William " Bill " Boyd Watterson II ( born July 5, 1958 ) is an American cartoonist and the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which was syndicated from 1985 to 1995.

Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes at the end of 1995 with a short statement to newspaper editors and his readers that he felt he had achieved all he could in the medium.

Later, when Watterson was creating names for the characters in his comic strip, he allegedly decided upon Calvin ( after the Protestant reformer John Calvin ) and Hobbes ( after the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes ) as a " tip of the hat " to the political science department at Kenyon.

In " The Complete Calvin And Hobbes ," Watterson does not name the inspiration for Calvin's character, but he does say Calvin is named for " a 16th-century theologian who believed in predestination ," and Hobbes for " a 17th-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature.

" There seems to be little doubt that this could only be John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes, respectively.

He designed grocery advertisements for four years prior to creating Calvin and Hobbes.

" Calvin and Hobbes was first published on November 18, 1985.

He refused to merchandise his creations on the grounds that displaying Calvin and Hobbes images on commercially sold mugs, stickers and T-shirts would devalue the characters and their personalities.

Despite this, many knockoffs have been found, including college T-shirts which show Calvin and Hobbes binge drinking or Calvin urinating on a logo.

Watterson announced the end of Calvin and Hobbes on November 9, 1995, with the following letter to newspaper editors:

The last strip of Calvin and Hobbes was published on December 31, 1995.

Since the conclusion of Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson has taken up painting, at one point drawing landscapes of the woods with his father.

Watterson has kept away from the public eye and has given no indication of resuming the strip, creating new works based on the characters, or embarking on other projects, though he has published several anthologies of Calvin and Hobbes strips.

He drew a new Calvin and Hobbes cover for that issue of the magazine as well.

In the years that followed the end of Calvin and Hobbes, there were many attempts to locate Watterson in his home town of Chagrin Falls.

In early 2010, Watterson was interviewed by The Plain Dealer on the 15th anniversary of the end of Calvin and Hobbes.

His syndicate, which has since become Universal Uclick, has said that the painting was the first new artwork from Watterson that the syndicate has seen since Calvin and Hobbes ended in 1995.

One example is that the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip ( written by Bill Waterson ) includes in its scenario a children's book Hamster Huey & The Gooey Kablooie, and Bill Waterson stated in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book that he believed that Hamster Huey & The Gooey Kablooie should remain an undefined story, left to the reader's imagination ; but someone not associated with the strip published Hamster Huey & The Gooey Kablooie in the real world.

Diarmaid MacCulloch suggests that Cranmer's own Eucharistic theology in these years approximated most closely to that of Heinrich Bullinger ; but that he intended the Prayer Book to be acceptable to the widest range of Reformed Eucharistic belief, including the high sacramental theology of Bucer and John Calvin.

Calvin was a dogmatician ( systematic theology ), as exhibited in his Institutes of the Christian Religion, and an exegete who over time translated the Bible from the " original languages " in the form of his grand series of Commentaries on all but one of its books ( the Book of Revelation, which provided a problem to him in its metaphory, not yielding robustly to his binomial formula of letter and spirit: either literal, or figurative ).

This project was undertaken at the time of the Reformation in the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam ( who remained a Catholic ), Martin Luther ( who was an Augustinian priest and led the Reformation, translating the Scriptures into his native German ), and John Calvin ( who was a student of law and theology at the Sorbonne where he became acquainted with the Reformation, and began studying Scripture in the original languages, eventually writing a text-based commentary upon the entire Christian Old Testament and New Testament except the Book of Revelation ).

Derbyshire's 1996 novel, Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, was a New York Times " Notable Book of the Year ".

After the 7th Squadron attacks, Book II, Elvis, Love Machine and Calvin escape into a flooding elevator shaft and meet up the President's protective detail, and later Schofield's team.

* Eugene Peterson @ Calvin College-January 24, 2006, Peterson reads the introduction and first chapter of Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

" The first of these includes four contemporary English translations of an identical passage from the Bible, those of William Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims Version, and the Authorized ( King James ) Version ; selections from the writings of influential Protestant thinkers of the period, including Tyndale, John Calvin, Anne Askew, John Foxe and Richard Hooker ; as well as selections from the Book of Common Prayer and the Book of Homilies.

In his later life, John Calvin wrote two different accounts of his conversion that differ in significant ways.

Throughout the fall of 1536, Farel drafted a confession of faith while Calvin wrote separate articles on reorganizing the church in Geneva.

Calvin also wrote that he was prepared to follow the Lord's calling.

When Servetus mentioned that he would come to Geneva if Calvin agreed, Calvin wrote a letter to Farel on 13 February 1546 noting that if Servetus were to come, he would not assure him safe conduct: " for if he came, as far as my authority goes, I would not let him leave alive.

Bolsec was banished from the city, and after Calvin ’ s death, he wrote a biography which severely maligned Calvin ’ s character.

For example, Calvin once wrote, " I have had much conversation with many Jews: I have never seen either a drop of piety or a grain of truth or ingenuousness – nay, I have never found common sense in any Jew.

Calvin also wrote that the Jews ' " rotten and unbending stiffneckedness deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without measure or end and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone.

Calvin probably wrote it during the period following Cop's speech, but it was not published until 1542 in Strasbourg.

Calvin wrote many letters to religious and political leaders throughout Europe, including this one sent to Edward VI of England.

Calvin also wrote many letters and treatises.

Following the Responsio ad Sadoletum, Calvin wrote an open letter at the request of Bucer to Charles V in 1543, Supplex exhortatio ad Caesarem, defending the reformed faith.

When Knox and a supporting colleague, William Whittingham, wrote to Calvin for advice, they were told to avoid contention.

John Calvin, who had lost his own wife in 1549, wrote a letter of condolence.

On 9 August 1926 he wrote an open letter to the American President Calvin Coolidge, arguing against France paying all its war-debts: " France is not for sale, even to her friends ".

John Calvin was received and accommodated there ( during which time he wrote part of his reforming theses ) and in return Henry VIII of England ( who had drawn on Calvin's work in his separation from Rome ) offered to fund a scholarship at the University.

" Calvin held his work in high regard, and through his writings and his influence in Basel ( where Calvin wrote his first edition of the Institutes ), Oecolampadius served as an intermediary between the humanism of Erasmus and the hermeneutics of Calvin.

Calvin wrote to Servetus, " I neither hate you nor despise you ; nor do I wish to persecute you ; but I would be as hard as iron when I behold you insulting sound doctrine with so great audacity.

The Genevan reformer John Calvin, writing his Institutes of the Christian Religion at the very time of the Reformation, wrote therein " beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for ".

Calvin wrote also that " those to whom he is a Father, the Church must also be a mother ," echoing the words of the originator of the Latin phrase himself, Cyprian: " He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother.

" Furthermore, John Calvin wrote in Institutes that millennialism is a " fiction " that is " too childish either to need or to be worth a refutation.