On the positive side, I am a great fan of his Calvin and Hobbes work over many years, and would quickly state that it had a significant influence on my developing worldview. As I grew both as a person and artist, I took great interest in his pushback against commercialism, and later, his efforts with the Sunday comics. There was a fighting spirit, a man of principle, who leveraged his success in ways that may seem trivial or needlessly difficult to regular business people, but are fundamental in the creative sphere where exploiting an artist's work for maximum profit is typically the norm. For these aspects of his career, I'm eternally grateful.
Here's the part where people look at me like I'm just being a jerk: After reading as much of his interviews, panel contributions and commencement speeches as possible, I discovered a profoundly selfish and hypocritical man. Time and again, he spoke highly of the importance of art, of doing art as much as possible, and how important his particular art, that of comics, was to the overall conversation about life. What bothers me the most is that once he obtained financial stability and security that, roughly speaking, only 1% of artists in any genre can hope to obtain, he straight up quit. He had, for lack of a better term, the world as his audience to continue putting out material on his own terms, and he did nothing. Nothing.
To me, I find that immensely conflicting. I love Calvin and Hobbes and always will. I embrace many of the lessons that Bill Watterson's career gave me about success, commercialism, and integrity. All that noted, I will never hesitate to claim that a real artist doesn't just up and quit and walk away because they can afford to. A real artist can never afford to quit because it's what they do, and art without an audience is simply selfish folly.
Will I try to get my hands on this interview? Of course. Will it be painful to read, simply because of my personal perspective? Absolutely...