Bill Watterson Character Quotations

I'm pulling out different aspects of my personality in writing each character and, if I'm doing my job well, I'm being true to the situation and true to the character.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

If you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well.

I've always tried to make the strip animated, even when the characters aren't moving, with expressions or perspectives or some sort of exaggeration. There's great potential for that which has yet to be fully mined.

If you have the personalities down, you understand them and identify with them; you can stick them in any situation and have a pretty good idea of how they're going to respond. Then it's just a matter of sanding and polishing up the jokes. But if you've got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don't work as well. These two characters clicked for me almost immediately and I feel very comfortable working with them.

You can draw a penguin on a toilet reading The New York Times and it's adorable, but try doing it with an adult male character, and it's disgusting.

The syndicates take the strip and sell it to newspapers and split the income with the cartoonists. Syndicates are essentially agents. Now, can you imagine a novelist giving his literary agent the ownership of his characters and all reprint, television, and movie rights before the agent takes the manuscript to a publisher? Obviously, an author would have to be a raving lunatic to agree to such a deal, but virtually every cartoonist does exactly that when a syndicate demands ownership before agreeing to sell the strip to newspapers.

Every time I've built character, I've regretted it.