On November 18, 1985, the Universal syndicate introduced Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes into the newspaper dailies. Perhaps injected is a more fitting verb. The strip exceeded the artist’s and the syndicate’s expectations, with its tale of the strange friendship between an overactive boy and his tiger acting like a solitary spark in a bramble forest at the end of a dry season. The bite-sized flights of fancy set millions of imaginations afire at the breakfast table daily.

Terry Pratchett’s map of his creation, Discworld, succinctly states that ‘a sense of imagination can’t be mapped.’ What Calvin and Hobbes did so well was to remind readers, however fleetingly, of the childish sense of discovery that they once possessed, back when they couldn’t even pronounce the word ‘improbable’ and certainly didn’t know its meaning.

Discovery, exploration, play, except for a few lucky adults who manage not to grow up while growing older, is inherently as childlike as wonder. What most of us call work today is mere repetitious robotic repetition and recurring reiteration that reduces us to the rank of minor laborers, trivial gears in a larger programmed Order. Busy on the rungs of corporate ladders, long forgotten are the college days when learning was its own reward, where knowledge was a Rosetta Stone awaiting interpretation between the beer and the bong. Few adults in this jet-paced world are afforded the luxury of doing something completely useless. No, in a world increasingly measured by the gigahertz and the teraflop, the stern and stentorian taskmasters of regimen and routine require each of our moments to be crammed with purpose and I hope that by now that you’re totally lost, because I am.

But I had fun doing it. Whatever ‘it’ is. Was. Darn, it’s happening again! It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that Universal decided to collect the cartoons from Calvin and Hobbes and Something Under the Bed is Drooling into one book. What matters is that Watterson decided that it wasn’t enough. What matters is that I’m currently in the Electric Banana in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, with some weird pop band playing decidedly unpoppy tunes on the stage. And I’ve been talking to Bill Watterson for a while now¹. . .

t-þoo (t): Your first two books were collected in the anthology The Essential Calvin and Hobbes. Could you explain that wonderful prelude?
Bill Watterson (B): Yes, when I heard that Universal wanted to do a treasury, I wanted to make it something more—just as in the first book—Calvin and Hobbes, where I’d thrown in some extra drawings of the characters. I decided to render the poem A Nauseous Nocturne, which focuses on Calvin’s fear of monsters under his bed, his hyperactive imagination, and his friendship with Hobbes, in watercolors, just because the book format allowed me that freedom. It really got me in trouble with my daily deadlines, but I enjoyed the final product.
t: It’s worth it for the readers. I’m a sucker for lettering, and with those long-tailed fs and ts, and those voluptuous whorls on the bottom halves of your gs, you made lettering that was not just creepy, but creepily elegant.
B: I’ve never thought of myself as much of a letterer, so thank you.

t: Welcome. Soooo. . . a lot of things going on during the events of this treasury collection.
B: Yes, you get to see the start, setting up shop, settling in, and striking out for new territory stages of the show. Or at least that’s how I like to think of it.
t: As I browse the early strips, I see your drawing style evolving, becoming more refined over time—a feeling shared by thom413 (07/06/01). Specially during the first few months, Calvin seems like a pair of feet connected to a talking head by a short expanse of striped t-shirt.
B: I know. Looking back at it now, from the perspective of the latter years of the strip when I could knock out a credible drawing of the main characters in minutes, some of the earliest drawings could make me wince on some days. But usually when I look at them, I see myself experimenting, running into problems, solving them or figuring out how to get around them, both in the storytelling and the drawing aspects. Those were exciting days!
t: Yeah, while drawings of Calvin settled down relatively quickly, Hobbes kept changing subtly over the years. I see Hobbes as being quite. . . fuzzy in this book.
B: Hobbes became more and more sleekly feline in appearance as I gained more inspiration and wisdom from Sprite. Sprite was my gray tabby who unconsciously became the model for Hobbes with her long body and facial expressions.
t: I’ve always enjoyed how you draw Hobbes with some of his stripes running out of his body.
B: I do as little penciling as possible, preferring to keep the inking spontaneous. Yeah, I have fun slapping on those stripes!

t: All right, let’s move to character dynamics. I’ve laughed along long and hard in the strips where Calvin and Hobbes tear into each other verbally, which usually degrades to physical conflict by the end. There aren’t all that many of such strips yet here. At this point Hobbes usually helps Calvin with his plans, or thwarts him through his passivity, such as when he doesn’t gobble up Calvin’s neighborhood nemesis, Susie Derkins.
B: I guess I was busy setting up Calvin’s interactions with those he saw as enemies to his way of life at the beginning—his parents, Susie, Rosalyn the babysitter, his teacher Mrs. Wormwood. It took me a while to take full advantage of the realization that Calvin’s personality allowed Hobbes to occasionally turn the tables on him. Hey, it took Schulz a while to realize that Snoopy had to be one of the leaders of the Peanuts gang. . .
t: Ah yes, I plan to talk about your influences later. But sticking to his family for now. . . what do his parents think?
B: I think they’re slightly bewildered, unsure what they’ve gotten themselves into, and trying to do the best they can. And no, I assure you I was not like Calvin as a child at all!
Calvin’s mom has saintly amounts of patience. If I was in charge of a brat like him, I’d be crabby much more often than his mother! She has to put up with his whining about baths and bedtime, food, going out before finishing homework and just random orneriness. She must have a hidden sense of humor-
t: Also sarcasm, though not hidden. I love the strip where she hands Calvin a map to the refrigerator when he couldn’t wait for dinner.
B: That helps too. Now, his dad, while he also can be driven to explode, usually manages to keep his own with Calvin, maybe since he doesn’t have to spend the entire afternoon with Calvin like his mom.
t: Yeah, it looks like his dad was taking Hobbes’s position early on as the wool-puller over Calvin’s eyes. aliventiasylum (09/28/01) believes he might be as roguish as Calvin. How often have you gotten mail from someone who loved his dad’s revelation that Calvin came from a K-mart Blue Light special?
B: Oh yeah! Ha hah!
t: argyle (08/07/00) feels that Calvin might grow up to be like his father.
B: Hmmm. . . I think he might have the temporal relationship reversed. Um, who can tell how Calvin will end up, how nature and nurture has touched him? But perhaps his father resembled Calvin many moons ago.

