43 PM on August 18, 2023 [18 favorites]

Watterson always had some small-c conservatism.

Haha I was writing a response using exactly that phrase.

walked away from limitless wealth and fame in order to preserve a certain set a values that he is presumed to still hold

The values that he is presumed to hold are perfectly consistent with a small-c personal conservatism, though, and it’s really not obvious to me what in the actual content of article you find to poised to demolish any assumptions about him. It’s simply the idea of him being interviewed in this particular big-C conservative publication that’s surprising, because he’s not known for doing interviews with anyone.

This

"Mom, can I have some money to buy a Satan-worshiping, suicide-advocating heavy metal album?"

is out of touch with the realities of 80s heavy metal, but the punchline was still that there is no such thing, not really, the real sin is the phoniness. The American Conservative skews high-minded, but publishes a lot of people who would believe Satan-worshipping metal bands are a legitimate danger to the soul.
posted by atoxyl at 10:51 PM on August 18, 2023 [8 favorites]

But yeah it’s not clear that he was interviewed here at all - there are quotes that I haven’t seen before, but many that I have. And for reasons stated above it’s not really surprising that the author would like him.
posted by atoxyl at 10:57 PM on August 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

The author of the piece says this is "an experiment in biography on Bill Watterson."
(xitter)

He's the managing editor of "The Lamp, a bi-monthly magazine featuring reporting, commentary, and coverage of arts and letters from an orthodox Catholic perspective."

Something is fishy here. If this turns out to be a "Ha ha ChatGPT wrote that article" situation I won't be a bit surprised.
posted by mmoncur at 11:01 PM on August 18, 2023 [42 favorites]

Yes, I too am intensely curious as to what precise part of the [biographical?interview?] process is "an experiment."
posted by Earthtopus at 11:10 PM on August 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

The writing linking it all together is fine, honestly. The experiment may be “not citing his sources.” That’s the part that feels odd.
posted by atoxyl at 11:17 PM on August 18, 2023 [14 favorites]

This is pretty normal for most news articles right now. There’s a small furor in the Bachelor franchise as one of the women had a miscarriage and was accused of “profiting” off it because of the articles. She has gone in depth about how many articles appear to be interviews with her but are just remixed quotes from her instagram and other sources and that she has done no press. She’s actually given a pretty good media literacy impromptu course for understanding that most articles you should assume the journalist has never even contacted the subject, much less gotten the go-ahead on their article or the viewpoint. I wouldn’t read anything in to the publication as reflective of Waterson’s views or endorsement.
posted by Bottlecap at 11:48 PM on August 18, 2023 [50 favorites]

ChatGPT, revised by somebody. Possibly Miss Wormwood.
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 12:01 AM on August 19, 2023 [22 favorites]

So this is based on a new interview with Watterson? It must be, given all the quotes and details,

Googling shows that a most (all?) of the quotes are from "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes". He does eventually mention he has that book in front of him but it certainly seems like a misleading article.
posted by Gary at 12:17 AM on August 19, 2023 [14 favorites]

Is this Calvinball journalism?
posted by JDC8 at 12:38 AM on August 19, 2023 [44 favorites]

For the next five years, he did not so much as touch his drawing board.
Wasn't he doing paintings? Not comics, but it's not like he Abandoned Art.

In the years since the strip’s end, Watterson has indicated that there was something false inherent to Calvin and Hobbes, some impurity either in his approach or encoded in the strip itself that made it impossible to continue in good faith
Where's this interpretation coming from??

“It seemed a gesture of respect and gratitude toward my characters to leave them at top form”
--Watterson, from the box set

Plus he's said repeatedly that he wanted to make art, fought constantly for space and freedom to make art, but the newspaper comic strip business didn't want art. They want the comic strip equivalent of McDonald's. The "impurity" was never in the strip or in Bill Watterson, it was The Cheapening of the Comics.

