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Remember Calvin and Hobbes? Of course you do. The all-time-great comic strip ran for a glorious decade before riding off into the sunset in 1995. Too soon.
Since his departure from the funny papers, creator Bill Watterson has been almost as famous for his reclusiveness a he is for his deceptively deep doodles. He’s been called “the bigfoot of cartooning.”
But, there was a Watterson sighting recently. Three of them, actually.
He collaborated with another comic author on three strips for “Pearls before swine” that hit newsstands last week. The collaboration started after Pearls before swine author Stephan Pastis included a very funny Calvin and Hobbs reverence in his comic. Watterson reached out to Pastis and offered to work together.
Pastis writes about the rare window in to Watterson’s post-comic life on his blog. Turns out Watterson only wanted to communicate over email and showed a decided lack of tech savvy – insisting on sending Pastis his drawings via snail mail rather than using a scanner to share images. “Technology is not his friend,” writes Pastis.
“By the end of the process,” he says, “I was left with the distinct impression that he works in a log cabin lit by whale oil and hands his finished artwork to a man on a pony.”
Pastis wasn’t put off by the thought of Watterson drawing by while oil light and neither am I. As long as he’s drawing again, any kind of animal fuel he wants to use for light in his log cabin is fine by me.
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