Bill Watterson gives first interview in 20 years

Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson gives his first interview in more than 20 years:

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.

An artwork can stay frozen in time, but I stumble through the years like everyone else. I think the deeper fans understand that, and are willing to give me some room to go on with my life.

It's good to see that Watterson hasn't gone completely Salinger on us. To be fair, he hasn't has been entirely absent from the public sphere-- he wrote an excellent review of a Charles Schultz biography for the Wall Street Journal in 2007:

We discover, for example, that in the recurring scenes of Lucy annoying Schroeder at the piano, the crabby and bossy Lucy stands in for Joyce, and the obsessive and talented Schroeder is a surrogate for Schulz.

Reading these strips in light of the information Mr. Michaelis unearths, I was struck less by the fact that Schulz drew on his troubled first marriage for material than by the sympathy that he shows for his tormentor and by his ability to poke fun at himself.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

At an intellectual level, I can understand Watterson's desire to withdraw from public life. But personally, it strikes me as a huge waste of a fine writer. He doesn't even need to draw any more comic strips. Just get a monthly column in a newspaper or something. (Or, dare I say it, write a blog. He always hated commercialism... well, you can't get less commercially rewarding than a blog! Trust me on this one.) Throw us a bone, Bill!