Dear Republic,
Maybe you liked Calvin and Hobbes as a kid but you probably have no idea of the scrupulous moral integrity that went into it, as demonstrates in this deeply-researched piece.
-ROL
CALVIN AND HOBBES AND THE PRICE OF INTEGRITY
I.
1978, Kenyon College, sophomore year. Bill Watterson is lying on his dorm room bed, staring up at the ceiling. He hasn’t yet invented six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes — though his studies have made him familiar with their philosophical namesakes — because the strip that will make Watterson’s name is almost a decade away. Right now, he’s thinking that his dorm room needs an amateur rendition of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”.
There’s a number of problems up front. The first is that (as Watterson will tell you himself) he’s not a talented painter. Still, what the work will lack in “colour sense and technical flourish” it’ll make up for with comedy — specifically “the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakeable odour of old beer cans and older laundry”. Besides, Michelangelo wasn’t Michelangelo until he’d painted and kept painting and became Michelangelo the painter. Watterson decides to go ahead and start painting.
The next problem is structural: how to reach the ceiling? He can stand on the bed, but that’ll mean hours with his head cocked all the way back, a young man developing an old man’s spine. He needs a way to paint the ceiling without permanently disfiguring his posture. His friends help him with a solution: they stand two chairs on Watterson’s bed, then lie a table across the chairs. By climbing up this tower and lying on the table, he comes two feet away from the ceiling. Watterson gets to work.
He’s sunk hours into hours of weeks upon weeks on his back when a third problem occurs to him. He should have thought of this and acted on it before the first brush stroke. He needs permission to paint his dorm room ceiling. But Watterson once admitted, “I never spent as much time or work on any authorised art project or any poli-sci paper as I spent on this one act of vandalism.” He isn’t giving up on it now.
The housing director is understandably suspicious of this kid wanting to paint some elaborate picture on his ceiling with only a few weeks left of the academic year. He realises that the idea is being proposed retroactively. Maybe that’s why he plays along and grants permission for something that’s obviously already underway. Watterson is allowed to complete the painting on the condition that he returns the ceiling to normal before he leaves in summer. Watterson goes back to his room, climbs up the makeshift scaffolding, and gets back to work.
A few weeks later, the project is finished. Watterson probably takes a moment to stand in the middle of the room and look up, contemplating the months of work, the tins of paint he went through, the things he learned about technique, about the joy of a job done for its own sake, about himself. Then he opens a tin of whitewash, climbs up the bed-chairs-table one last time, and paints over his work. He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh.
II.
In the years after Kenyon, Watterson has a recurring dream about his old college where he doesn’t know what class he’s taking or where he’s meant to be. He roams the grounds, growing more flustered with each confused step. Right before he wakes, he thinks, “How many more years until I graduate…? Wait, didn’t I graduate already? How old am I?”
It’s 1995 and Watterson is thirty-seven. He’s sitting at the desk where he’s worked for the last ten years, drawing the adventures of Calvin and his maybe-real or maybe-stuffed-toy tiger, Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes runs in over 2,400 newspapers across the world and, by a more meaningful metric, re-enchants life for millions of readers. It’s pop-culture that transcends the ‘pop” part of its nature; it feels like a private piece of each reader’s soul. For a lot of grown-ups, Calvin and Hobbes is a bridge between who we were as wide-eyed, wondering children and who we are now.
A few years after he found success with Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson told a graduating class at Kenyon that there’s nothing like the joy of work done for your own creative satisfaction, rather than for fame or a few bucks. Watterson is convinced that an artist should do what he does for love, even if it fails, even if it costs him, even though it and everything else will eventually end. In fact, his editor has just okayed a strip in which Hobbes asks Calvin, “If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?”
Which is what brings Watterson to his desk today.
There’s a few papers scattered beneath and around the single page that he’s focused on. He has an unusual task this morning: he’s not drawing, but writing, dealing exclusively in words. Maybe he starts right away, knowing exactly what he wants to tell the people who’ll read this letter. I imagine him taking a moment to consider the current that’s swept him along the last ten years to what he’s preparing to do today. He takes a sip of what’s left in his coffee mug (damn, it’s gone cold), then starts to write.
