Why Bill Watterson Vanished - The American Conservative

Why Bill Watterson Vanished - The American Conservative

"The trouble with Calvin and Hobbes started at the very beginning, when Watterson was a year out of college. In those days, he was nothing if not earnest. He was working at the Cincinnati Enquirer as a political cartoonist, a job he had scored through Jim Borgman, a school connection on the paper's staff. (Borgman is better known now for illustrating Zits.) The job was a bad fit: Watterson had no feel for horse race politics. At Kenyon College, he had studied political science under the school's resident Straussians, reading Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke--but decontextualized theories of political life did him little good in the 1980 presidential primaries, which he had been assigned to cover. Watterson recalls absentmindedly doodling George H.W. Bush in an editorial board meeting as the rest of the staff drilled the future vice president on Ronald Reagan's fitness for office. He felt totally lost. Within a few months, he was fired.

"Then came a long period of bitterness. Watterson moved back in with his parents and took a job designing layouts for a weekly free ad sheet which was handed out at his local grocery store. He received minimum wage and slaved in a windowless basement office. His boss shouted at him frequently. His car was in constant need of repair. During his lunch break, he read books in a cemetery. He did this job for four years.

"And he developed a monomania that would become the force behind his life's work. He had failed at politics. He could feel himself failing at advertising. There was only one other career he could envision, and it was in humor. But there was nothing funny about how he achieved it. Calvin and Hobbes was conceived in desperation and executed in panic."