1942 USAAF Serial Numbers (42-91974 to 42-110188) Last revised September 25, 2016. Jean Arthur (October 17, 1900 – June 19, 1991) was an American actress and a major film star of the 1930s and 1940s. Arthur had feature roles in three Frank Capra. 8 Responses to The Bill Watterson Interview. There has been a lot of discussion — and controversy — recently about the presence of women in super-hero comics, both in terms of the relative lack of female. Classic Movie Musicals: Music S. She is more to be pitied than censured. She is more to be helped than despised. She is only a lassie who ventured. They asked me how I knew My true love was true. I of course replied, Something here inside, Cannot be denied. They said someday you'll find, All who love are blind.
On life's stormy path ill advised. Do not scorn her with words fierce and bitter. Do not laugh at her shame and downfall. For a moment just stop and consider. That a man was the cause of it all. Words and music by William B. Gray, 1. 89. 8She Done Him Wrong (sung by Lee Phelps (?) ), 1. The Bill Watterson Interview . After less than three years in syndication, it appears in more than 6. The three Calvin and Hobbes collections are permanent fixtures on The New York Times best- seller list. And its creator, Bill Watterson, has already won the coveted National Cartoonist Society Cartoonist of the Year award. So why haven? Because Watterson says . In fact, Watterson probably says . Watterson was born in Washington, D. C., 1. 95. 8. At Chagrin Falls High School and Kenyon College in Ohio, he drew for the student newspapers and yearbooks. Upon graduation in 1. The Cincinnati Post, an experience he remembers as relentlessly depressing but mercifully short. Unable to fulfill his editor. For the next five years, Watterson submitted comic strip ideas to the syndicates. Six were developed; six were rejected. United Features Syndicate was the most encouraging, and Watterson. Ironically, UFS declined to distribute it, saying they didn. Universal Press Syndicate snatched it up and launched it on November 1. Watterson values his privacy and only rarely gives interviews. He agreed to do this one on the grounds that the strip be the center of discussion. The interview was conducted, transcribed, and edited by Richard West, editor of the late and lamented political cartoon journal Target, and longtime friend of Watterson. All images by and . I just draw it for myself. I guess I have a gift for expressing pedestrian tastes. The trend nowadays in comics seems to be to zero in on a narrow, specific audience, like divorced parents, baby boomers, and so on. I guess the idea is to attract a devoted special interest group to the comic page who will scream if the strip is ever dropped. That way, the strip stands a better chance of survival than a strip that aims wide but doesn. Still, with any strip, it. A family strip can be hackneyed drivel just as easily as any other kind of strip. WEST: Sometimes Calvin acts very childlike and at other times he acts and says things that are completely impossible for a child of 6. What are your thoughts on that? WATTERSON: The main concern for me is flexibility . As far as making the kid into a wisecracking adult, that. The appeal of that is that, you know, the cartoonist is an adult and, presumably, he has adult comments to make. What I have enjoyed about Calvin is that I feel I. The whole challenge really is to set up rules. You can make your cartoon world have as much sense or as little sense as you want to, and the main thing is that you. I think the audience will go along with you. Cutter John rides a wheelchair loaded with animals wearing fish bowls for space helmets, and that. Everyone in the strip accepts it, and we readers do, too. In essence, Breathed says he. The readers have to take it or leave it. Other strips, equally good, have more ordered universes. I suppose mine is somewhere in between the extremes. WEST: Do you think that because Breathed has established no rules, he limits the acceptability of his strip? Or, put another way, because Calvin and Hobbes is restricted in some ways . That aspect of it doesn. Who reads it and who doesn. For instance, if you violated the rules of Calvin? I like to work within certain confines. The aspect of the strip that I have the most fun playing with is the personalities and the characters. In other words, their interaction is what is interesting to me, not the playing with the form of the comic strip. Visually, I like to play with the form, but, for example, Bloom County occasionally has a narrator. Where do you go to find inspiration if you. You take your size for granted. You get larger up to a point and then you stop, and then that is your size, and you relate to the world from that viewpoint. If size was a complete variable, what would the world be like? In other words, if there was not a hard and fast rule of growth, how would things change? That presents me with an awful lot of visual possibilities that I enjoy working with. And to adults who are used to thinking of the world from a certain vantage point, it sometimes seems fresh, I hope. WEST: One of the best things about the strip is that you surprise readers with the areas of concern of the strip. Do you surprise yourself? Do you find yourself pursuing things that delight you: that you? Is the inspiration on automatic pilot? WATTERSON: I wish it was more than it actually is. For example, everybody works with a day- to- day assumption that gravity is going to