American newspaper comic strips reached a particular commercial and cultural saturation in the latter decades of the twentieth century, as syndication networks extended the reach of cartoonists into living rooms and kitchen tables across the country. William Boyd Watterson II was born on July 5, 1958, in Washington, D.C., and would go on to work within that syndicated world while remaining, in important respects, at odds with it.

Educated at Chagrin Falls High School and later at Kenyon College, Watterson built his career as a cartoonist, comics artist, and comics writer. In 1985 he launched Calvin and Hobbes, a comic strip that ran in syndication until the final day of 1995. Over those ten years the strip traced the imaginative inner life of a boy and his tiger companion, rendered in a visual language that shifted register — from cramped domestic panels to expansive, painterly Sunday pages — depending on the demands of a given sequence. Watterson's relationship to the syndication industry that carried his work was a complicated one: he became openly critical of the commercial and licensing pressures that the system imposed on cartoonists, a stance that set him apart from many of his contemporaries and that became as much a part of his public identity as the strip itself.

At the end of 1995, Watterson retired, stepping away from the strip and, to a considerable degree, from public life. His private nature has been noted consistently in discussions of his career, and he has granted very few interviews or public appearances in the decades since. That withdrawal was deliberate rather than circumstantial, reflecting the same skepticism toward commercial demands that had characterized his working years.

The recognition Watterson received from within the industry was substantial. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Hall of Fame and received the Reuben Award, the highest honor of the National Cartoonists Society. International honors followed as well, including the Grand prix de la ville d'Angoulême, the Max und Moritz Award, the Adamson Awards, and the Yellow Kid Award — a breadth of recognition from multiple countries that documented the reach Calvin and Hobbes achieved during its decade of syndication.