It’s the birthday of cartoonist Bill Watterson (b. 1958), known as the creator of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. The strip ran from just 1985 to 1995, yet the Calvin and Hobbes collections still sell today and continue to attract new readership from each new generation.

Watterson was born in Washington, D.C., to James and Kathryn Watterson, but the family moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, when Watterson was just six. (Points to Chagrin Falls for having one of the cooler town names I’ve ever come across.) Watterson appears to have had a stable, happy childhood and picked up a love for Charles Schulz’ Peanuts from his parents; he also grew to love the comic strip Pogo. He claims he was not much like his creation, Calvin, while growing up; he stayed out of trouble and didn’t go in for imaginary friends.

Watterson majored in political science Kenyon College, drew a lot of political cartoons for the campus paper, and then got a job as an editorial cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post—but the job was short-lived. Watterson was fired before the year was out. Watterson did some work in advertising while trying to make a go as a comic strip artist. After several years of rejection, Watterson finally sold Calvin and Hobbes to Universal Press Syndicate in 1985. Watterson says that the strip started out in about 35 papers and “made healthy progress that first year, but nothing extraordinary.” However, when the books started coming out the next year, they sold like crazy, and this pushed the comic into more and more newspapers. All along, Watterson refused to allow his characters to be merchandised.

In 1995, Watterson announced his retirement and became somewhat reclusive (although not in a creepy Howard Hughes sort of way). He caused a stir in 2014 when it was revealed that he was the ghost artist in a special storyline of Stephan Pastis’s comic strip Pearls Before Swine; the premise was that Pastis was temporarily replaced by a second grader, actually Watterson. (Pastis compared his brief collaboration with Watterson to getting “a glimpse of Bigfoot.”) In 2015, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalog was released, which included a long-awaited and much-raved-over in-depth interview with Watterson. In it, Watterson expresses surprise that his books continue to find new readers and didn’t simply go out of print within a few years of the strip ending.

Watterson and his wife live in Cleveland.

Reread an old favorite book today and stay scrupulously honest to the data.