Before Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson was a freelancing cartoonist.
Around 1983 one of his clients was the Mark Twain Journal.
Recently Kirk H shared some of Watterson’s Mark Twain art on the GCD-Chat Google Group.
A personal subscription to the Mark Twain Journal in 2019 includes a limited edition Mark Twain Journal mouse pad. The commissioned image of Twain driving a stagecoach was drawn by a “struggling cartoonist” who later produced a well-known syndicated (1985-1995) comic strip.
For more rare Bill Watterson art, including a few more Mark Twain images, check out the Bill Watterson’s Rarest page which also includes the Calvin and Hobbes daily comic strip left out of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes and every other C&H collection.
“Glass of Tang.”
Twain lived too early.