Bill Watterson received the Grand Prix at the Angoulême Comics Festival in 2014. While everyone seems to know his comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, few people know who this reclusive artist is, eager to live anonymously in his native Ohio. Here is his portrait.

Before being published in 1985 in some thirty newspapers, Bill Watterson went through five lean years during which he lived with his parents, did layout work for advertising catalogs, and sent out comic strip projects hoping he wouldn’t be told “no” again.

Between Snoopy and satirical drawing

As a child, Watterson dreamed of being an astronaut or a comic strip artist. As his science grades declined, he convinced himself that cartoonist was the right path. Raised on Snoopy, he always tried to imitate his favorite comics. Later, upon discovering Krazy Kat and Pogo, he understood that comics were not simply a futile art meant to sell newspapers but a medium allowing the artist to convey personal emotions and reflections.

At a comics convention in 1989, he declared:

Peanuts is about the search for acceptance, security, and love, and how hard those self-affirming things are to find. The strip is also about alienation, about ambition, about heroes, about religion, and about the search for meaning and « happiness » in life. For a comic strip, it digs pretty deep.

Nevertheless, he did not study art history and finished his studies with a degree in political science. An admirer of the great editorial cartoonists in daily newspapers, Oliphant or MacNelly, he was quite worried when he began his six-month trial contract at the Cincinnati Post. He sensed that he did not have the political culture and the bite necessary to make a career, and it was almost with relief that he was fired.

Five years of reflection

At that time, most daily newspapers went through syndicates. The term and the function do not really exist in France because the number of newspapers is much smaller than in the United States.

Basically, these syndicates act as artists’ agents: they sell the strips of the cartoonists they manage to as many daily newspapers as possible, driving prices down through economies of scale. In this way, newspapers can get cheap strips, and the syndicates make up for it on the volume sold. Accustomed to this system and to paying a low price for comics, newspaper managers are reluctant to pay top dollar for the creation of a new series.

Watterson then spent the following years putting together comic strip projects and sending them to all the syndicates. At the same time, he survived thanks to small jobs vaguely related to graphic design. Among the series he proposed was Spaceman Spiff, a boastful space explorer who would later become one of Calvin’s fantastical alter egos.

Among the proposals sent, one caught the attention of United Features, which had him sign a contract to develop two secondary characters from In the Doghouse, a rejected project. They were a little boy and his tiger stuffed animal. Although reluctant to make a comic with a child character, Charles Schulz’s shadow being overwhelming for most artists, Watterson began drawing a month of strips and sent them to the syndicate, which then paid for a plane ticket to see him in an interview. It offered to publish the series if he added Robotman to the cast, a toy for which it held the license. Watterson refused and pitched the duo to other companies.

Universal Press Syndicate then offered him the possibility of publishing the series on the condition that he give up his rights to the characters. Not knowing whether he would have a better chance later and after so many rejections, Watterson signed the contract: Calvin & Hobbes was thus born in 1985.

Early years of fine-tuning

At first, Watterson didn’t really know how to develop his characters. For example, Calvin and his stuffed animal were part of a scout club before the author realized that it didn’t work well and dropped the idea.

The drawings were a bit soft, and the parents lacked personality. Some ideas were a bit clichéd, like the monsters under the bed. But Watterson tried to treat them in a more personal way. Over the strips, Calvin’s character became more assertive, and it became easier to describe the world in which the characters evolve.

Calvin is at once capable of making convoluted reasoning with complicated words unusual in the mouth of a six-year-old child and of responding very naively. The fantastical strips in which he daydreams about dinosaurs or space exploration allow Watterson to escape too and to draw in another style.

Hobbes is inspired by one of the Watterson couple’s three cats. He has animal behavior and at the same time serves as Calvin’s conscience. Both represent aspects of Watterson’s personality. But Calvin is far more turbulent than he ever was, and Hobbes is more reasonable. Calvin’s father does the same job as the artist’s, and both have somewhat similar relationships.

