Bill Watterson's Speech – Kenyon College, 1990

http://www.serverunderground.com/archive/bill_watterson.html

by tim_sw • 13 years ago

170 58 13 years ago

mattm3• 13 years ago

It's a shame that Bill Watterson just simply disappeared.

Wingman4l75• 13 years ago

There's a Kickstarter-funded documentary coming out called Stripped about comic strips, which has an audio interview with him. I'm amazed and cannot fathom how they got that, as he's notoriously reclusive, supposedly even more so after he stopped writing Calvin and Hobbes.

zachrose• 13 years ago

Nothing close to, say, J.D. Salinger though.

thinker• 13 years ago

Do you know when it's coming out? It looks like it was funded back in Sept 2011 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smallfish/stripped-the-c...

soperj• 13 years ago

Not really. It's kind of the opposite really, because you know that he's out enjoying himself, rather than pandering to the masses. He's done his service to humanity, now let him be free.

mattm3• 13 years ago

Yes I know he's just doing whatever makes him happy but I sometimes feel sad that if the internet had come out just 10 years earlier, he may have gone the self-published route which didn't really exist at that time for him. Instead of just being limited to 10 years of his creative expression, he may have had the opportunity to pursue it on his own for as long as he wished.

Although articles about him are very tough to find, I read one interview where supposedly he does paintings and when they are done, he burns them.

I guess my comment would better be rephrased as "It's a shame that by working in a system that is solely focused on profit, it caused him much more stress and discomfort than he was prepared to take on and, as a result, felt the only sensible path for him was to disappear."

noonespecial2• 13 years ago

The opposite, I assume, would be Jim Davis-hood. He said what he needed to say, and no more. Magnificent.

(I'm actually expecting a disappearance of _why-like proportions from Randall Munroe in the not-to-distant future as well.)

thebooktocome2• 13 years ago

I'd not be surprised if it coincided with his wife's eventual death or decline from cancer.

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

I doubt it. xkcd has been hitting it out of the park consistently of late, and he's been experimenting more and more with radical new projects. I think it'll be a while before he gets tired of cartooning.

ArkyBeagle• 13 years ago

It is a shame, but it is also wonderful.

Wingman4l75• 13 years ago

It tickles me to know that there's some dorm room ceiling at Kenyon with a copy of of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam", done by Watterson, hiding under a few coats of paint -- unless of course that dorm has since been torn down (even if it was brand new when he was a student, it'd be ~35 years old now; he attended 1976 - 1980).

mbreese• 13 years ago

It's probably more common than you think. When I was in college (actually, just down the road from Kenyon at Denison - they were our big rival), I had a friend paint a large part of the "Creation of Adam" on her ceiling...

in Tide.

So, by day, it looked normal. However, by blacklight, you could see it in all its glory. I still don't know how she got the shading right.

Wingman4l75• 13 years ago

Working on that under blacklight would have been interesting. That's going to really freak someone out someday, if it never got painted over...

marblar• 13 years ago

The dorm probably hasn't been torn down. Kenyon gets rather attached to its buildings.

Wingman4l75• 13 years ago

Now, to send out a mass email to every student asking them to chip some paint off their ceiling and check... =D

precisioncoder• 13 years ago

Bill Watterson is one of my heroes. From what I've read of him he had an extraordinary strength of will. His comics were a major influence on me growing up and the more I learn about him the more I admire him.

jdrobins2000• 13 years ago

The world could use a little more Bill Watterson. There is a man who values what is truly valuable, and refuses to sacrifice it for the sake of greed or ego. To me, that is the epitome of virtue.

GHFigs• 13 years ago

I am reminded of one of Taleb's aphorisms: "You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept", and of Glenn Gould's interview with himself:

"G.G.: I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and for that of his public – and let me get on record right now the fact that I'm not at all happy with words like "public" and "artist"; I'm not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology – that he should be granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were, unconcerned with – or, better still, unaware of – the presumed demands of the marketplace – which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of "public" responsibility, and his "public" will relinquish its role of servile dependency.

g.g.: And never the twain shall meet, I daresay!

G.G.: No, they'll make contact, but on an altogether more meaningful level than that which relates any stage to its apron."

-- http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/glenngould/028010-4020.07...

skore3• 13 years ago

> "You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept"

Reminds my of my favorite saying of Thoreau: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

And Watterson was right in that precise sense. Had he sold out, there would have been no end to the things he didn't want to, but would have had to do.

stkni• 13 years ago

I wish that I'd heard that speech when I graduated. He nails a lot of things I've discovered to be true as I've come along the way.

