How its author’s resolve made Calvin and Hobbes connect to its readers
How Bill Watterson’s resolve allowed Calvin and Hobbes to make a personal connection to its readers
Let’s Go Exploring By Michael Hingston ECW 144 pp ; $12.95
If you were the sort of person who followed Calvin and Hobbes during its original run, you probably have a close connection to the strip. As a child, you would have flipped through abandoned newspapers looking for the weekly comics, demanded someone older than you buy the weekend edition for the beautiful, fullcolour Sunday strips, and each year, received the most recent collection — Scientific Progress Goes Boink, Something Under the Bed is Drooling — as a gift. Now, as an adult, you probably own the 23-pound, three-volume Complete Calvin and Hobbes box set.
It’s a connection that Michael Hingston, author of Let’s Go Exploring, felt as deeply as anyone, but one that he knows is common. “The strip’s greatest virtue,” he says near the start of his book, “was being able to forge that same personal connection with so many readers all at once.”
It was a connection to the imaginary world of Calvin, who could turn any boring old day into a magical one simply by imagining that a box could travel through time, or that a math test was a chance for Spaceman Spiff to fight aliens. It was a different sort of strip, one that made the reader feel part of a special, private world. Bill Watterson, the creator of the strip, was a different sort of comic artist, too. He was protective of his strip, he demanded a high-quality of work from himself and would not be swayed by outside pressures. “He had a vision,” Hingston writes, “and he was going to stick with it, no matter what the cost.”
Watterson didn’t come to that singularity of vision right away. Let’s Go Exploring traces the development of the artist, from college to his early years trying to break itno the funn y pages, sending out ideas to various comic syndicates ( the comic conglomerates that were the only point of access to the national papers and the fortunes to be earned there). In 1985, his strip featuring a young boy with a stuffed tiger as a best friend got picked up. At first, Watterson was thrilled to have finally broken in; he signed the standard entry- level deal and began the grind of a daily comic artist: drawing one strip a day, for the rest of his life.
Within a few years, Watterson began pushing the medium, doing multi- part storylines and turning in those beautiful Sund strips, ile at the same time finding himself at odds with his syndicate. They wanted more from him – cartoons, movies, merchandise – while Watterson, irked by the pressure of daily strips and his lack of control over the comic, wanted to do less.
The fight got ugly, spilling over into the strip itself – around the late-1980s, you can see Calvin taking “loud, angry, rhetorically torqued stances in fights that are…unwinnable” – but so popular was Calvin and Hobbes that Watterson was able to nego- tiate unprecedented concessions from his syndicate: he not only got a nine-month hiatus in which the strip would go into reruns, but he was also given more space to develop his Sunday strips, and the syndicate backed off on its merchandising pressure ( the unlicensed Calvin- urinating- ona- logo decals notwithstanding). On returning from the break, the comic hit its true golden era. But then, after a second hiatus, Watterson returned only to let readers know he’d be ending the strip at the end of 1995.
It’s easy to let sentimentality and reverence colour opinion of the strip, but Hingston offers some refreshingly frank criticism. He shows that in the last months of the strip – even before the announcement it was ending – it was clear that Watterson’s interest had waned. The long story arcs in the weekly strip give way to shorter gags so that Watterson could focus on the artistically ambitious Sunday strips. Watterson himself was self- aware enough to see that he was turning in work below his own high standards, and so he pulled the plug.
Watterson walking away from comics and disappearing into seclusion is, by now, something of a legend. However, Hingston shows that this isn’t quite the case in his breakdown of Watterson’s post- strip life. He did take a few well- earned years off after the strip, but ever since the release of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes boxed set, he’s made nearly yearly appearances in one medium or another. He gives interviews occasionally, he’s donated art to museums and charity, and he even returned to the comics page ( in a three- day arc of Pearls Before Swine). He’s anything but the complete shut-in he’s made out to be; he just picks his spots based on his own whims.
Despite the reality, the legend has stuck, and it’s inspired a mixed- bag of speculative work and fan fiction with which Hingston closes the book. There is a small cottage industry of reporters and writers tracking down the supposed “recluse” for articles or books that mostly become about their own experiences with the strip. They show up in his hometown, try to get in touch through him through his syndicate or his parents, but mostly fail ( disproving the recluse theory: the one reporter who was bold enough to just show up at Watterson’s doorstep was granted an interview). To Hingston’s credit, he attempts no such thing — he builds his book out of the source material and existing interviews, and avoids getting too swept up in his own feelings for the strip.
Calvin and Hobbes has not inundated pop culture like Peanuts or Garfield; there are no movies or commercial tie- ins keeping trying to get the attention of new fans. There is only the strip itself and its readers’ love of it. What keeps it alive, Hingston says, is that it is an “artistic and intellectual totem that millions of parents will reverentially pass on to their own children.” And there’s no better testament to the strip than that – it inspires a personal connection so close that you want to share it with those you love.