Bill Watterson squandered a rather unremarkable childhood reading the comics in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. By the time he graduated from high school, his own primitive cartoons had appeared in the school newspaper and yearbook, and not a few stall doors of various boys' rooms.

At Kenyon College, fellow delinquents encouraged Watterson to pursue political cartooning. Watterson's chronicles of the Carter years proved to be amongst his most humorous work ever, the insights into foreign policy being especially laughable. In an effort to remedy this, Watterson majored in political science and, thanks to a friend with access to the school's computer, Watterson earned a degree in 1980. A major Cincinnati daily immediately offered him a job as editorial cartoonist, but within a matter of months, the editor returned from the sanitarium and Watterson was fired. Disillusioned, Watterson turned to comic strips. The next few years were not proud ones, and only a well-tuned, used Fiat kept Watterson from the law's grasp. Rejection slips and debts piled up, and eventually his parents sold him into slavery as a lay-out artist for a sleazy tabloid shopper. There, in the dank and windowless basement of a convenience store, submitting to the idiot whims of a maniacal tyrant, Watterson developed that carefree, happy-go-lucky view of life that so permeates all his cartoons.

Influences

"Three comic strips have been tremendously inspirational to me: Peanuts by Charles Schulz, Pogo by Walt Kelly, and Krazy Kat by George Herriman. These strips have very different sensibilities, but they've helped me discover what a comic strip can do.

Peanuts books were among the first things I ever read, and once I saw them, I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist. I instantly related to the flat, spare drawings, the honesty of the children's insecurities, and to Snoopy's bizarre and separate world. At the time, I didn't appreciate how innovative all that was - I just knew it had a kind of humor and truth that other strips lacked. Now when I reread the old books, I'm amazed at what a melancholy comic strip it was in the '60s. Surely no other strip has presented a world so relentlessly cruel and heartless. Charlie Brown's self-torture in the face of constant failure is funny in a bitter, hopelessly sad way. I think the most important thing I learned from Peanuts is that a comic strip can have an emotional edge to it and that it can talk about the big issues of life in a sensitive and perceptive way.

Pogo, in some ways, is the opposite of Peanuts. Whereas Peanuts is a visually spare strip about private insecurities, Pogo was a lushly drawn strip, full of bombast and physical commotion. The strip's dialogue was a stew of dialect, pun, and nonsense, and word ballons were often filled with gothic type or circus poster letters to suggest the character's personality and voice. With the possible exception of Porkypine, there was not a soul-searching  character in a cast of dozens. The drawings were beautifully animated and the stories wandered down back roads, got lost, and forgot their destinations. Kelly's animals satirized the day's politics, back when comics were expected to avoid controversy altogether. Beneath the chaos and bluster though, the strip had a basic faith in human decency and an optimism for bumbling through. Pogo had a pace and an atmosphere that will probably never be seen again. The strip is a wonderful lesson in what a lively, rich world the comics can present.

It is Krazy Kat, however, that fills me with the most awe today. Krazy Kat is more poetic than funny, with a charm that's impossible to describe. Everything about the strip is idiosyncratic and peculiar - the wonderful, scratchy drawings, the bold design and color of the Sunday strips, the kooky, austere Arizona landscapes, and the bizarre conglomeration of Spanish, slang, literary allusion, dialect, and mispronunciation that makes up the dialogue. The circular plot, such as it is, can be interpreted (and over-interpreted) as an allegory about good and evil, love and hate, society and individual . . . or it can simply be enjoyed for its lunatic machinery. For me, the magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but how it says it.   In its singular, uncompromised vision, its subtle whimsy and its odd beauty, Krazy Kat stands alone.

Other cartoonists and artists have inspired me as well, but these three strips shaped my idea of what a comic strip could be. All the strips work on several levels, entertaining while they deal with bigger issues of life. Most important, these strips reflect uniquely personal views of the world. They argue that comics can be vehicles for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression. They set the example I wanted to follow.

The challenge of any cartoonist is not just to duplicate the achievements of the past, but to build on them as well. Comic strips have a short history, but their traditions are important. Cartoonists learn about cartooning by reading cartoons. Unfortunately, the history of comics is not very accessible. Popular strips were not regularly collected in books until very recently. Peanuts and Pogo collections are often difficult to find and are increasingly expensive. Krazy Kat still has not been adequately published in book form. It has only been in the last few years that I've seen any extended runs of the true classics of the medium. Early strips are amazing - some are far more inventive than today's - but they can't educate future cartoonists if they're not collected and republished. Sometimes I wonder what strips would be like if every generation didn't have to reinvent the wheel."

