Still, 100% agreed that he stopped at the right time, both because of the creeping cynicism, but also simply because he was running out of fresh ideas...
He had dreamed of being a cartoonist from childhood (when he was 8 he wrote Charles Shulz of Peanuts who wrote him back and it changed his life). He had actually majored in Political Science at Kenyon College (class of '80) because he thought that political cartooning was going to be his route in. It was not. He was a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post briefly before they fired him, then he worked for an ad agency and freelanced a bit before Universal Press Syndicate signed him on for Calvin and Hobbes. But, even at 27 when he started working for UPS, he understood the pressure of the professional art world and was cynical about it.
Apparently he lived a miserable life for the last few years of his work. He had been injured in a bike accident and it terrified him that he would be injured in such a way that he could no longer draw (1) so he basically stopped going out, stopped doing anything that could possibly harm his ability to earn money, stopped doing anything that might bring joy to his life. He lived a recluse for several years, before deciding to just quit, then he and his wife Melissa adopted a child and gave her a good life.
1: Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was the editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times when, in 1991, he crushed his right hand attaching a snow-plow to his truck, and he had to retire. I think that incident is what inspired this fear, the timelines match up. But of course, Watterson is famously private and so this is conjecture.
curmudgeonliness: The state or condition of being curmudgeonly.
okay, let's look up curmudgeonly:
curmudgeonly: Characteristic of a curmudgeon; churlish
nearly there:
curmudgeon: An ill-tempered person full of stubborn ideas or opinions, often an older man.
Why so often an older man? Need we look farther than Dickens' Scrooge?
Look up some crazy sounding 20+ character word, takes three steps, and then you get a definition of the sub-sub-sub word and it says ".... blah blah, derived from the Greek base <abc>- and then also the Latin base -<xyz>", and you realize you had no chance at getting it from any kind of first principles or anything.
Especially as it’s not a very common word a lot of non-native speakers need to look up. Probably also a few native speakers.
"Curmudgeon" itself is interesting, because while it's not particularly common, I actually think a lot of native English speakers would recognize it because it's got a lot of character- for some reason, the way it feels to say and the way it sounds almost has some of the character of the meaning.