William Boyd Watterson II is an American cartoonist who authored the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. The strip was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. Watterson concluded Calvin and Hobbes with a short statement to newspaper editors and his readers that he felt he had achieved all he could in the medium. Watterson is known for his negative views on comic syndication and licensing, his efforts to expand and elevate the newspaper comic as an art form, and his move back into private life after Calvin and Hobbes ended. Watterson was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. The suburban Midwestern United States setting of Ohio was part of the inspiration for Calvin and Hobbes.
A comic strip is a sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with daily horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in newspapers, while Sunday papers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections. With the advent of the internet, online comic strips began to appear as webcomics.
Calvin and Hobbes is a daily American comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995. Commonly cited as "the last great newspaper comic", Calvin and Hobbes has enjoyed broad and enduring popularity, influence, and academic and philosophical interest.
The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) is an organization of professional cartoonists in the United States. It presents the National Cartoonists Society Awards. The Society was born in 1946 when groups of cartoonists got together to entertain the troops. They enjoyed each other's company and decided to meet on a regular basis.
Chagrin Falls is a village in eastern Cuyahoga County, Ohio, United States. A suburb of Cleveland, it is part of the Cleveland metropolitan area. The village was established around Chagrin Falls on the Chagrin River. As of the 2020 census, the population was 4,188.
Guy Berkeley "Berke" Breathed is an American cartoonist, children's book author, director, and screenwriter, known for his comic strips Bloom County, Outland, and Opus. Bloom County earned Breathed the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1987.
Stephan Thomas Pastis is an American cartoonist and former lawyer who is the creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. He also writes children's chapter books, commencing with the release of Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made. The seventh book, It's the End When I Say It's the End, debuted at #4 on The New York Times Best Seller list for Children's Middle Grade Books.
Frazz is a syndicated comic strip by Jef Mallett about school custodian Edwin "Frazz" Frazier and the school and students where he works. The strip debuted on April 2, 2001, and as of 2019, appears in over 250 newspapers and is read by tens of thousands online each day.
Skippy is an American comic strip written and drawn by Percy Crosby that was published from 1923 to 1945. A highly popular, acclaimed and influential feature about rambunctious fifth-grader Skippy Skinner, his friends and his enemies, it was adapted into movies, a novel and a radio show. It was commemorated on a 1997 U.S. Postal Service stamp and was the basis for a wide range of merchandising—although perhaps the most well-known product bearing the Skippy name, Skippy peanut butter, used the name without Crosby's authorization, leading to a protracted trademark conflict.
Richard Church Thompson was an American illustrator and cartoonist best known for his syndicated comic strip Cul de Sac and the illustrated poem "Make the Pie Higher". He was given the Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year for 2010.
Bill Watterson's comic strip Calvin and Hobbes features a wide range of secondary characters. These range from Calvin's fellow students at school to monsters and aliens from Calvin's vivid imagination.
Krazy Kat is an American newspaper comic strip, created by cartoonist George Herriman, which ran from 1913 to 1944. It first appeared in the New York Evening Journal, whose owner, William Randolph Hearst, was a major booster for the strip throughout its run. The characters had been introduced previously in a side strip with Herriman's earlier creation, The Dingbat Family. The phrase "Krazy Kat" originated there, said by the mouse by way of describing the cat. Set in a dreamlike portrayal of Herriman's vacation home of Coconino County, Arizona, KrazyKat's mixture of offbeat surrealism, innocent playfulness and poetic, idiosyncratic language has made it a favorite of comics aficionados and art critics for more than 80 years.
Chris Eliopoulos is an American cartoonist and letterer of comic books.
Mark Tatulli is an American cartoonist, writer, animator and television producer, known for his strips Liō and Heart of the City and for his work on the cable reality television series Trading Spaces and A Wedding Story, for which he has won three Emmy Awards. His comics have appeared in hundreds of newspapers around the world.
Benjamin Bocquelet is a French-British animator, writer, director and producer, best known as the creator of the Cartoon Network animated series The Amazing World of Gumball. He was also the director of a short film called The Hell's Kitchen in 2003. When Cartoon Network Development Studio Europe was created in 2007, Bocquelet was hired in order to help people pitch their projects to Cartoon Network after the dismissal of Nickelodeon and Jetix subdivisions of Europe. However, when the studio decided to have its employees all pitch their own ideas, he decided to take some of the rejected characters he had created for commercials and put them all in one series, with a school setting. Daniel Lennard, Khaki Jones, and Brian A. Miller, the Vice President of Original Series and Development at Turner Broadcasting System, liked the idea and the series was ultimately greenlit.
Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes is an American children's textbook published in 1993. As a rare piece of officially licensed Calvin and Hobbes merchandise, it is a highly valued collectible.
In the comic-strip field, a zombie strip is one whose creator has died or retired, but which continues to exist with new editions in publication. The strips are taken over by others, often relatives of the originator. Zombie comic strips are often criticized as lacking the "spark" that originally made the strip successful.
Dear Mr. Watterson is a 2013 American documentary film directed by Joel Allen Schroeder, produced by Christopher Browne and Matt McUsic, with Andrew P. Waruszewski as the cinematographer. The film follows the career of Bill Watterson, the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and the influence of both the author and the comic strip on the world.
Calvin is a 2015 young adult novel by Martine Leavitt. It was published by Groundwood Books.
