Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”

The semi-reclusive cartoonist who said "the days are just packed" (and "treasure" is all around us if we just know where to look) ended his enchanting strip after just a decade— unlike his hero Charles Schulz, who drew Charlie Brown 'til he died. 

Did Bill Watterson "grow up"? And does growing up have to be seen as "always a loss"? Questions we're about to address in class  with Susan Neiman's "Why Grow Up…" She insists that maturity is enlightenment, if we just know how to approach it.

Anyway, it's always a pleasure to revisit that little boy and his more mature sidekick, who could care less if people called them "a pair of pathetic peripatetics" and who understood the importance of embracing change in all the seasons of life.

"Growing up is always a loss—a loss of an enchanted way of seeing, at the very least—and for some people growing up is more of a loss than for others. Perhaps part of what drove Watterson, "Ahab-like" by his own telling, back to the drawing board with his boy and his tiger day after day was a subconscious commitment to staying a child. Maybe he chose to stop publishing because, in some way, for whatever reasons, he became O.K. with growing up."

Life After "Calvin and Hobbes"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/30/the-mysteries-bill-watterson-book-review