Bill Watterson Net Worth: Bill Watterson is an American artist and author who has a net worth of $100 million. Bill Watterson was born July 5, 1958 in Washington, D.C. He is best known as the artist and author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, a cartoon about a rambunctious boy and his imaginary friend, syndicated 1985-1995. As a child, Bill Watterson—unlike his creation Calvin—"never had imaginary animal friends." He developed an early interest in drawing and was inspired by classic cartoonists like Peanuts' creator Charles Schulz and Pogo illustrator Walt Kelly. In 1976, Watterson enrolled at Ohio's Kenyon College, where he spent four years drawing political cartoons for the Collegian campus newspaper (and a few weeks during his sophomore year painting a copy of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on his dorm room ceiling). Following his 1980 graduation, Watterson was offered a job as an editorial cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post. He soon abandoned political cartoons (he was not particularly interested in politics) and returned to his first love—comic strips. After experimenting with different characters, Watterson developed a strip called Calvin and Hobbes. Readers loved Calvin and Hobbes with Calvin's flights of wild imagination, often undertaken while clad in rocket-ship underpants; Hobbes's wry observations; the sensitive, wise, literary voice of the strip itself (the main characters named after philosophers John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes). In 1986, Watterson became the youngest cartoonist ever to receive the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award—the industry's highest honor. After 10 years of delighting readers, Watterson announced in 1995—to the heartbreak of fans—that he was ending the strip. The final strip ran on December 31, 1995.