I'm currently working through the Complete Calvin and Hobbes with my 9 year old, and he had these jabs at commercialism throughout, though it might have been sharper towards the end, but he was already jaded by art in 1985 as a 27 year old.
He had dreamed of being a cartoonist from childhood (when he was 8 he wrote Charles Shulz of Peanuts who wrote him back and it changed his life). He had actually majored in Political Science at Kenyon College (class of '80) because he thought that political cartooning was going to be his route in. It was not. He was a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post briefly before they fired him, then he worked for an ad agency and freelanced a bit before Universal Press Syndicate signed him on for Calvin and Hobbes. But, even at 27 when he started working for UPS, he understood the pressure of the professional art world and was cynical about it.
Apparently he lived a miserable life for the last few years of his work. He had been injured in a bike accident and it terrified him that he would be injured in such a way that he could no longer draw (1) so he basically stopped going out, stopped doing anything that could possibly harm his ability to earn money, stopped doing anything that might bring joy to his life. He lived a recluse for several years, before deciding to just quit, then he and his wife Melissa adopted a child and gave her a good life.
1: Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was the editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times when, in 1991, he crushed his right hand attaching a snow-plow to his truck, and he had to retire. I think that incident is what inspired this fear, the timelines match up. But of course, Watterson is famously private and so this is conjecture.
He had dreamed of being a cartoonist from childhood (when he was 8 he wrote Charles Shulz of Peanuts who wrote him back and it changed his life). He had actually majored in Political Science at Kenyon College (class of '80) because he thought that political cartooning was going to be his route in. It was not. He was a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post briefly before they fired him, then he worked for an ad agency and freelanced a bit before Universal Press Syndicate signed him on for Calvin and Hobbes. But, even at 27 when he started working for UPS, he understood the pressure of the professional art world and was cynical about it.
Apparently he lived a miserable life for the last few years of his work. He had been injured in a bike accident and it terrified him that he would be injured in such a way that he could no longer draw (1) so he basically stopped going out, stopped doing anything that could possibly harm his ability to earn money, stopped doing anything that might bring joy to his life. He lived a recluse for several years, before deciding to just quit, then he and his wife Melissa adopted a child and gave her a good life.
1: Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was the editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times when, in 1991, he crushed his right hand attaching a snow-plow to his truck, and he had to retire. I think that incident is what inspired this fear, the timelines match up. But of course, Watterson is famously private and so this is conjecture.