Early Years and Education
Watterson was born in Washington, D.C., where his father, James G. Watterson (born 1932), worked as a patent examiner while going to George Washington University Law School before becoming a patent attorney in 1960.
In 1964, when Watterson was six years old, the family moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where his mother, Kathryn Watterson, became a city council member. James Watterson was elected as a council member in 1997, holding that position for 12 years before retiring on August 31, 2009 to pursue artistic "projects and goals".
Watterson, who drew his first cartoon at age eight, spent much time in childhood alone, drawing and cartooning. This continued through his school years, and he drew cartoons for his high school newspaper and yearbook. During this time he discovered comic strips like Pogo, Krazy Kat, and Charles Schulz' Peanuts which subsequently inspired and influenced his desire to become a professional cartoonist. His parents recall him as a very quiet and unassuming child, who would spend hours drawing in his room:
"He was a conservative child, not that he was unimaginative, because of course he was. But not in a fantasy way. He and his brother (Tom) would make time-lapse movies and that certainly showed a certain amount of imagination. And he would draw his characters. But he was nothing like Calvin. He didn't have an imaginary friend like Hobbes, and he wasn't a Dennis the Menace."
— James G. Watterson
Read more about this topic: Bill Watterson
Famous quotes containing the words early, years and/or education:
“It is so very late that we
May call it early by and by. Good night.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“... a novel survives because of its basic truthfulness, its having within it something general and universal, and a quality of imaginative perception which applies just as much now as it did in the fifty or hundred or two hundred years since the novel came to life.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)