To fill Karl with dread:


Interview with Bill Watterson in "Honk", 1986:

Christie: Do you think you'll ever need a ghost?

Watterson: No, that's against what I believe about comic strips. In
fact, I'd go even further and say I don't think a strip should ever be
continued after the death or retirement of a cartoonist.

Christie: Well, you know, a lot of the very good ones used assistants.

Watterson: Yeah, Pogo did. Schulz has a good comment on that: "It's
like Arnold Palmer having someone to hit his chip shots." I spent five
years trying to get this stupid job and now that I have it I'm not
going to hire it out to somebody else. The whole pleasure for me is
having the opportunity to do a comic strip for a living, and now that
I've finally got that I'm not going to give it away. It also gives me
complete creative control. Any time somebody else has their hand in
the ink it's changing the product, andI enjoy the responsibility for
this product. I'm willing to take the blame if the strip goes down the
drain, and I want the credit if it succeeds. So long as it has my name
on it, I want it to be mine. I don't know, if you don't have that kind
of investment in it...I guess that's the difference between looking at
it as an art and looking at it as a job. I'm not interested in setting
up an assembly line to produce this thing more efficiently. There are
certainly people who could letter the strip better than I do; I don't
enjoy lettering very much, but that's the way I write and that belongs
in the strip because the strip is a reflection of me. If cartoonists
would look at this more as an art than as a part time job or a
get-rich-quick scheme, I think comics overall would be better. I think
there's a tremendous potential to be tapped.


1990 Commencement address at Kenyon

...

In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a
copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on
the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the
ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy
the picture from my art history book.

Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more
ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs
on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs
and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up
the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative
comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my
paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.

The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the
work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a
painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical
flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance
masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old
beer cans and older laundry.

The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed
to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English
poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was
transmitting the spark of life to man.  My friends and I liked the
finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask
permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was
curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my
ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a
sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never
had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed
retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so
long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the
end of the year. And that's what I did.

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of
college are times like these, where things were done out of some
inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was
demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any
authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one
act of vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for
ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe
utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a
cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and
happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.  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. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day,
year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do
that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

...