People I Want to Meet: Bill Watterson

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer (via Daring Fireball):

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.

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.

Wow. You know, I never realized that Watterson was only in his 30s when he drew Calvin & Hobbes. Actually, I've never even thought about it. His writing was always so wise and insightful. Also striking is that it's been time-and-a-half as long since the strip ended as the entire run of the strip. Amazing. I can still remember reading the final Sunday like it was yesterday.

I can't wait to share Calvin & Hobbes with my kids, which reminds me of this (which Watterson did not create, but could have):