The Tiger Strikes Again looks at The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and the strip’s reclusive creator:
It is 1988. The strip has been going for three years. The phone rings at Universal Press Syndicate. It is Steven Spielberg’s assistant. Mr. Spielberg would very much like to speak to Mr. Watterson.Lee Salem, the syndicate’s president, is ecstatic. Two creative minds like that getting together! The Wizard of Oz! Winnie the Pooh! Peter Pan! Excited, he calls Watterson at home in Chagrin Falls, a leafy suburb of Cleveland. Would he talk to Spielberg?
No, Watterson says.
‘Bill simply was not interested,’ Salem remembers now, the sound of lost millions in licensing revenue like so much static down the phone line.
It turned out Watterson wasn’t interested in doing anything other than the strip. After the first couple of years, no interviews. No ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ dolls — even if Hobbes was, at least as adults see it, a doll himself. (There’s no telling how much a Hobbes doll could have made. The syndicate originally had licensing rights, but Watterson’s opposition was so vehement that Salem ultimately ‘caved in completely” and gave all the rights back to Watterson. ‘Otherwise, I’d be on the beach somewhere right now,” Salem says.) No animated specials. No calendars, notebooks, pencils, backpacks or lunch boxes. (Those car decals of a Calvinesque brat whizzing on one thing or another are rip-offs.)
In 1990, Watterson gave the commencement speech at his alma mater, Kenyon College in Ohio. It was about fleeing the ‘real world.’
He apparently hasn’t appeared in a public forum since.