BILL WATTERSON!!!

The "father" of one of the best of the most recent, and _truly_ successful modern humor newspaper strips, that is, one that is really entertaining, as well as a moneymaker, is CALVIN & HOBBES. The many trade edition collections of this comic strip, as well as the luxurious, and expensive, slipcased editions that you can find in the bookstores, and on-line, are proof enough of the dollar value of the series.
Watterson, who is retired from producing comic strips, held for years that he would not get involved in allowing any animated cartoons, dolls, or what-have-you, being made from his series, which, while a very staunch and even admirable attitude, is certainly depriving the millions of "Calvin" fans from a lot of potential fun.
It is, however, Watterson's right to keep his stance firm, and, it is, after all, the strips that Watterson already wrote and drew that make him a topic of this blog.
Watterson's concept of a boy and his stuffed tiger, the tiger being able to communicate with the boy only when no one else is around, is charming, and "speaks" to many of the people who had "invisible friends", or other special companions when they were children. The idea may or may not be entirely unique, but it is that that makes it acceptable to us all, we can believe it, because it may have happened to _us_ as well.
Watterson draws the slightly "manic" Calvin as though Calvin is on a "sugar high", from eating too much of his favorite breakfast cereal, "CHOCOLATE FROSTED SUGAR BOMBS". As a person at nearly the age of 50 years, and one who ate way too much CAP'N CRUNCH as a child, and still eats that occasionally now, I can attest to the power that some cereals hold over today's children. First of all, we want that sugar high, and we want it badly!!! We also want any of the little plastic toys that come in the box, and we want more than one, just in case we lose the first one, or the school bully pries it from our fingers. Calvin has wonderful flights of fancy, with his few friends, and the school bully even, but mostly with that stuffed tiger, Hobbes.
Calvin's color adventures, in the Sunday papers, as "Spaceman Spiff" are wonderful, not only because of the great recalling of our own childhoods, but, also, because they allow Watterson to have more room, plus that famous "polychromatic effulgence" once spoken of by William Randolph Hearst, that makes them instantly recall our own childhood play times, and lends reality to the fantasy from watterson's pencils and brushes. We almost want to cheer, and maybe some of us do, when Calvin escapes from the monstrous aliens he battles as Spiff. We want him to succeed as much as we want to succeed, whether it is in school or at our office or store, or what-have-you, or with whatever endeavors our Calvin-loving offspring may be dealing with.
For it's immediacy in our own lives, and the way Calvin figures into them, I name Bill Watterson one of my favorite new strip cartoonist of the 1980's forward.