BILL WATTERSON AT ANGOULEME
The creator of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes comic strip stepped out of seclusion last winter—this time, to produce the poster for the 2015 Angoulême International Comic Art Festival held every winter in France.
In early 2014, the Festival named Watterson the recipient of its Grand Prix award for lifetime achievement — a prize that usually includes serving as event president the following year (in this case, starting January 29). Apparently, saith reporter Michael Cavna at ComicRiffs, “in a fashion that’s delightfully French, the festival bestows the typically obligation-laden honor without asking in advance whether the honoree’ll accept the concomitant duties, from jurying to appearances.”
So it was all a surprise to Watterson, who didn’t even know the award existed.
“Nobody asked me anything,” he told Cavna, “I wasn’t even aware I’d been nominated. My syndicate sent me an email saying I’d won this award, and I literally had to Google it. People started talking about all the obligations that went with the prize, so I thought the whole thing was bananas, but Angoulême assured me there were no strings attached and they’d work with whatever I’d be willing to do. Drawing the poster sounded fun, so I agreed to do that.”
Watterson didn’t attend the event, but last year’s show of Calvin and Hobbes originals at Ohio State’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum traveled to Angoulême for the festival.
He talked about the poster with Cavna:
“This is a comic strip about newspaper comics, presented as if it were a newspaper comic strip. But in all that circularity, I hope the drawings convey the fun and pleasure of cartoons in the largest sense. I still read newspaper comics, but without much hope for their future. As a small joke on myself, I deliberately set the story in a non-digital world, where the guy gets his morning newspaper in the yard, and the lady next door uses a big phone with a cord. For me, the anachronism evokes the distant heyday of the medium, and razzes how long ago my career was.
“For this idea,” Watterson continued, “I wanted something simple, exaggerated, and silly — i.e., very cartoony. In that regard, I always think of Popeye and Barney Google as quintessential comic strips in that old rollicky, slapstick way we’ve sort of lost. So older comics were in the back of my mind, although I wasn’t trying to mimic anything specific. And to tap into one of comics’ great strengths, I chose to tell the story visually [without words], so that anyone of any age, from any country, could understand it. In this way, I was trying to connect the poster to my American newspaper comics background and acknowledge the international flavor of Angouleme’s festival.”
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