But the attraction, I think, derived mainly from the fact Calvin thinks, speaks, and acts like no child in existence. Everything about his character is utterly alien to an actual six-year-old
WRONG (source: virtually any of the strips about baths). His vocabulary is generally way more advanced than a typical young child's, but he frequently thinks and acts like a child. Perhaps the author is unaware that children are in fact real people who are soaking up info and exploring the world. They usually can't talk like Calvin but they still have vibrant internal lives and interesting thoughts & observations.

The author seems incapable of grasping the idea that art can be for art. You can want to do art because you want to do art. The satisfaction can come from the creative process more than Possessing The Art. He calls it "strange" that Watterson painted a mural on his dorm ceiling in college and didn't mind painting over it at the end of year. "Strange"!?
posted by Baethan at 12:55 AM on August 19, 2023 [30 favorites]

"The end of Calvin and Hobbes is not about filling a blank sheet. It is about taking a colored sheet and making it blank again."

I'm not a cartoonist, but as someone who is simultaneously extremely busy doing what I feel is the very best work of my career while also rapidly approaching the precipice of retirement -- that quote resonates with me.
posted by smcdow at 1:43 AM on August 19, 2023 [7 favorites]

Nic Rowan: My interview is with Bill Watterson. ...ahem...
Nic Rowan: "1995! With a creepy, tingling sensation, you hear the clatter of pencil on floorboard. Resignation! With Bill's comic tragically cut short and mystery why disappeared, this amazing foreword from my half-understood copy of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes reveals a profound..."
Class: FOREWORDS AREN'T INTERVIEWS!!
Nic Rowan: Look, who's talking to Bill? You chowderheads... or me?!
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 1:52 AM on August 19, 2023 [50 favorites]

why disappeared

polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice you sly genius.
posted by flod at 2:15 AM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's ten years since I wrote 750 words Enough, already about Watterson and being driven by the muse. That was long before ChatGPT, so I probably wrote it myself. I've barely read Watterson let alone interviewed him but it didn't / doesn't stop me riffing respectfully on his life and works.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:55 AM on August 19, 2023

Here's a great site ft actual interviews with and writings by Bill Watterson. I linked to one of the pages above but it's worth looking at some of the other interviews and essays!

I particularly love this interview, in which he says that he's a huge fan of Garfield and really always wanted C&H to be more like that but tragically, as we know, couldn't hack it.
Here is the proof, which I definitely understood:
"Christie: What about Jim Davis?
Watterson: Uh...Garfield is...(long pause)...consistent."
posted by Baethan at 3:06 AM on August 19, 2023 [22 favorites]

I know why Bill Watterson quit doing Calvin & Hobbes, but the margins here are too narrow to write it down.
posted by chavenet at 5:03 AM on August 19, 2023 [31 favorites]

This article’s quotes are all from the Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book or Exploring Calvin and Hobbes (which has an interview from sometime in 20xx conducted by the curator of a comics museum). It’s unlikely Watterson ever spoke to the American Conservative.
posted by ignignokt at 5:05 AM on August 19, 2023 [23 favorites]

I’m sad they were able to trick people into thinking they got an interview via attribution omission and clickbaiting me into looking at it just to see if they did.

I can assure you there’s nothing worth seeing there (check out the aforementioned books or read Wikipedia), but in case you still haven’t RTFA but don’t want to record this kind of conservative chicanery, here is an archive.org copy.
posted by ignignokt at 5:12 AM on August 19, 2023 [30 favorites]

I'll assume that's a sort of meta commentary/clever riff on the awful article!

(Just in case clarification is needed, can't let anyone get the wrong impression on the internet: Watterson of course does not receive royalties because those stickers are unauthorized, as is all Calvin & Hobbes merchandise. I suppose the f you money part is vaguely true in the sense that he was able to stay true enough to his artistic vision and stopped when he wanted to, while maintaining an impressive degree of privacy.)
posted by Baethan at 7:21 AM on August 19, 2023 [14 favorites]

I didn't mind the article, but I'm not a Watterson expert.

This phrase from the article:

But I think I have an explanation.

