Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson doesn’t give interviews very often, but Mental Floss has one, and—from what they’ve put online, at least—it’s great. Watterson is always an interesting dude (as you’d expect from a guy who casually admits that “Calvin and Hobbes created a level of attention and expectation that I don’t know how to process”), but in this, he touches on why there’ll never be a Calvin and Hobbes movie, those stupid truck decals, and what’s currently happening to comic strips (and, it might be worth extrapolating, art in general):
I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. (Via.)
I so miss Calvin and Hobbes. Dearly so, really.
You’d read the paper about all these awful things happening in the world, but could at least look forword to Calvin, Far Side, Bloom County and Doonesbury to make you snicker just a little.