Dear Mr. Watterson Page #5

As the caption reads,

Watterson is the one

on the far right, "blinking."

Perhaps this drawing foreshadows

Watterson's future reputation

for being a man who shied away

from the spotlight

and very much desired his privacy.

I think initially, he was pleased

that so many papers were signing on.

He started getting

a lot of fan mail.

He got a lot of press attention

and he realized,

I think pretty quickly on,

that he had done something special

and I think it didn't take him long

to become a little unnerved

and taken aback by it.

Even with a tiny amount of

success it's a little daunting

how much feedback and comment

and request you get

from the general public.

So, I can only imagine

if I'm Bill Watterson

and I have millions and millions

and millions of adoring fans.

Nobody knows Bill Watterson.

There's like three people on

the planet who have ever seen him.

He won't talk to anybody.

He's the Sasquatch of cartoonists.

People have seen his footprint,

but nobody's ever gotten

a picture of him.

He just wanted to draw

his comic strip.

He didn't really want

to be famous.

He didn't want all the trappings

that went with it.

He just wanted to do a good job

drawing a comic strip.

- Cartooning attracts solitary people,

quiet people, insular people,

because if you are gonna

spend time at your drawing desk

you weren't the kind of person

that dated well in high school.

You know what I mean?

You weren't the kind of person

that was the captain

of the football team.

For the most part, it's people

that used their art

to make their voice to the world.

So, it doesn't surprise me

that he errs on the shier side,

the introverted side,

the reclusive side,

because that's probably

what his life framed him as.

He was probably always shy

and introverted and reclusive

or else he wouldn't have spent

the decades crafting his abilities

as an artist.

He would have been out socializing

and became a regional sales manager

for Midas car parts.

It would have been

a different path in life.

Luckily, Watterson didn't end up

selling car parts

and he did create

Calvin and Hobbes.

By the end of its

decade-long syndication,

it was in over 2,400 newspapers

worldwide

with a daily readership of millions.

Watterson won the Reuben Award

for Cartoonist of the Year

in 1986 and 1988,

the Harvey Award for Best

Syndicated Comic Strip

SGVGH years in a TOW,

and Calvin and Hobbes was loved

by readers and critics alike.

Eighteen Calvin and Hobbes

book collections

have been published in the US;

selling 45 million copies.

And dozens more have been

published internationally

in at least two dozen languages.

There are frequent homages

and spoofs on the comics pages

and the strip has been referenced

in numerous American TV shows;

including Family Guy,

The Big Bang Theory,

Parks and Recreation,

Portlandia and Robot Chicken.

But, Bill Watterson doesn't seem

to care too much about the numbers

or the awards or the accolades.

His focus was on

the comic strip itself,

which, despite being something

that Watterson has said

he did for himself,

had become very important

to readers worldwide.

Bill Watterson saved almost all

of the original art

from Calvin and Hobbes,

both the dailies and the Sundays

and all of the book art that he did

and he put it on deposit here

at the Billy Ireland

Cartoon & Library Museum.

So we are the caretakers

and we make sure that it's preserved

and kept safe and also

that it's accessible to researchers

and scholars.

So if somebody wants to come

and actually see the original art

they can come to our reading room

and request it and we'll bring it out

and they can look at it.

So, this is what we call the stacks

and this is obviously where we keep

all of our collection.

We operate like a rare books room,

so nothing circulates,

nothing actually leaves

the cartoon library.

If anybody wants to use something

they have to actually come here

and request it and then we bring it

out and you can look at it.

So we have over 400,000

original cartoons

including, of course,

the Bill Watterson deposit collection.

We have many, many books

about cartoons, periodicals,

we have comic books,

we also have archival material;

so we collect the papers and letters

of cartoonists

and other people

related to the business.

This is gonna be all of your books

about cartoons, anthologies,

reprint books, "How-To" books,

journals like Puck or Judge

that have a lot of cartoons in them.

Then, over here we have

our flat files,

which is all of the original art.

So, this is one of

my favorite drawers.

This is our Little Nemos

by Winsor McCay

and these are just

absolutely spectacular.

- That is massive.

- Yes, of course the newspaper

pages were bigger themselves

at the time, but it would have

been smaller than he did it

as the original.

Little Nemo, of course, is a

wonderful comic strip

about a little boy who goes

to sleep every night

and he goes to Slumberland

and has all these amazing

adventures and then,

always in the last panel,

he wakes up and is back in his bed

and is back into reality,

and so you can see how this influenced

Bill Watterson with Calvin and Hobbes.

There were a lot of strips

that were like that

where he's in kind of a fantasy world

and then, in the last panel,

he wakes up or comes back

to reality.

If you had the chance to view

a selection

of Calvin and Hobbes originals,

how would you pick

which strips to see?

Would you pick specific examples

of panel layout or

use of black and white

or line techniques?

Maybe a daily and a Sunday

from each year?

Or would you just narrow it down

to your absolute favorites?

No matter what you finally decide,

once you put on the white gloves

and sit down with the strips,

I don't really think

you could go wrong.

It's admittedly

a strange experience.

You can examine each line

and letter and mistake and alteration

and you can compare the originals

to the printed newspaper

or book version.

The dailies look much

as you might expect,

but the Sunday strips

are another story.

You can explore

Watterson's lush watercolor art,

but the Sunday originals

are black and white.

They're incredible to see

despite the missing color,

but the experience got me thinking

about the art of the comic strip.

Comics are a bit of a unique medium

in that it can be difficult

to define exactly what the

final piece of art actually is.

Watterson's originals are probably

worth tens of thousands of dollars

a piece.

But, it isn't until the Sunday strips

are printed in the paper or in books

that they reach

their final intended state.

If you think for just a moment

about how prevalent comics are

and how many millions of prints of

each daily strip are distributed

across the planet, it might be easy

to understand how comics might be

often categorized as low art.

But it's hard to deny

their high impact.

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