Seems like an early giveaway that there was no special access afforded to the author.
posted by All Out of Lulz at 7:28 AM on August 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Why are we giving AC clicks?

There’s no comparison beyond extremely loose editorial standards, but American Conservative faking a Bill Watterson interview is like a shittier fanboy retcon version of when The Advocate used to do “list of b list celebrities from your childhood we wish were gay.”

I’m gonna need some evidence that Watterson actually gave an interview here.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:30 AM on August 19, 2023 [20 favorites]

"That American Conservative article is an unashamed fountain of falsehoods and deception. I was never interviewed by them, will never be interviewed by them, and that article is a lesson that anyone can just go on the internet and tell lies."

--Bill Waterson
posted by AlSweigart at 7:51 AM on August 19, 2023 [36 favorites]

AlSweigart -- I so totally hope that that quote is legit -- is it from a social media post or something? Or are we all just kinda riffing at this point?
posted by martin q blank at 8:35 AM on August 19, 2023

No, the original quote is from Abraham Lincoln.
posted by Pendragon at 8:39 AM on August 19, 2023 [21 favorites]

This "interview" led me to the news about the new Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium which releases the cartoons in a much easier to read format than the collected edition.
posted by Pendragon at 8:47 AM on August 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

Do not trust any quote attributed to "Bill Watterson". No such person exists. The "Calvin and Hobbes" comic adventures were in fact written by none other than I, Alfredo Sweigart, frustrated scion of the cadet branch of the House of Wattersohn, under an alias so as not to arouse the ire of the family patriarch. But no longer! In this exclusive interview with The American Conservative, I will
posted by phooky at 8:52 AM on August 19, 2023 [11 favorites]

If anyone else is curious about Watterson's collaboration with Stephan Pastis in Pearls Before Swine (mentioned in the first comment), you can read the whole backstory and see the resulting comic strips here. I'd seen them and somehow totally forgotten it happened.
posted by martin q blank at 9:00 AM on August 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

AlSweigart -- I so totally hope that that quote is legit --

quick google search on "That American Conservative article is an unashamed fountain of falsehoods and deception. I was never interviewed by them, will never be interviewed" gets "no results found"
posted by philip-random at 9:08 AM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

But he also emptied himself of all physical attachment to Calvin and Hobbes. In 2005, he donated the bulk of his original proofs to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Columbus. Once he had unburdened himself of the madness that had consumed him for practically his entire adulthood...

This is a very weird way to frame "He donated his original proofs to the world's largest and most comprehensive cartooning archive which also happens to be at the state university about two hours away from him." Especially since they did a really nice exhibit of the stuff about 10 years ago, and he gave an interview about the strip and donating the work:

Jenny Robb: Why did you choose to place your collection at The Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum?

Bill Watterson: Long ago my friend Rich West recommended the library to me. I met Lucy Caswell and was much impressed with her vision and scholarly professionalism. Some years after I stopped the strip, I wanted to get my work into a more protective, permanent environment, so the choice was a no-brainer. And now of course the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum is even better. It’s a remarkable institution, and the fact that this fabulous resource is right in my home state is icing on the cake.

Like, this was him finding a safe place to keep the work, not him jettisoning it out of his life never to be seen again.
posted by damayanti at 9:29 AM on August 19, 2023 [22 favorites]

It sounds like Bill Watterson vanished when he started writing Calvin & Hobbes, and reappeared again after he stopped.
posted by heatherlogan at 9:42 AM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

The "Calvin and Hobbes" comic adventures were in fact written by none other than ... S. Morgenstern.