I don’t know how Watterson drafted this letter, but in my telling of the story he’s scribbling it down on paper with a pencil, the way he does dialogue for his strip. He’ll type it up later and post it out tomorrow afternoon, or maybe he’ll type it up on a computer and electronically mail it. For now, he’s writing a letter by hand, and it’ll be sent to all the editors of the various newspapers that run Calvin and Hobbes. The letter goes like this:
“I will be stopping Calvin and Hobbes at the end of the year. This was not a recent or an easy decision, and I leave with some sadness. My interests have shifted, however, and I believe I’ve done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels. I am eager to work at a more thoughtful pace, with fewer artistic compromises. I have not yet decided on future projects, but my relationship with Universal Press Syndicate will continue.
That so many newspapers would carry Calvin and Hobbes is an honor I’ll long be proud of, and I’ve greatly appreciated your support and indulgence over the last decade. Drawing this comic strip has been a privilege and a pleasure, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity.
Sincerely,
Bill Watterson”
III.
The letter is finished, ready to be typed up and sent out. Time now for the real work. At one edge of Watterson’s desk are a couple of pencils, an eraser, the curled zigzags of shavings. On the other side of the desk are tools for different parts of the creative process. A small sable brush (for inking), a Rapidograph fountain pen (for lettering the dialogue), and a crowquill pen (for “odds and ends”). His set-up is “as low-tech as you can get”.
This is how he likes it. The simpler things are, the more control he has over the work — which is the hill on which he’ll die and take everyone with him if he has to. For Watterson, it’s a question of maintaining artistic integrity. He derives an enormous amount of pride from the fact that he can say, “I write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration myself.” The strip is a “one-man operation” because he’s convinced it’s the only way to preserve the integrity of his craft.
For Watterson, craft has never been a side dish to the main course. It’s inextricable from the truths he wants to express and the meaning he hopes his work might have for its readers. It’s his belief that half a century ago, the best comics were more than amusing to look at; they were beautiful and undoubtedly counted as capital-A Art. Here in the mid-nineties, he “can’t think of a single strip today that comes close to that standard of craftsmanship”.
His readers think he’s achieved that kind of quality, from know-nothings like me who intuit something special here that I haven’t found anywhere else, to icons of the craft like Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts. In a foreword to The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, Schulz praises Watterson’s ability to show us the numinous in the mundane by elegantly drawing “bedside tables … and living room couches and chairs and lamps … and all the things that make a comic strip fun to look at”. He adds that this attention to the heightened depiction of the smallest details is what makes a strip truly great: if all the cartoonist does is “illustrate a joke”, the cartoonist “is going to lose”.
It turns out there are a lot of ways a cartoonist can lose, and most of those wins and losses come out of one essential battle: creativity versus commerce. Here, commerce is represented by Universal Press Syndicate, which Watterson refers to as “the syndicate”, like an organisation of villains in a comic book. (Once, he even publicly called them “a bloodsucking corporate parasite”.) The syndicate act as middle-man between the artist and publishing outlets, and without them, there’s no realistic chance of any cartoonist getting a strip printed in a major newspaper and making something like a livable income. Middle-man, except that Watterson sees them as taking a side — the side of the newspapers.
The conflict comes out of the fact that, Watterson laments, the “commercial, mass-market needs of newspapers are not often sympathetic to the concerns of artistic expression”. It’s a dynamic that’s made him face “countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions”. These things that others regard as only or mostly artistic concerns, he looks at as questions of ethics, which explains his refusal to back down even when giving in was so much easier (not to mention more profitable). It was never a question of drawing a little differently or working to an altered schedule; it was a question of what truly mattered at a level Watterson perhaps thinks of as spiritual.
