"Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came."
How many people are able to spend 5 years without income ?
Should we commend Mr. and Mrs. Watterson Sr.? Without them, Calvin & Hobbes might have never been created; but how healthy is it to subsidize your children for so many years, hoping that they'll eventually find their own way ?
As a (not particularly wealthy) parent, this is the sort of question I keep asking myself, and my experience tells me to do the exact opposite of what the Wattersons did.
They may have paid his way through 4 years of college, but it seems pretty clear that he held jobs after left college, he just wasn't making any money off his comic strip.
I feel like this is the key to any great work.