I started medical school in 1987. For our lectures, students ran a transciption service. Library staff recorded the audio on cassette tapes and lecturers provided handouts to the scribe for the illustrations. Students who needed money, e.g. me, would hire themselves out to do others' assigned lectures. I made good money. I wrote mine on my Macintosh SE in a concise style that was very well liked, using a foot switch to control my cassette player and 100 wpm typing skillz. I always made room for a decoration at the bottom of the last page, which would usually be a Calvin & Hobbes strip.
posted by neuron at 9:56 AM on August 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

Plus he's said repeatedly that he wanted to make art, fought constantly for space and freedom to make art, but the newspaper comic strip business didn't want art. They want the comic strip equivalent of McDonald's. The "impurity" was never in the strip or in Bill Watterson, it was The Cheapening of the Comics.

I’m not really sure what Rowan means by “some impurity in the strip,” either but it seems like the main idea of the rest of the piece is to examine what it means that Watterson went out on top - not in the midst of his brutal fights with the comics business but after winning them. Which I think is fair enough to Watterson’s telling but I don’t know that there has to be any tremendous mystery to the answer. He struggled with the deadline-driven lifestyle (even when he’d been allowed to take a fair amount of time off in the last few years) he cared about the quality of the strip and he felt like ten years was enough?
posted by atoxyl at 10:39 AM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

The thing now with web comics is you can see a more natural inspiration-death process, the way the likes of Achewood just… sputtered to a halt on their own at some point.
posted by atoxyl at 10:48 AM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

So TIL that Bill Watterson has new work coming out in October.
posted by LooseFilter at 11:26 AM on August 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

This thread about gave me a heart attack, with the ups and downs and then the revelation.
posted by Scattercat at 11:35 AM on August 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

In 2021, Berkeley Breathed ran a segment of strips on his characters finding a stuffed tiger and going on a quest for the owner. It ended with Hobbes in an adult Calvin's workshop and THEN with a single page WaPo story with a photo of an individual flying a small oval-shaped UFO flying at a ridiculous speed. Spiff is emblazoned on the pilot's helmet.

I don't remember if Waterson ever saw that but I think he would have been pleased.
posted by Ber at 11:54 AM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Love these "isolated" men who live with wives who "organize" everything for them. A long time ago the NY Times had a profile of a "hermit." They showed a picture of him next to his wife.
posted by DMelanogaster at 12:33 PM on August 19, 2023 [29 favorites]

I don't remember if Waterson ever saw that but I think he would have been pleased.

Watterson and Breathed are known to have had a friendly correspondence and exchanged parody comics in private. Watterson’s jab at Breathed for not being so principled on licensing issues being the most famous. So I suspect he knew about the tribute.
posted by atoxyl at 1:57 PM on August 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

Achewood is back! It is on Patreon now, the first Patreon I've been motivated to subscribe to, in fact. And, I have to say, it's been totally worth it! Onstad has been reliably and frequently posting a ton of new strips and various ancillary materials there, and in my opinion the quality is as good as it's ever been. I know I myself have gotten so MANY hours of free entertainment from the Achewood universe that I don't mind at all buying its creator a cup of coffee a month for the foreseeable future, and I recommend any other Achewood fans do the same. You won't regret it!
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 2:07 PM on August 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Love these "isolated" men who live with wives who "organize" everything for them.

Yeah, that said a lot about the author of that article!
posted by Baethan at 3:16 PM on August 19, 2023 [5 favorites]

"Watterson's legend rests to a large extent on the presumption that he was a guy who did it for art/love and who resisted the depredations of capitalism and the market, and then walked away from limitless wealth and fame in order to preserve a certain set a values that he is presumed to still hold, and this article (interview? unprompted email? drunk texts?) seems to want to demolish several of those presumptions, and there's definitely a possible ideological recalibration behind that.
posted by anazgnos at 10:27 PM on August 18 [5 favorites +] [!]"

Dude, the answer to your question is the literally title of the strip: "Calvin and Hobbes". The whole thing was a play-set to test out Calvinism vs. Hobbsian philosophies. The best example of this is all the strips that showed them flying down a hill in a wagon and going over the rail into disaster.
posted by metametamind at 3:19 PM on August 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Maybe Hobbes is the friend we made along the way
posted by chavenet at 4:01 PM on August 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't remember if Waterson ever saw (Berekley Breathed's C&H homage) but I think he would have been pleased.

