This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of ten years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I've never regretted stopping when I did.
I agree with that. The kids grow up. Continuing it is like someone who refuses to become an adult and remains an adolescent into what should be their productive adult years.
Bloom County, Dilbert (shudder), Doonesbury (though the characters at least aged and moved through life)... All pretty much wore out whatever made them special in their prime.
Outland and Opus. Neither of which were great. He also came back on Facebook for a time to poke fun at Donald Trump. Who could resist? But that wasn't really great either.
Eh. There's the odd fun strip or sequence now and then. But it's mostly stuck in the 90s Pac Bell cubicle world where Scott Adams worked. There's so much fresh SV material to mine that Dilbert really doesn't. (And that's leaving aside Scott Adams' personal persona.)
You really nailed what I hadn't been able to verbalize. Dilbert is still stuck in a world that no longer exists. The open hostility, hierarchy, etc. of the corporate world has been replaced with this kind of generic feel-goodyness that still has the same sociopathic corporate behaviors but cloaked in some kind of faux "meaning"... the HBO show really nails some of this while Dilbert feels antiquated.
It’s hard for me to appreciate Scott’s daily dose of misanthropy. By the time I get to the comics page, I’ve already been dosed with the pure, uncut stuff on the front page, spoken by our American President.
This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of ten years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I've never regretted stopping when I did.
That’s from his last interview here https://www.cleveland.com/living/2010/02/bill_watterson_crea...
Edit: not sure if you saw this https://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/530095596279848960... He made this recently