t: Okay. . . You set up some recurring themes that popped up every now and then. There’re the high velocity mid-air smash greetings from Hobbes when Calvin returns from school every afternoon, which I’ve read came from Sprite. Then you’ve got the wagon rides. rosaphile (06/28/00) feels the wagon ride discussions contain ‘deep meaning,’ and she can’t be the only one with such beliefs.
B: I’m sure she’s not. Yeah, those rides are a way of changing the scenery while the pair is engaged in some philosophizing. You can imagine that the world goes by while these permanent thoughts go from Calvin’s mind to his mouth. Of course, sometimes the ending of the ride provides an effective demonstration and full stop for the discussion.
t: Then there‘s the classic Sunday strip featuring the two star attractions simply dancing.
B: Ah, that’s one of my favorites! That early on in my career, I found myself chafing under the restrictions the industry put on the Sunday strip format in terms of panel placement, and constantly tried to break free.
t: You explained this in your tenth anniversary book.
B: Right. Anyway, in that strip, I tried to have the drawings flow, so the viewer’s eyes would move fluidly from panel to panel. As is turned out, the strict formatting defeated me, as it required me to put abrupt brakes in the sequence of Calvin and Hobbes’s dancing. Still, the scenes from this strip were one of the heaviest license infringement issues, so I suppose people liked it.
t: It’s pretty spiffy. Must’ve looked interesting in the papers—a nearly wordless strip among strips filled with words.
B: Sometimes I just liked drawing the strip, though I did enjoy the writing part as much as the drawing.
t: And as you grew in confidence, you started creating stories that ran over a few days. Let’s see. . . Calvin’s mother gets sick and Hobbes makes Calvin think she’s having a baby. . . tangles with Rosalyn. . . performing in his class play as an onion. . . Hobbes giving Calvin a lousy haircut—haha, those two were quite lengthy! Oh, here’s something different: the little raccoon story. That’s one of the stories that must’ve been so much more meaningful following in the papers.
B: I was slightly apprehensive about that one. Broaching the idea of death in Calvin’s world. . . but I felt that I needed to reveal that side of his personality. And yes, the overall response turned out quite positive. Though most cartoonists know that someone somewhere will always get offended by something.
t: Yea, I know it. Omigosh! How did I forget? The introductions of the transmogrifier and Tracer Bullet. Some of my favori-

As if to underscore Bill’s comment about some people being easy to offend, some of the feminists in the audience started heckling the band as they started on a song called Bitch School. The leader singer leaped down from the stage and started heckling right back. The resulting chaos took over 20 minutes to quell, and I had misplaced the ticket to the last train of thought I’d boarded.

t: Well, I forget what we were talking about—something about offending others. . . but let’s move on to your mid-career. . .

part 2 of 5
¹ Continued from
http://www.epinions.com/content_47025983108

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes
Foreword by Charles Schulz
Collects daily strips from 11/18/85 – 5/23/87
The last strip (ice tea failure) doesn’t appear anywhere else
Contains 12-page illustrated poem: A Nauseous Nocturne

trivia: The village the giant version of Calvin is destroying in the back cover is Watterson’s home town—he holds the village’s candy and popcorn store in his hand.

Resources

Watterson, Bill       The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
Watterson, Bill       Calvin and Hobbes Sunday Pages 1985-1995
Calvin and Hobbes Resurrection
http://www.alloftheabove.net/cahr/index.html
Calvin and Hobbes Bibliography
http://members.tripod.com/~cabbresson/ch_bibliography.htm

Newcomer Network

aliventiasylum
http://www.epinions.com/content_41868955268
argyle
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-17DD-F63B792-398ED63B-prod1
rosaphile
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-1499-6777457-3959FE9A-prod1
thom413
http://www.epinions.com/content_30223928964

t-edication

For DA, a.k.a. Calvin’s dad, frozen up there in the north but still full of fire.

t-mark

I love to read. Before I had a chance to experience the Internet, most of my free time was spent on books. In literature, I’m willing to try almost anything. Time is the reason I’m not able to read as often as I’d like to nowadays; I do try to take in at least a few pages of whatever I’m currently reading before I go to sleep daily.

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10.24.01, 11.16-9
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Recommended: Yes