I seem to remember hearing that Watterson actually drew some of the Hobbes art for that sequence.

The article that's the subject of the post, however, seems like the journalistic version of all those Calvin peeing stickers: unauthorized selling out our fond memories with inauthentic crap that bears little resemblance to the original.
posted by JHarris at 6:26 PM on August 19, 2023 [8 favorites]

Reading a tossed-off couple of sentences about his wife managing his entire life so he could write and draw one page a week made me STABBY. God I hope he's nice to her and she's now living a luxurious life with the money she paved the way for him to make.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 7:10 PM on August 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

spitbull: I'll assume Watterson is rolling in money from the royalties on those Calvin pissing on stuff decals on the back of millions of pickup trucks.

I'm not sure if you meant this earnestly or not, but there are no royalties to be had there. None of those are licensed and Watterson famously avoided licensing his characters for anything. The only royalties he's getting are for the books.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 7:27 PM on August 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

Reading a tossed-off couple of sentences about his wife managing his entire life so he could write and draw one page a week made me STABBY.

One page a week is a weird way to describe Calvin & Hobbes. You don't have to minimize the time & effort that went into that strip to acknowledge that Melissa Richmond was certainly an indispensable support to Watterson throughout the run.

It was gross and crappy of the author of the piece to talk about how she "organized" everything else in his life because the guy made that up. I'll eat a hat if he's ever so much as made small talk with Watterson or Richmond, much less scored an interview.

One does not simply Get An Interview with Bill Watterson.

Those sentences were just to serve the purpose of portraying Watterson as having been 1000% obsessed with Calvin & Hobbes to the extent of not doing what he should (putting aside childish things and getting that wife in the family way). Needless to say, the stolen quotes don't really support this interpretation of Watterson because it's completely bonkers.
posted by Baethan at 8:49 PM on August 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

Watterson famously avoided licensing his characters for anything.

I can claim ownership of one licensed Calvin & Hobbes item: The USPS stamp in the "Sunday Funnies" series from 2010.

I'm lucky to have an official piece of Calvin & Hobbes marketing material. I worked at a bookstore in the 1990s when the 10th Anniversary book was released; the cardboard display (or "dump") of books was prominently placed at the front of the store. When the dump's sales period was completed, I kept the large cardboard topper featuring Calvin and Hobbes making goofy faces. I still have it.
posted by JDC8 at 11:13 PM on August 19, 2023 [14 favorites]

I would like to lay to rest some of the fanciful notions put forth in the comments here by people under the influence of this "article." I can't claim to know Watterson directly, but I worked with a family member of his for several years in the mid-eighties, and remain a somewhat distant friend of his to this day. From conversations I've had I can guarantee Bill Watterson is neither a wastrel, a layabout, or even a small-c conservative, whatever the fuck that is.

I can speak to the integrity of his entire family and you can be safe in accepting my word that the portrayal of him in this article borders on scandalous. He has given immense energy to maintaining the integrity of his work, even since he ceased daily publication by legally fighting the bootleggers, continues to create art (I have seen one piece- it was very much playful, fun, and in the fashion) and is reportedly very much happy and at peace with the decision he made to lay Calvin and Hobbes to rest when he realized the strip had run its course.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:58 AM on August 20, 2023 [43 favorites]

I haven't followed Watterson closely, but I've certainly gotten the impression that he still continues to make art when he feels like it.

In case any of his fans haven't seen it, please do take a look at the utterly wonderful portrait he did of Cul de Sac's Petey (Petey is Alice's big brother) for the benefit of Team Cul de Sac and the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
posted by kristi at 3:31 PM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

"But I think I have an explanation"...and then never goes on to really explain what it is - basically sums up the entire thing. It's trying to, or pretending to, say a lot while not saying much at all. The only somewhat interesting thing is trying guess what sly angle is being played by a rightwing rag.
posted by blue shadows at 11:15 PM on August 22, 2023 [2 favorites]