‘Calvin and Hobbes’ said goodbye 25 years ago. Here’s why Bill Watterson’s masterwork enchants us still.
by Michael Cavna
Yet the beloved duo have never really left us.
“Calvin
and Hobbes,” one of the greatest strips ever to grace newspapers,
blazed across the pages for a beautiful decade before heading off into
the white space of our imaginations, trusting us to continue the next
adventures in our heads. And to this day, the creation — once syndicated
to 2,000-plus papers — is ever-present on bestseller lists, in
libraries and nested on home shelves within easy reach of nostalgic
adults and each next generation of young readers.
Decades later, the brilliance of “Calvin and Hobbes” refuses to dim. It remains a tiger — the tiger — burning bright.
The
final “Calvin and Hobbes” strip was fittingly published on a Sunday — Dec. 31, 1995 — the day of the week on which
Bill Watterson
could create on a large color-burst canvas of dynamic art and narrative
possibility, harking back to great early newspaper comics like “Krazy
Kat.” The cartoonist bid farewell knowing his strip was at its aesthetic
pinnacle.
“It seemed a gesture of respect and
gratitude toward my characters to leave them at top form,” Watterson
wrote in his introduction to
“The Complete Calvin and Hobbes” box-set
collection. “I like to think that, now that I’m not recording
everything they do, Calvin and Hobbes are out there having an even
better time.”
Readers return that respect. Ask a fan for a favorite
“Calvin and Hobbes” scenario and a stream of recurring comic premises
pours forth.
“Spaceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet,
Calvinball,
G.R.O.S.S., the wagon rides, Calvin’s battles with his food, Calvin’s
epic confrontations with [babysitter] Rosalyn, the cardboard-box
inventions, Stupendous Man — and that’s just off the top of my head,”
says curator Andrew Farago, whose Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco
has exhibited Watterson’s original art. “I don’t think any strip since
‘Peanuts’ made such an impact on so many people.”
Just what is it about “Calvin and Hobbes” that continues to enchant so many?
For some fans and fellow artists, it begins with the
comic’s sense of boundless imagination. A fresh snow is like “having a
big white sheet of paper to draw on!” says Hobbes in the final strip.
That dialogue reflects the comic’s sheer joy in taking readers on wild
rides, exploring the creative possibilities with youthful abandon.
Watterson’s
ability to tap into childhood, including his own memories, propels
Calvin’s flights of fancy, whether he is climbing into a capsule as
Spaceman Spiff (facing down alien overlords as stand-ins for Calvin’s
real-life authority figures) or imagining himself to be a fearsome
beast.
Stephan Pastis, creator of “Pearls Before
Swine,” views Calvin as an expression of pure childlike id, yet thinks
there is a whole other dynamic that makes many of Calvin’s acts of
imagination so appealing.
Watterson “accurately
captured how put-upon you feel as a kid — how limited you are by your
parents, by your babysitter, by [schoolteacher] Miss Wormwood. You’re
really boxed in and all you have is individual expression,” says Pastis,
who collaborated with the “Calvin and Hobbes” creator on
a week of “Pearls” strips in 2014, marking Watterson’s only public return to the comics page since 1995.
“I
think that’s why to this day, some people get [Calvin] tattooed on
their bodies,” Pastis continues. “He stands for that rebellious spirit
in the fact of a world that kind of holds you down. You get into
adulthood, you get held down by your various responsibilities. Calvin
rebels against that, therefore he always remains a hero.”
Calvin’s
irrepressible nature is often comedically set against Hobbes, who,
alive through Calvin’s eyes, holds forth as the voice of reason —
leading to art that revels in both the physical and the philosophical.
In
one day’s strip, Calvin and Hobbes might engage in, say, a ballet of
physical comedy — the stretch and squash effects rendering the strip as
near to animation as a static art form can. The next day, by contrast,
our buddy-comedy protagonists might muse on themes befitting a
comic-strip title that name-checks two lofty thinkers.
“My
8-year-old son tends to laugh out loud at the physical humor, like when
Hobbes pounces on Calvin, or his mother’s mystery dinner attacks him,”
says
Jenny Robb, who curated
a 2014 Calvin and Hobbes
retrospective at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, which
holds almost all of the 62-year-old Watterson’s art in its collection,
in his home state of Ohio.
Yet one of her son’s
favorite strips is “where Calvin saves a snowball in the freezer for
months, then throws it at” neighborhood girl
Susie Derkins — but misses, says Robb, noting that “the more philosophical ones give us something to discuss when we read them together.”
Those
philosophical ones even deal with mortality in an especially tender
way, such as when Calvin comes upon a dead bird and says, “Once it’s too
late, you appreciate what a miracle life is.” Or when he asks, “Hobbes,
do you think our morality is defined by our actions, or by what’s in
our hearts?”
“The series I remember the most was
when the baby raccoon died,” says CNN anchor Jake Tapper, a comic-art
collector and former college cartoonist. “That was a week-long series
about loss that was very moving” and “planted itself in my soul.”
Daveed Diggs, the “Hamilton” and “Soul” star who co-created
viral webisodes
in 2014 that acted out “Calvin and Hobbes” strips, says that the comic
was able to address “adult existential angst in the bodies of this kid
and tiger.”
As “Calvin and Hobbes” evolved, so did
Watterson’s virtuosic abilities to render everything from kinetic action
to spot-on facial expressions to panoramic long shots.
“I
don’t think any cartoonist since Walt Kelly has been able to make
nature as gorgeous as Watterson — you’d have to go back to the swamps of
the Okefenokee,” says Tapper, citing the creator and the setting of the
classic strip “Pogo.”
Dave Kellett, a comics
documentarian and creator of the strip “Sheldon,” especially relishes
Watterson’s half-page Sundays created during the latter half of the
strip’s run.
“His beautiful vistas of the American
Southwest, his energetic panels taking you through Ohio forests, his
experiments with brush and pen that really shined with the increased
real estate — those are some of the most beautiful newspaper comics ever
made,” says Kellett, whose
2014 film “Stripped”
was a love letter to the form. “They probably go toe to toe with the
greatest pages Winsor McCay ever produced for ‘Little Nemo in
Slumberland.’ ”
So many 20th-century comics feel
embalmed in their era because of topical references or period-specific
jargon and humor, but 35 years after its launch, the spirit of “Calvin
and Hobbes” feels snowflake fresh. Sure, the strip knowingly decorated
its interiors with throwback furniture — Watterson noted how fun it was
to draw mid-century styles — but little else looks antiquated.
“The
vast majority of situations, jokes and themes that Bill wrote about
work just as well in 1890 as they did in 1990, so I suspect that same
agelessness will work well for the strip in 2090,” says Kellett, whose
“Stripped” film featured original poster art that was a surprise gift
from Watterson.
That accessibility helps the strip
appeal to generations of fans — a dynamic that Robb witnessed during her
Watterson retrospective. “I loved going up to the galleries to listen
to visitors laughing out loud,” she says, “or to watch them point out a
favorite strip to their companion or their child.”
That
staying power is unfettered by ancillary projects or products. The
cartoonist boldly drew and held the line against merchandising his
creation, lest commercial tie-ins pollute the purity of the creator and
reader experience.
“Everything having to do with
‘Calvin and Hobbes’ expressed my own ideas, my own values, my own way,”
Watterson wrote in his box-set introduction. “I wrote every word, drew
every line, and painted every color.
“It’s a rare
gift to find such fulfilling work and I tried to show my appreciation by
giving the strip everything I had to offer.”
