Wise words from the creator of Calvin & Hobbes
Bill Watterson, creator of the beloved "Calvin & Hobbes" comic strip, recently gave his first interview since 1989, to a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, thus avoiding becoming the next J.D. Salinger, at least for now.
One exchange:
Q: Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved -- and are still grieving -- when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?
A: This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.
It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.
I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.
I've never regretted stopping when I did.
May editors across the country think about what Mr. Watterson said here, and ask themselves, "Why am I still running old 'Peanuts' strips, more than ten years after Charles Schulz retired it? Or 'Blondie,' nearly 30 years after the death of Chic Young?" And on and on and on.
One exchange:
Q: Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved -- and are still grieving -- when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?
A: This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.
It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.
I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.
I've never regretted stopping when I did.
May editors across the country think about what Mr. Watterson said here, and ask themselves, "Why am I still running old 'Peanuts' strips, more than ten years after Charles Schulz retired it? Or 'Blondie,' nearly 30 years after the death of Chic Young?" And on and on and on.
posted by Allthenewsthatfits at 7:59 AM
2 Comments:
Also..don't be The Family Circle. How many times do we need to have the smiling ghostly grandma or that little runt run all over the neighborhood with a dashed line behind him?
Good fill someone in on and this post helped me alot in my college assignement. Say thank you you on your information.
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