be there from the time he gets up until he goes to bed and so on. To imagine if gravity were suddenly turned off requires an effort. You seem to be doing less of them these days. Is there a reason? WATTERSON: At first it was fun simply to juxtapose fantasy with reality . See it from the child. That was originally a fun device, but the burden on the strip has been to make each switch more clever. The juxtaposition alone can get predictable if it. But I still try to do the fantasies as they interest me. In other words, when Spiff is on Planet Zorg, it. I get to draw bizarre landscapes and monsters and fool with lighting and color and so on, in the Sundays. He reacts to the situation and then maybe at the end it flips into a classroom or whatever, but there. The depth of the friendship between Calvin and Hobbes interests me because of its significance. Each kind of story has its own problems in writing, but my main concern really is to keep the reader on his toes, or to keep the strip unpredictable. I try to achieve some sort of balance between the two that keeps the reader wondering what. Both interest me for different reasons. I try to explore as diverse a world as I. This, again, gives me the flexibility to keep the writing interesting and I hope it also keeps it lively for the reader as well. WEST: Let. He seems to be older and wiser than Calvin, but not much. Which of the following more accurately describes him: a pet, a brother, a friend, or the father that Calvin never had? WATTERSON: Hobbes is really hard to define and, in a way, I. I suppose if I had to choose from those four, the brother and the friend would be the closest. Some reporter was writing a story on imaginary friends and they asked me for a comment, and I didn. It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up. WEST: Well, at the risk of getting into psychobabble, a lot of psychologists would say that children create imaginary friends to play out family dramas. So an argument can be just as much a part of an imaginary world as, you know, a sort of sentimental, gooey friendship can be. WATTERSON: Yeah, well, I would hope that the friendship between Calvin and Hobbes is so complex that it would transcend a normal fantasy. The resolution of the question of whether Hobbes is real or not doesn. If you accept the rest of the fantasy that you? His dad assumes that Calvin tied himself up somehow, so well that he couldn. Calvin explains that Hobbes did this to him and he tries to place the blame on Hobbes entirely, and it. I like the tension that that creates, where you. Something odd has happened and neither makes complete sense, so you. Did Alice really go through the looking glass? Was Dorothy really in Oz? What do you choose to believe? WATTERSON: I should also mention, just in that context, that the fantasy/reality question is a literary device, so the ultimate reality of it doesn. In other words, when Dorothy. There are inner workings in The Wizard of Oz that are too coherent for a dream . The literary merits, the purpose of writing it that way, are better served by some ambiguity than by making everything very obvious. WEST: You do a lot with the visuals of the strip. Do you make a conscious effort to vary the visual, as well as the storylines? WATTERSON: I enjoy the drawing more than the writing, so I try to think of ideas that will allow me to develop the visual side of the strip as fully as possible. Even then, I try to make the drawings as interesting as I possibly can, given the very limited constraints of the format. This is probably done more out of boredom than any conscious decision to do this one day and do this another day. The Sundays are the one day that I have a little more freedom with the visual aspects. The fun of a Sunday is that I have more space. Sunday strips lend themselves to longer conversations or visual things or, best of all, both: although if you have much conversation then you don. Sundays are more consciously chosen to reflect those two interests. WEST: Isn. Tigger is probably more naive and energetic, but he. Disney did a good job with him in animation, although the other Pooh characters suffered in the translation. The original Pooh stories are very subtle and sophisticated. They went right over my head as a kid, which is why they never were a real influence on me, but I reread them recently, and they. If I had understood the stories earlier, I. And many of the situations I deal with . Is that simply because it doesn. I think the way they relate to Calvin is more a reflection of my misanthropic tendencies than any literary concern. Many strips have, you know, the funny character, the straight man, the foil . The role of these characters in the strip is entirely defined by their function as a member of a social group or age group, or whatever, and I. I try to make each character, even the ones that aren. Some of the minor characters appear less often than Calvin and Hobbes, but, hopefully, over years, each one will become a unique personality that will be every bit as complex and interesting as Calvin and Hobbes. In other words, I don. I want them to be unique individuals as well. They are parents, of course, and, as sane people, they have to react to Calvin. What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position, to the extent that I can, and I know that if I was Calvin. Hopefully, the mother is not just the disciplinarian, but is more well- rounded than that .
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