Writer explores world of Calvin and Hobbes
A lonely little boy wandering around with his imaginary friend who happens to be a tiger: it wasn’t even the first time we’d seen this — think Christopher Robin and Tigger.
But there was something about Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes that created a planetary shock wave of adoration when it first graced newspaper comic pages in 1985 that instantly turned the heads of even its mightiest peers.
In a conversation I had with Garfield creator Jim Davis this week, the 72-year-old cartoonist describes his first encounter: “I was on a plane to L.A. and I picked up a newspaper and opened it and saw my first Calvin and Hobbes strip. I landed and got on the phone and called the syndicate, because,” he laughs, “it wasn’t our syndicate that syndicated it!
“I said, ‘David — tell me you never had an opportunity to syndicate Calvin and Hobbes.’ He said, ‘Well, it’s a long story …’ I said, ‘DAVID! It’s absolutely brilliant! And it’s beautiful! The line work! And the concept!
“I’ve seen one gag. Do you know what they’re going to do to us?’”
While Garfield celebrates 40 years this summer, Calvin and Hobbes lasted just 10 — including two breaks — unceremoniously switched off when Watterson felt he’d said what he had to say.
Running in over 2,400 newspapers, this left millions of fans bewildered and yearning.
No more would we be chasing Spaceman Spiff through the cosmos, hear Calvin’s dad’s hilarious lies or enjoy new, deliciouslydrawn dinosaurs or armies of snowmen. With the briefest of thank yous, Watterson — who generally refused to licence his characters in any but their purest forms on the printed page — mostly retracted from public life.
And then, inexplicably, armies of Calvins on crude, illegal knock-off decals began urinating on any object of disdain and on what felt like every truck in North America.
Watterson would later comment, “I figure that, long after the strip is gone, those decals are my ticket to immortality.”
But that’s another story — just one of many within Edmonton author Michael Hingston’s wise and love-driven new book, Let’s Go Exploring: Calvin and Hobbes. He’s launching at Audreys Books 2 p.m. on Saturday.
The 10th in ECW Press’s Pop Classics series — including separate volumes on Twin Peaks, My So-Called Life and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — Hingston’s little orange piece of nonfiction is a cousin to the famous 331/3 books, which brilliantly dissect single-record albums.
You might recall Hingston is behind the annual, successful Short Story Advent Calendar series, which has contributions from writers around the world.
For the Pop Classics series, explains Hingston in his sunny south side home, “The idea is you take a piece of disposable pop culture and show why it will last.
“It started the same way a lot of things I do start — I looked for the book about Calvin and Hobbes I wanted to read.”
One of the most attractive things about Let’s Go Exploring, frankly, is that it’s not about him
as a fan, but actually somehow in selfie-addicted 2018 about its stated subject matter.
“Calvin and Hobbes seems to really bring that out in people,” Hingston says with a chuckle. “‘OK, let’s stop and talk about me for a while.’ That’s actually one of the charms of the strip, is it pulls that personal connection out — but nobody cares about my childhood.”
Which is not to say Hingston’s text isn’t full of his observations, analysis and well-researched history. Read it, you’ll learn a lot about the churning comic industry, the pressures to merchandise art, and the ongoing legacy of both the strip and its author, who’s now a painter.
Hingston dissects why he thinks the strip endures, going back to its brief, daily life in the newspaper. “Like all kids, you just love this concept where Calvin lives in this world where everything ’s prescribed for him. He has very little freedom, and he doesn’t put up with it. He has this private space that’s all his that’s like the coolest thing in the world. It spoke to kids who wanted to feel that sense of rebellion on the small scale.”
Dutifully, Hingston “sent the email that you send” to try to contact Watterson, even hilariously detailing the maze with the wall at the gate in his book.
Watterson’s retired editor Lee Salem did get back to the Hingston, filling in some of the details.
“A lot of the Calvin and Hobbes lore has snowballed over the years, stuff like Stephen Spielberg calling him, how much money was left on the table. George Lucas and Jim Henson called him. He didn’t even call them back.
“Those guys are your peers — you don’t want to know how Star Wars was made? But he seemed really concerned with losing control of the strip.”
Indeed, rebuttals like these speak to Watterson’s admirable and nearly unfathomable sense of purpose — he really just wanted to make the cartoon the best he could with no distractions. The fact we’re talking about it today, 23 years later, proves there was something to that idea.
“I think Bill Watterson is a really admirable person. He has a really grounded, principled and also humane sense of the world. I also think the artistic integrity of the strip would not have been annihilated by a Hobbes doll.”
Though its characters are named after historical figures and its content occasionally drops in philosophical thinking, “One of the reasons Calvin and Hobbes is on my mind is because it’s one of the things from my childhood — I have books lying around — and when I show my kids, it’s the one thing that doesn’t need any explanation.
“My son who just turned seven, very recently he was Calvin’s age and he has a stripey T-shirt and blond hair. He just loved the fact he is kind of like Calvin. He did a school project recently on bats, and Calvin does a report about bats, but he doesn’t do the research. There’s something very Calvin about the way my son did the write-up: ‘Bats are stupendous creatures’ is how it starts.
“I think I can detect a whiff of Watterson in there.”
Appreciating the way Watterson let kids into the adult world, Hingston remembers learning vocabulary — well, almost — from the strip. “They’re walking through the woods and out of nowhere Calvin says, ‘What if someone calls us a pair of pathetic peripatetics?’
“Still, to this day — I don’t even think I could tell you off the top of my head what it means …”
Peripatetic (I looked it up) means travelling from place to place, working in various places for short periods of time. One more clever move, in a throwaway rhyme gag, Watterson essentially described the essence of making comic strips, which by his hand reset its settings and situations, exploring a new world every day with his imaginary tiger.