Watterson’s way of speaking about these things occasionally veers into the self-important register of grievance, the eternal complaint of someone for whom things-as-they-are never satisfy because things-as-they-were always seem better. But there’s no denying the conviction with which he fought the fight, even before he had the name-brand authority he’d later earn, even back when it really looked like he was going to lose. And he came very close to losing some of his biggest battles with the syndicate.
IV.
“When cartoonists fight their syndicates,” Watterson says, “it’s usually to make more money, not less.” Yet for six years, Watterson kept his heels dug deep in the earth, fists up, boxing stance against his syndicate’s plan to make them all millions of dollars.
Watterson’s contract meant the syndicate retained the right to turn Calvin and Hobbes into toys, t-shirts, and other ephemera, and it became clear pretty early that they could all expect stupid amounts of money from merchandising. As Nevin Martell puts it in his inimitable book Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, the eighties were a time when “big-name cartoonists were making big bucks by harnessing the selling power of their characters”.
The creator of Garfield, Jim Davis, became the head of his own empire just a few years after he’d started drawing his mopey cat. There are Garfield plush toys, Garfield pyjamas, Garfield slot machines, Garfield movies, Garfield-themed cruises, all of it bringing in a fortune between 750 million and one billion dollars a year — and Davis gets a share of that. “So here’s a math problem for the kids,” writes Martell. “If there were 255 million suction-cupped Garfield dolls sold over the course of the decade, how many small tropical islands was Jim Davis able to buy with the proceeds?”
Maths like this led Watterson’s syndicate to include licensing rights in their contract with him, assuming the artist would have no problem with it. All that money for doing what he loves? Seemed a no-brainer. The problem was that Watterson had an exacting idea of what it was he loved doing, and it was at odds with toys and tat, indifferent to silos of cash. “I went into cartooning to draw cartoons,” Watterson says, “not to run a corporate empire.”
It was still early days in the ten-year run of Calvin and Hobbes when the syndicate approached Watterson with its big ideas of Calvin sweatshirts, Spaceman Spiff bumper stickers, an animated Calvin and Hobbes Saturday show, maybe a movie, and — worst of all — a Hobbes doll. Watterson really loathed the Hobbes doll. To make sense of how much it bothered him, we need to talk about the tiger in the room.
When Watterson created Hobbes, his focus was on the character more than the conceit of a teddy that comes to life. Watterson told Rich West for The Comics Journal that “there’s something a little peculiar about [Hobbes] that’s, hopefully, not readily categorised”. But Watterson’s readers often wanted Hobbes categorised into either “real” or “imaginary”. So Watterson came up with a compelling non-answer to the question:
“Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that’s how life works.”
You could say Hobbes is both imaginatively real and really imaginary, depending on your perspective. Hobbes can be either, which also means he’s both. Is Hobbes a tiger or a toy? Yes.
Watterson insisted that if he wasn’t going to settle the question of Hobbes, then he definitely wouldn’t let some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes “into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic”. He’d sound off wherever he could on how “licensing usually cheapens the original creation” by saturating a market with characters until readers are bored of seeing them; how a multi-paneled story with dynamic action cannot be respected by the vagaries of a coffee mug illustration; how subtlety is sacrificed for immediacy; how selling off “everything fun and magical” means “the strip’s world is diminished”.
He has a hundred lines like these, articulations of higher reasoning against merchandising, but just once, in the Tenth Anniversary Book, he drops the high-and-mighty in favour of I-the-mighty: “Calvin and Hobbes was designed to be a comic strip and that’s all I want it to be. It’s the one place where everything works the way I intend it to.”
Here again is the artist as lone genius, the one-man operation he jealously guards. Watterson’s convictions are sincere, and he’s put a lot of thought into defending those values, but maybe there’s some emotion involved too. Maybe part of Watterson’s aversion to what his syndicate were asking for has something to do with not wanting to play with others. It often seems with Watterson like he’s never quite made peace with the public nature of the private world he created in Calvin and Hobbes. He seems uncomfortable with compromise.
There’s a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin discovers the world has lost all colour. There’s “no hue, value, or chroma” as he moves through his house depicted in negative relief. The cause of this aberration was an argument with his dad, who in the final (full colour) panel says, “The problem is, you see everything in terms of black and white, ” to which Calvin cries, “SOMETIMES THAT’S THE WAY THINGS ARE!”