The Process

"I think I learned to be a writer so I could draw for a living. Actually, I enjoy writing as much as drawing, but working on a deadline, the drawing is easier and faster. People always ask how cartoonists come up with ideas, and the answer is so boring that we're usually tempted to make up something sarcastic. The truth is, we hold a blank sheet of paper, stare into space, and let our minds wander. (To the layman, this looks remarkably like goofing off.) When something interests us, we play around with it. Sometimes this yields a funny observation; sometimes it doesn't, but that's about all there is to it. Once in a while the cartoonist will find himself in a beam of light and angels will appear with a great idea, but not often.

Occasionally I'll have a subject or issue in mind that I want to talk about, but if I don't have a ready topic, I try to think of what I'd like to draw. My goal is to feel enthusiastic about some aspect of the work. I think one can always tell when an artist is engaged and having a good time: the energy and life comes through in the work. I like to sit outside when I write, partly because there are bugs and birds and rocks around that may suggest an idea. I never know what will trigger a workable idea, so my writing schedule varies a great deal. Sometimes I can write several strips in an afternoon; sometimes I can't write anything at all. I never know if another hour sitting there will be wasted time or the most productive hour of the day.

When I come up with a topic, I look at it through Calvin's eyes. Calvin's personality dictates a range of possible reactions to any subject, so I just tag along and see what he does. The truth of the matter is that my characters write their own material. I put them in situations and listen to them. A line for Hobbes never works for Calvin or Susie, because Hobbes reacts differently and he expresses himself in a different voice. Virtually all the strip's humor comes from the characters' personalities: I would never think of Calvin's retort if Calvin weren't the one saying it.

I write my ideas in an ordinary school notebook. I spend a lot of time fussing with the wording, juggling the various concerns of timing, clarity, brevity, and so on. I write in pencil, and go through erasers at an alarming rate. Once I bang an idea into form, I make a small doodle of the characters to give the strip a rough outline. My purpose at this point is mostly to show who's speaking each line, but I try to suggest gestures and rough compositions, so I will think about the idea in visual terms when it comes time to ink up. I reevaluate the roughs over several days, when I'm fresher and more objective. Often the writing needs more work, and sometimes I just cross the whole thing out. On occasion, I've ripped up entire stories - weeks of material - that I didn't think were good. Obviously, if I'm right on deadline, that kind of editing becomes a luxury, so I try to write well ahead of due dates. It's very embarrassing to send out a strip I think is bad, so I like a long lead time and, given the need to fill newspaper space every day, I weed out as much mediocre work as possible.
After I have about thirty daily strips, I show them to my wife. She can usually intuit what I'm trying to say, even when I don't get it right, so she's a good editor, and a pretty accurate Laugh-o-meter. After reworking or scrapping weak strips, I ink up the ones I like.

I typically ink six daily strips, or one Sunday strip, in a long day. I'd enjoy the inking more if I could make more time, but I need to draw efficiently in order to gain back the time lost writing bad ideas. I lightly pencil in the dialogue first, as that determines the space left for drawing. Next, I sketch in the characters very loosely, establishing the composition of each panel. I frequently make revisions, so I use a light pencil and I erase if needed. If the picture is unusually complex, I'll render the difficult parts completely, but generally, I try to do as little pencil work as possible. That way, the inking stays spontaneous and fun, because I'm not simply tracing pencil lines. Inking mistakes and accidents are whited out.

I draw the strip with a small sable brush and waterproof India ink on Strathmore bristol board. I letter the dialogue with a Rapidograph fountain pen, and I use a crowquill pen for odds and ends. It's about as low-tech as you can get.

The Sunday strips also need to be colored. This is a timeconsuming and rather tedious task, but the color is an integral part of my Sunday strips, so I think it's important to choose all the colors myself. (Foreign collections of my work are sometimes recolored, and the results rarely please me.) When I first started 'Calvin and Hobbes' there were 64 colors available for Sunday strips; now we have 125 colors, as well as the ability to fade colors into each other. The colors are incremental percentage combinations of red, yellow, and blue, and we have a pretty good range, although I wish there were more pale colors. Each color has a number, so I color my strip on an overlay, and mark the corresponding numbers. The syndicate sends this to American Color, a company that processes all the Sunday comics into color negatives for newspaper printing.

After a batch of strips is inked and colored, I send them to the syndicate, where my editor corrects my spelling and grammar, and looks printed up and sent to subscribing newspapers. Then I start writing again."