Comic strip artist Bill Watterson was born on July 5, 1958 in Washington, D.C. He is the son of a patent examiner and a former city council member and has one brother, Thomas, who is the younger of the pair. Thomas is currently an English teacher in Austin, Texas.

The family spent some time in Washington before moving to Chagrin Falls in Ohio, where Watterson’s mother became a member of city council and Watterson’s father worked as a patent attorney (he’d gone to law school while Bill was young to earn a degree in it and step up from a mere patent examiner). Watterson attended Kenyon College with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and graduated in 1980, whereupon he was offered a job drawing political cartoons by the Cincinnati Post. The post didn’t work out for Watterson, however – he believes that he didn’t live up to the editor’s expectations – and he soon found himself jobless. From there he would work at designing grocery advertisements for four years.

In 1985 Watterson discovered inside himself that which would later make him famous. The first Calvin and Hobbes strip was published on November 18, 1985. Drawing on inspiration from Charles Schulz, Walt Kelly and George Herriman, Watterson created his own little comic strip world, one in which a young boy with a penchant for mischief and his philosophizing tiger have constant adventures. Working with pure fiction and his own personality and experiences to create his comics, Watterson quickly had a hit on his hands, especially with his belief that the art should not suffer because it is compressed into a small format.

Watterson’s beliefs as to how cartoons should be made soon conflicted with the space restrictions of most newspapers. He was particularly influential in changing the format of Sunday strips. Normally Sunday strips contain a title box and then a series of rectangular panels of varying sizes that the artist is bound to; thanks to his persistence, however, Watterson soon had the Sunday format adapted to his own tastes, and his Sunday comics would often stretch as far down as the entire page and be covered in inventive panel arrangements.

Not long after the advent of Calvin and Hobbes Watterson was given the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award in 1986, and the Humor Comic Strip Award form the same society in the same year. Watterson marked the youngest person ever to receive a Reuben. He won the Reuben again in 1988 and received a third nomination in 1992, though he didn’t win. It was discovered soon after that no artist could win a Reuben twice.

Despite the great success of Calvin and Hobbes Watterson retired the strip in 1995, the last strip appearing on December 31. Since then Watterson has become reclusive: he refuses to sign autographs, won’t license any of his characters and is reluctant to give any interviews. He now spends much of his time painting at his home in Cleveland, and only recently emerged from his reclusive world to review Schulz and Peanuts, a biography of Peanuts creator Chales Schulz.