"Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came."
How many people are able to spend 5 years without income ?
Should we commend Mr. and Mrs. Watterson Sr.? Without them, Calvin & Hobbes might have never been created; but how healthy is it to subsidize your children for so many years, hoping that they'll eventually find their own way ?
As a (not particularly wealthy) parent, this is the sort of question I keep asking myself, and my experience tells me to do the exact opposite of what the Wattersons did.
They may have paid his way through 4 years of college, but it seems pretty clear that he held jobs after left college, he just wasn't making any money off his comic strip.
One of the great American artists, IMO, and one gets the sense his noteworthiness is increased by several orders of magnitude by his steadfastness in the face of "sell out" pressure. I think about the artist behind Calvin and Hobbes every time I see some unlicensed Calvin urinating on some automobile manufacturer logo, or kneeling at some religious symbol.
He's a pretty cool guy from everything I've heard. It's sad to hear about some of the things that drove him away, especially the fights with the syndicate, or even how when he used to sneak signed books into a local bookstore, people started selling them, much to his chagrin.
I feel like this is the key to any great work.