But even if I had of heard it, I probably would've shrugged it off and made the same mistakes that I made anyway :-)

iagomr• 13 years ago

First time I really read about the man behind the masterpiece of my youth, and it did not disappoint, by far. What a great human being.

nollidge3• 13 years ago

It's kind of rare for our heroes to refrain from disappointing us, isn't it?

nathell• 13 years ago

So this is where the inspiration for http://xkcd.com/557/ came from.

andrewb• 13 years ago

I don't think he took inspiration from it. From speaking with friends we have all had the same dream for the first few years graduating University.

dugmartin• 13 years ago

I graduated 20 years ago and I still occasionally have that same dream.

scott_s• 13 years ago

So much so that I'm shocked that nathell apparently doesn't have them. In the past six years, I've taught more classes than I've attended, and I still have them.

gertef• 13 years ago

When does it stop? I am well into my second decade.

signa11• 13 years ago

this is just beautiful "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."

easyfrag• 13 years ago

I recall Watterson also battled with the newspaper industry over how his strips looked, especially with the use of colour in the Sunday strips. I believe he felt somewhat constrained by the format and you can see him stretching the format's boundaries in the Calvin & Hobbes strips, especially the Sunday ones.

I used to wonder why he never moved to doing comic "books" where he had more room to breathe. I've since come to believe that creative work benefits from some kind of constraint - a boundary to push against.

nollidge3• 13 years ago

Not color, but format. Some newspapers will format a comic with two rows of panels, whereas another newspaper will format it with three narrower rows, etc. So the syndicates wanted comics with panel divisions that allowed that reformatting, whereas Watterson wanted to simply have his block of space to do whatever he wanted with.

He ended up winning that battle. But to hear him tell the tale (IIRC in the 10th anniversary collection), while it opened up creative possibilities, the toll it took on his psyche probably helped ensure the relative brevity of his career.

po• 13 years ago

Format yes, but also with color. The color palette of the sunday comics was punchy and vibrant to attract attention. He very much desired to work in pastels and earth tones and it was a battle for him to get the look he wanted.

MaxGabriel• 13 years ago

If I remember, another good example of this is that papers split on how much space was given, thus many Calvin and Hobbes comics have a "throwaway joke" at the top that the rest of the strip can be independent of.

Example: http://calvinhobbesdaily.tumblr.com/image/48223268456

fr0sty• 13 years ago

More info re: formatting:

http://calvinandhobbes.wikia.com/wiki/Sunday_comics

spodek• 13 years ago

I would love to be a fly on the wall of a room with Bill Watterson, Banksy, and some beer.

What other artists work with such passion, independence, and integrity?

I'm sure there are others, but they come to mind.

wging• 13 years ago

It's interesting that David Foster Wallace also spoke at Kenyon. http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallac...

sramsay• 13 years ago

"If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood."

Someone please put this in the fortune file for all eternity. It describes my life as a scholar, and the life of every professor I've ever known.

Pxtl3• 13 years ago

Watterson was born in the wrong decade. The internet era has created a lot of horrible things, but it has also created a massive culture of creator-owned creativity. The webcomic revolution has run a complete short-circuit around the heartless syndicates, establishing the relationship between the artist and the consumer as a direct one.

However, because nobody pays for webcomics, by necessity the artists can't have Watterson's high minded attitude about merchandising. A web cartoonist that doesn't merchandise is one who doesn't eat. But on the other hand, the merch is entirely theirs to design - they have first and last say over what is sold with their brand on it.

F_J_H• 13 years ago

So, somewhere out there exists a manager who was not able to harness and utilize Bill Watterson's creativity, and fired him instead.

Don't be that guy....

ctdonath• 13 years ago

On a related note, an anecdote which has long stuck with me:

In the foreword to the Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Watterson noted his excitement at receiving the first copy, a box containing his life's work nicely arranged and packaged. Then horror hit him: that was it, his life's work, in just one small box.

Zikes• 13 years ago

As a fan of his work I do hope he realized how much everyone loves his life's work, and that ultimately the reach of that work extends far beyond what was in that one small box.

curiousabout• 13 years ago

Wonder if anyone has tried finding out where his room was and removing layers to reveal his painting?

Bill Watterson's Speech – Kenyon College, 1990

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