During these years of fine-tuning, Watterson spent his months producing as many pages as possible per day to send to the syndicate, which approved some and rejected others that had to be replaced by other strips. He had to deliver one strip per day, and the Sunday page, which is in color, had to be made two months before its publication. Despite this sustained pace, Watterson was happy to do what he had always dreamed of doing.

The refusal of merchandise

After a few months of publication, more than two hundred daily newspapers bought a license for Calvin & Hobbes, as did Watterson’s local newspaper. He could then feel like a real comic strip artist.

Unfortunately, that happiness did not last. Very quickly, the syndicate that held the exploitation rights to the characters asked the artist to sign contracts for merchandise. Mugs or T-shirts bearing his heroes’ likenesses could earn him a lot of money. But just as he had refused to include Robotman in his series, Watterson declined all merchandise offers.

Nevertheless, as Calvin & Hobbes became popular, the pressure on Watterson to sign merchandising contracts grew stronger. The author then bitterly regretted having given up his rights to the syndicate, which could very well replace him and entrust the development of the series to another cartoonist if he decided to resign.

Feeling cornered, Watterson became increasingly stressed, and certain strips reflected his struggle to keep his rights. Of course, the whole thing was transformed into humorous fiction, but the anger and anxiety were very much there.

Watterson eventually issued an ultimatum: he had suffered too much to finally be published. He wanted to recover his rights to the comic strip, and if the syndicate refused, he would resign, because there would be no point in drawing characters that no longer belonged to him and would end up on a coaster. Universal gave in. Watterson recovered his rights and continued the series.

Demanding More

Having been morally exhausted by the quarrel with his syndicate, Watterson took leaves of absence in 1992 and 1994, to the great dismay of the newspapers, which had to publish already-published strips. Some cartoonists criticized him, believing he had gotten a big head. But the syndicates then became aware that they should probably grant more breaks to their authors to prevent burnout. The number of vacation days was therefore increased.

Furthermore, Watterson demanded to be able to draw the famous Sunday color pages as he wished. Previously, these strips were cut in a strict way because each newspaper had its specific layout, and the panels had to be rearranged in another order while preserving the meaning and humor of the comic. This required extra work from the authors and harmed their creativity. Once again, Watterson won, and he could then make the panels the size and shape he wanted in these Sunday pages. He could truly express the fertile imagination of his little rascal in that half-page of the newspaper.

Subsequently, Calvin & Hobbes became even more personal, and the dialogues between the kid and his stuffed animal seemed to echo Watterson’s pessimism regarding ecology or mass (a)culture via television. The cartoonist also took advantage of his freedom of expression to mock contemporary art through a series of snowmen.

But after ten years spent drawing, Watterson stopped his series at the height of its glory.

Silence is golden

Leaving comics behind for painting, Watterson paints for himself and his friends. In 2012, a portrait of Petey Otterloop, a character from the comic strip Cul de Sac, was sold at auction to help research on Parkinson’s disease, which affects the author Richard Thompson. It brought in only $13,000, whereas an original Sunday color page sold for $203,150 in 2011.

Recently, for the DVD cover of a documentary devoted to him, Watterson made a new drawing. It is also for him a way of celebrating the end of an era with a still-powerful print press and its comics syndicates.

In a 2014 interview, he was very pessimistic about editorial cartooning, comics, and new means of distribution. For him, the connection between reader and comic strip character is definitively lost, corrupted by marketing and mass culture that consumes everything like a bag of chips.

That would be my guess. I can’t really picture the average person going to the trouble of curating his own little comic section, much less reading a new and unfamiliar strip for months to build up a relationship with it. There’s so much other content available—instantly and all for free—that there’s no reason to stick around if you’re not immediately enthralled. We consume everything like potato chips now.  In this environment, I suspect the cartoonist’s connection with readers is likely to be superficial and fleeting, unless he taps into some fervent special interest niche. And that audience, almost by definition, will be tiny. It’s a very different world from the days when everyone in America knew who Popeye, Dick Tracy or Charlie Brown was.

By awarding its Grand Prix to Bill Watterson, the Angoulême Festival jury surely did not realize it was paying tribute to the author who currently has the least faith in the comics medium…