Bill Watterson

William Boyd Watterson II, born July 5, 1958, is an American cartoonist best known as the creator of Calvin and Hobbes. The strip was syndicated from 1985 to 1995 and became the work that defined his public career. Watterson was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. That suburban Midwestern setting helped inspire the world of Calvin, a boy with a fierce imagination, and Hobbes, his stuffed tiger companion.

Watterson began drawing early. He made his first cartoon at age eight and spent much of his childhood alone drawing and cartooning. In school, he discovered strips such as Walt Kelly’s Pogo, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts, all of which helped shape his desire to become a professional cartoonist. When he was in fourth grade, he wrote to Schulz and received a reply, an experience that made a strong impression on him. His parents encouraged his art, though they later recalled him as a conservative child: imaginative, but not much like Calvin.

After high school, Watterson attended Kenyon College, where he majored in political science. He had already chosen cartooning as his goal, but he thought political science might help him enter editorial cartooning. At Kenyon, he kept drawing for the college newspaper, painted Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling of his dormitory room, and produced early “Spaceman Spiff” cartoons. He graduated in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Later, the names Calvin and Hobbes would nod toward his studies: Calvin after John Calvin, and Hobbes after Thomas Hobbes.

Watterson first tried to follow the path of Kenyon graduate and Cincinnati Enquirer political cartoonist Jim Borgman, who supported and encouraged him. In 1980, Watterson was hired on a trial basis at the Cincinnati Post, but the job proved difficult, partly because he did not know the Cincinnati political scene. He was fired before his contract ended. He then worked for four years at a small advertising agency, designing grocery advertisements while developing his own projects and contributing to Target: The Political Cartoon Quarterly.

Calvin and Hobbes first appeared on November 18, 1985. Watterson brought into it pieces of his life and thought: his cycling, memories of his father’s talks about “building character,” his views on corporations and merchandising, and even his cat Sprite, who inspired much of Hobbes’s personality and look. His influences included Schulz, Kelly, Herriman, Winsor McCay, Richard Thompson, Jim Borgman, Paul Coker, Chuck Jones, and Tex Avery. He also wrote about these influences in books connected to the strip, including The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book and The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

Watterson spent much of his career pushing against the limits placed on newspaper comics. He objected to shrinking comic-strip space, to the way syndication worked, and especially to licensing Calvin and Hobbes for mugs, stickers, T-shirts, television, or film. He believed such uses would cheapen the act of making and reading the comic. When he ended Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, he told newspaper readers he had done all he could in the medium, then moved back into private life. His words and drawings still matter because they came from a clear artistic conscience: playful, stubborn, and serious about what comics could be.