This fall a documentary on Calvin and Hobbes, entitled Dear Mr Watterson, will be released. The comic strip ran from 1985 to 1995, when Bill Watterson decided to end it. Enormously popular and enormously entertaining and thoughtful it is remembered very fondly in the THC house, where we along with our children were avid readers. Watterson has remained secluded since ending the strip, refusing to license the characters.
Wikipedia reports on an interview that Watterson gave to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2010 about his decision:
"This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of ten years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say. 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, ten, or twenty 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. I've never regretted stopping when I did."THC hopes the documentary is as good as the comic.
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