Watterson wrote that strip to get onto the page and out of his head the way he felt when fighting his syndicate. This move to a reductive black-white binary is a difficult circle to square with the artist who refuses to settle the ontology of Hobbes with a definitive answer. How is it that Watterson both adores and rejects ambiguity? Maybe Watterson is neither one thing or the other. Maybe he’s both. Lee Salem, president of Universal Press Syndicate, says, “Bill is both refreshingly different and exasperatingly different, depending on one’s perspective.”
The syndicate found out just how different he could be. Other cartoonists wanted fame, wanted to be printed in every newspaper in the world, wanted an ocean of money where the tide was always in. But other cartoonists could swim; Watterson felt like he was drowning. So he told his syndicate, “No.” No t-shirts, no merchandise, no stuffed Hobbes toys. But the argument wouldn’t go away, and even Watterson understood why. As he put it, “Trainloads of money were at stake — millions and millions of dollars could be made with a few signatures. Syndicates are businesses, and no business passes up that kind of opportunity without an argument.”
So Watterson and the syndicate had that argument. For six years.
V.
The struggle went on until 1991. It was a fight that few knew much about — certainly not the happy majority of readers who met with Calvin each morning in the paper and had nothing but fun — but Watterson viewed the conflict as something Biblical in its intensity and stakes.
On one side of the battle: the conglomerated corporate power of the syndicate-as-Goliath, with their money and lawyers and binding legalese, and their teams of people with vested interests working against the simple artist.
On the other side: Bill Watterson, pencil in hand and heart full of uncompromisable values.
In one of Watterson’s strips from that time, Calvin refuses to get in the bath, shouting about how he’ll never compromise his principles; cut to Calvin in the bath, sullen and grumbling, “I don’t need to compromise my principles, because they don’t have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway.”
The way Watterson tells it, he was powerless to stop them forcing him to merchandise Calvin and Hobbes, and all he could do about it was quit, in which case the syndicate would just hire a team of anonymous ghost-artists to churn out more stories for Watterson’s duo. He was one small man facing down a global behemoth that had risen from the swamp of modern capitalism. What could he do?
I’m not so convinced by the case he makes. For any merchandising opportunities to be worth much, the strip had to continue enchanting readers, and to do that it had to be written and drawn by the man who’d brought it into the world. Calvin and Hobbes, as Nevin Martell notes, “was not your run-of-the-mill, gag-a-day strip with average artwork that anyone could do”. That’s why Lee Salem acknowledged in a conversation with Martell that the syndicate was “lucky that [Watterson] didn’t call one day and say, ‘I quit.’”
That’s not the only source of fishy odour around Watterson’s suggestion that all the cards were held by other players. There’s also the plain fact of how long the argument ran for. Every week, month, and year that passed with Watterson holding out and the syndicate essentially shrugging and saying, “Okay, we won’t force it,” revealed how unwilling they were to simply bend him to their will.
Then there’s the offer they made to him not long before the whole thing was decided. Lee Salem went to Watterson’s house with a box of bootleg t-shirts with Calvin and/or Hobbes printed on them. (I first found out this was a thing when, in an episode of Friends, Joey tells Rachel he can’t take his sweater off in public because his t-shirt “has a picture of Calvin doing Hobbes”. I remember scrunching my young eyes up and thinking no no no no no as if the word could scrub out the unwanted mental picture that had been forced on me.)
Salem told Watterson that the best way to choke off the flow of this stuff was to license Calvin and Hobbes. Granting merchandising rights would mean that an entirely separate company, whose interest would be controlling the legal use of those rights, would come down tough on the pirates making illegal merchandise. On top of that, all the profits from merchandising would go into a brand-new fund for saving tigers across the world. This debate didn’t take five years; sounds like it didn’t take five minutes: Watterson said no.
