Bill Watterson
Rare Calvin & Hobbes watercolor goes up for auction
Calvin & Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson is notoriously reclusive, and original pieces of art from his long-running strip are just as rare. That’s why recent news by Heritage Auctions that a piece of his is going up for sale is worth perking your ears up about.
The watercolor illustration (seen at right) was a piece done by Watterson for a 1989-90 calendar cover. The piece comes from the collection of comic historian Rick Marschall, to whom Watterson inscribed it to in the lower right corner.
The current highest bid is at $26,000, but the auction house expects it to top $50,000 by the time the live floor auction starts on Feb. 23. I expect to see a vast array of comics art collectors come out for this, and perhaps even a few comic artists who are fans of Watterson’s work.
- February 3, 2012 @ 02:00 PM by Chris Arrant
Watch a holiday tribute to Calvin & Hobbes and Bill Watterson
If the season has you missing Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes — particularly, Calvin’s scenes of snowman carnage — you’re not alone. Jim Frommeyer and Teague Chrystie have created a wonderful short film called “A Very Calvin & Hobbes Christmas” that pays homage to those fondly remembered strips and delivers a touching message to their creator. For the curious, Frommeyer even walks us through the process.
- December 16, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Comics A.M. | The Governator placed ‘on hold’; B&N gets $1B offer
The Governator
Publishing | As the fallout mounts from the revelation that former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger fathered a child more than a decade ago with a member of his household staff, plans to revive the Terminator star’s acting career have been put on hold — a move that now extends to The Governator, the comics and animation project co-developed by Stan Lee. “In light of recent events,” representatives announced last night, “A Squared Entertainment, POW, Stan Lee Comics, and Archie Comics, have chosen to not go forward with The Governator project.” However, Entertainment Weekly notes the statement was revised two hours later, putting the project “on hold.”
Unveiled in late March, on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, no less, The Governator features a semi-fictional Schwarzenegger who, after leaving the governor’s office, decides to become a superhero — complete with a secret Arnold Cave under his Brentwood home that not even his family knows about. “We’re using all the personal elements of Arnold’s life,” Lee said at the time of the announcement. “We’re using his wife [Maria Shriver]. We’re using his kids. We’re using the fact that he used to be governor.” But even before the couple’s separation became public, producers had backed off depicting Shriver and their children. [TMZ, Entertainment Weekly]
- May 20, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose
Bill Watterson illustrates Mark Twain
Unlike the painting that Bill Watterson just did for the Team Cul de Sac project, these drawings are not new work; in fact, they were done early in his career, before Calvin and Hobbes became such a success. Artist Thom Buchanan posted them at his blog My Delineated Life, which is a treasure trove of interesting illustrations from times gone by.
Watterson did these as a freelance job for the Mark Twain Journal, and it’s kind of interesting to see how consistent the public discourse is: These cartoons, done in 1983 and based on material that’s about 100 years older, are about the same things that cartoons are about now: Cats and corruption in Congress.
At The Daily Cartoonist, where I first spotted this item, Nevin Martell contributed a few more Mark Twain cartoons, including one on another timeless topic, the irritations of modern technology—in this case, the telephone.
- May 6, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Bloggers get their say with Team Cul de Sac zine
Alice, the Team Cul de Sac cheerleader
Team Cul de Sac is that rare combination of a worthy cause and total awesomeness. Founded by the friends of Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson, who has Parkinson’s Disease, it is a fund-raiser for Parkinson’s research in which famous artists make Cul de Sac fanart, and it just made news recently when Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson contributed a painting.
Now the writers are going to get their turn as well. Enter the Team Cul de Sac zine, with Craig Fischer at the helm. Here, I’ll let him say it:
To that end, I’m cobbling together a big, fat, old-school zine to raise money for the Team. I’ve asked an armada of bloggers, critics and fans (and maybe a cartoonist or two) to each write a short essay answering the following questions: what is your favorite comic (comic book, comic strip, graphic novel, whatever), and why? The Team zine will be a compilation of these essays, an explosion of wildly divergent opinions, and an ideal shopping list to take with you as you plunge into an unfamiliar longbox or used book store.
And he has a stellar lineup: Derik Badman, Noah Berlatsky, Shaenon Garrity, Sean Kleefeld, Joe McCulloch, Chris Schweizer, Tom Spurgeon, and our own Chris Mautner. The zine will premiere at Heroes Con, where it will sell for $5 a copy, with every penny going to the cause. After that, it will be available through the mail and at other cons.
- April 29, 2011 @ 06:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Grab a pawful of early and rare Bill Watterson art
Bill Watterson: The College Years
Face it, tiger-lovers — you just hit the jackpot: Check out this terrific gallery of early and rare art by Calvin & Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson. Included are pieces from the Kenyon College yearbook and student newspaper, covers from the political-cartooning journal Target, Watterson’s own editorial cartoons from the Cincinnatti Post, illustrations for an essay in The Comics Journal, self-portraits, a collection of Calvin & Hobbes sketches, and much more. The site design indicates that this is about a million Internet years old and thus many of you may have seen it before, but I sure haven’t, and it’s great way to see whole new side of Watterson — and a demonstration that his chops were ample even at a tender age.
(via Andrew Sullivan and Gavon Laessig)
- December 7, 2010 @ 02:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
Calvin and Hobbes, meet Joker and Lex
Joker and Lex
Wow. I knew Lee Bermejo could draw some steely-lookin’ bad guys, but I didn’t know he could also channel Bill Watterson so well I’d have a hard time telling the two apart. Behold “Joker and Lex,” Bermejo and writer Brian Azzarello’s Calvin and Hobbes-esque contribution to the Superman/Batman all-star 75th-issue spectacular. I don’t even wanna think about what the rules of Jokerball would be in the alternate universe where this strip is a universally beloved classic — let alone what kind of “Joker peeing” stickers it might have spawned.
(via Topless Robot)
- August 28, 2010 @ 08:58 AM by Sean T. Collins
Talking Comics with Tim | Nevin Martell
Looking for Calvin and Hobbes
Over the past few months, I’ve been introducing my son to the wonder of Calvin and Hobbes, the nationally syndicated comic strip that ran from 1985 to 1995. So creator Bill Watterson was already on my mind, when I gained access to a preview of Nevin Martell’s Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip. The book aims to trace “the life and career of the extraordinary, influential, and intensely private man behind Calvin and Hobbes”. In this new email interview, Martell and I get a chance to discuss the ground he covers in the book and the folks he got to interview in his pursuit.
Tim O’Shea: You did some advanced marketing of the book a few months back by releasing the first chapter of the book for free upon request. Did you find that helped generate buzz for the project?
Nevin Martell: The free chapter giveaway turned into an insane bonanza of buzz, which, frankly, I was totally unprepared for. My publishers told me that super successful versions of this kind of promotion in the past had garnered a couple of hundred requests. But then the offer got written up by BoingBoing and NPR, not to mention a slew of comic-related blogs and the Twittersphere, so suddenly I had hundreds of requests pouring in. Since I was initially answering all these requests individually, it turned into three days of hitting reply, attaching a file, writing a quick note, and then repeating. Ultimately over 4,000 people requested the chapter, which just blew my mind. Actually, my mind is still blown.
- October 12, 2009 @ 02:30 PM by Tim O'Shea