Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist—how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms!
But since my “rock star” days, the public attention has faded a lot. In Pop Culture Time, the 1990s were eons ago. There are occasional flare-ups of weirdness, but mostly I just go about my quiet life and do my best to ignore the rest. I'm proud of the strip, enormously grateful for its success, and truly flattered that people still read it, but I wrote “Calvin and Hobbes” in my 30s, and I'm many miles from there.
Via Hacker News [1], “ Bill Watterson, creator of beloved 'Calvin and Hobbes' comic strip looks back with no regrets | Living - cleveland.com - cleveland.com [2]”
It's not the best Bill Watterson interview (a much better interview [3] was done by Andrews McMeel Publishing [4]) but that answer is just great.
The reason for even linking to this is that any interview with Bill Watterson is a very rare event. Heck, even pictures of the artist are very rare and so far, I think this is the only picture I've seen of him:
[Reminds me of Calvin's dad, or maybe his uncle Max] [5]
Quite the recluse, that Mr. Watterson. [6]
He's also famous of not allowing any Calvin and Hobbes merchandising, although it does appear he relunctantly gave his endorsement for a new product coming out in July:
[Cheeeeeeese!] [7]
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1092777
[2] http://www.cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2010/02/bill_watterson_creato
[3] http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/calvinandhobbes/interview.html
[4] http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/
[5] /boston/2010/02/01/billwatterson_500.jpg
[6] http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10020/1029428-
![[5] /boston/2010/02/01/billwatterson_500.jpg](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2010/02/01/billwatterson_500.jpg){kind=link}
![[7] /boston/2010/02/01/calvin_500.jpg](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2010/02/01/calvin_500.jpg){kind=link}