So, maybe it’s the clarity of hindsight, an unimpressive backwards prediction, but I don’t find it surprising that when the dispute was finally resolved after six years, it fell Watterson’s way. The syndicate backed off, agreed not to license any merchandise, and went as far as rewriting their contract with Watterson in his favour. And it really went in his favour.
VI.
Who knows for sure how the sabbaticals came about? Well, Watterson knows and the people at the syndicate know, but they’re telling different stories. In Nevin Martell’s book, Watterson demanded two sabbaticals as part of his renegotiated contract, which is presumably what Universal says went down. On the other hand, Watterson (who gave no input to Martell’s book except to ask Lee Salem of it, “Who cares?”) maintains that Universal offered him the sabbaticals and he accepted. This seems unusually generous for a syndicate Watterson also portrays as essentially money-grubbing, but again — who knows?
Sabbaticals were basically unknown for syndicated cartoonists. It was a huge ask of readers to take some months away from a strip and not lose interest or replace it with another strip. For editors, re-runs were a kick in the crotch, paying for a strip they’d already paid for. Universal knew all of this and rallied to craft a message supporting their artist’s need to recharge his creative batteries. Watterson knew all of this too and thought, They can have a worn out Calvin and Hobbes, or I can take this break and come back with work I’m proud of, that they’ll be eager to print.
In May of 1991, Calvin and Hobbes went into re-runs.
For the next nine months, Watterson lived like he didn’t have millions of dollars in merchandise a mere signature away, like his work wasn’t so widely adored that national newspapers were publicly counting down the days until he brought them all something new. Instead, at the age of thirty-three and mid-career, he was living the low-key life of a retiree.
As the months slipped by, Watterson started meeting up with his art professor from Kenyon. They painted together, the older man with skill and the younger man with inelegance slowly turning into basic proficiency. A dynamic developed between them that helped Watterson’s recovery. No longer teacher and student, they were (as the professor told Martell) “just two guys who liked to do a couple of things really well”.
The time off did what it was supposed to for Watterson, and in early 1992, he returned to drawing Calvin and Hobbes. He was three years away from quitting forever.
***
Watterson threw himself into his next big swing with the syndicate. He wanted to radically change the Sunday strip.
In the Golden Age of comics, Sunday strips were given a whole page to create worlds and tell stories. “With all that space to fill,” Watterson says, “cartoonists produced works of extraordinary beauty and power.” Around the middle of the twentieth century, that page was reduced to half a page, and most newspapers saved more space by decapitating the strip of its top row. Whatever remained got straitjacketed into “specific and unyielding” dimensions that forced all comics into the exact same sequence of panels. Watterson says the result was that he’d “often need to eliminate dialogue or simplify the drawings so they’d fit in the arbitrary space the format allotted”.
On the back of so many wins for Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson decided it was time to push back. The proposal was simple: his Sunday comic would come “exclusively as a half-page feature with no panel restrictions”. The story (and not the commercial needs of the newspaper) would determine the shape of each Sunday strip.
The syndicate warned Watterson they might lose half of the papers running Calvin and Hobbes and, with them, half of his income. Watterson wanted to hold himself to a higher standard than how many papers published him and how much money he made. Whatever he lost would, he figured, be worth it — “if I could work at the limits of my abilities for a change.” To his surprise (though maybe only to his), the syndicate agreed to sell Calvin and Hobbes with this caveat in place.
Editors were furious. Watterson seemed ignorant of the many and complex requirements of publishing a paper in an expensive industry already struggling, one that had just paid him for nine months of re-runs. Watterson looked like a megalomaniac snatching precious page space from other cartoonists. This latest act of ego was an affront to both business and morality.
Watterson was having none of it. No editor had to buy Calvin and Hobbes, he said. He’d be offering them a superior product for the same price. With a little imagination, he told them, Sunday strips could be reimagined (and resized) without a zero-sum competition between artists. Some editors threatened to cancel their contracts with Universal over this. It looked like the syndicate’s warnings to Watterson were well-founded: Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation.
