Dear Mr. Watterson

"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."

You could read that as being about Calvin and Hobbes specifically but it feels to me that it's about cartooning in general.

It's understandable that someone who had achieved what he has achieved in the medium felt that there wasn't too much more to do and that it was time to try something else.

That said, it's so rare to see an artist quit out of artistic principle...and also, refuse to sellout. He's fiercely protective of his copyright...not because he's selling his own C&H merchandise, but because he doesn't want his characters to be watered down in the same way that Peanuts has been. I would love to have C&H t-shirts, dolls...but I have to say, about a decade later, the scarcity of C&H has made it even more sacred and beloved to me.

That said, it's a strongly political strip, which no doubt alienates some people, and of course, it requires a good translation for anyone who can't read Spanish.

Here's the Vimeo channel for the documentary: http://vimeo.com/dearmrwatterson

Here's the synopsis:

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Calvin & Hobbes dominated the Sunday comics in thousands of newspapers for over 10 years, having a profound effect on millions of readers across the globe. When the strip’s creator, Bill Watterson, retired the strip on New Year’s Eve in 1995, devoted readers everywhere felt the void left by the departure of Calvin, Hobbes, and Watterson’s other cast of characters, and many fans would never find a satisfactory replacement.

It has now been more than a decade since the end of the Calvin & Hobbes era. Bill Watterson has kept an extremely low profile during this time, living a very private life outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Despite his quiet lifestyle, Mr. Watterson is remembered and appreciated daily by fans who still enjoy his amazing collection of work.

Mr. Watterson has inspired and influenced millions of people through Calvin & Hobbes. Newspaper readership and book sales can be tracked and recorded, but the human impact he has had and the value of his art are perhaps impossible to measure.

This film is not a quest to find Bill Watterson, or to invade his privacy. It is an exploration to discover why his 'simple' comic strip made such an impact on so many readers in the 80s and 90s, and why it still means so much to us today.