mostly for kevin's enjoyment:

The Short, Tongue-in-cheek Autobiography of Bill Watterson

Bill Watterson squandered a rather unremarkable childhood reading the comics in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. By the time he graduated from high school, his own primitive cartoons had appeared in the school newspaper and yearbook, and not a few stall doors of various boys' rooms.
At Kenyon College, fellow delinquents encouraged Watterson to pursue political cartooning. Watterson's chronicles of the Carter years proved to be amongst his most humorous work ever, the insights into foreign policy being especially laughable. In an effort to remedy this, Watterson majored in political science and, thanks to a friend with access to the school's computer, Watterson earned a degree in 1980.
A major Cincinnati daily immediately offered him a job as editorial cartoonist, but within a matter of months, the editor returned from the sanitarium and Watterson was fired.
Disillusioned, Watterson turned to comic strips. The next few years were not proud ones, and only a well-tuned, used Fiat kept Watterson from the law's grasp. Rejection slips and debts piled up, and eventually his parents sold him into slavery as a lay-out artist for a sleazy tabloid shopper. There, in the dank and windowless basement of a convenience store, submitting to the idiot whims of a maniacal tyrant, Watterson developed that carefree, happy-go-lucky view of life that so permeates all his cartoons.