It says something about the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes — not to mention Watterson’s pulling power as a cartoonist — that after all the outrage and arguments, only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened to remove it from their pages. And only seven followed through. Calvin and Hobbes was still very much on top. But it was also getting on top of Watterson.
***
The standardised Sunday strip was like a jig used by carpenters: when they have to make the same cut over and over, they set up a jig to rest the saw and the wood against, and it automates the repetition, making the process smoother, faster. Less creative, by design. The Sunday strip granted less creative freedom, but it streamlined the process, making it smoother and faster to draw the strips.
Watterson no longer had the benefit of the jig. He had to go back to the literal drawing board each time, so the Sunday strips that used to take a day to draw now required a day and a half, sometimes longer. They demanded a slower process, more time to think and tinker. Watterson liked drawing his strip at this turtle’s pace, but the ever-looming deadline made it hard work to go so slowly.
His approach to deadlines was to stay well ahead of them. When you’re faced with a due date (as he told Lee Nordling in Your Career in Comics) “there’s no quality control. It’s just garbage in, garbage out.” This was because “the never-ending pressure to meet deadlines encourages cartoonists to publish virtually everything they think up”. Watterson’s approach was instead to “stay far enough ahead of the deadlines that I can throw away mediocre material and write something better”. This is quality determined by quantity: the more stuff in the wastebasket, the better the strip.
Watterson was already working weeks and sometimes months ahead of schedule, refusing to submit second-tier work, maintaining this throughout six years of the licensing fight, and now he took more time than ever to think creatively about the Sunday strips suddenly requiring triple the effort to produce. It took more and more of his time to keep Calvin and Hobbes going. “I had to steal that extra time,” he confessed in Sunday Pages 1985-1995, “from what would have been some semblance of an ordinary life.”
Watterson burned out. In April of 1994, he took his second nine-month sabbatical. You have to assume he did a lot of the same as last time, some painting, some walking, nowhere to be and no time he had to be there. He never said or wrote much about that second sabbatical, but it’s clear that it didn’t do what it was meant to do. He returned to the strip in January, 1995, knowing for sure what he’d suspected for a while: he was done with Calvin and Hobbes.
VII.
It’s early afternoon. The letter he wrote this morning is sitting at the top of his desk, and his sable brush is in hand. His fingers are cramping a little, but the work is going well. Maybe there’s an air of solemnity hanging over him on this particular day, and maybe he indulges it, or maybe he tries to ignore it so he can get on with what he’s doing. A lot of maybes hang over a single certainty: that he’s drawing the last Calvin and Hobbes that will ever be printed.
Watterson’s wife was the first to know that it was all coming to an end, and second was Lee Salem and the syndicate. No one behind the scenes was all that surprised. It was obvious to everyone as far back as 1992, after Watterson had come back from his first sabbatical, that he would be quitting the strip, it just wasn’t clear when that would happen. Now it’s a sure thing. They’ve agreed that the last day of 1995, not far off, will be the last time a new Calvin and Hobbes runs in the papers. All that’s left is to tell his editors and, more importantly, his readers, which he’ll do by way of the resignation letter.
And after? He’s uncertain. Does he know here today, as he works on his last outing with the kid and his tiger, that he’ll spend the next five years drawing nothing at all? That he’ll abruptly stop doing what he’s done for the last ten years of his life?
In the decades after closing shop on Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson will become surgeon-thorough in scalpeling out his creation from his private life. Over the next thirty years, he’ll give only three or four interviews; he’ll put out a single book (entirely unrelated to Calvin and Hobbes) for which he’ll do his usual amount of hype and marketing (none); he’ll say almost nothing of note on the duo he gave up for adoption to his readers. Eventually, he’ll force his editor to put a notice on his website informing fans that he won’t read any letters that refer even passingly to Calvin and Hobbes.
This KEEP OUT sign on the gate to his personal life will do very little to keep well-meaning if obstinate trespassers off his mental lawn. There will be a day when Watterson will be on the literal lawn of his front yard and a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer will show up. He’ll be neither the first nor the last journalist to try his luck like this, and he’ll be no more nor less successful than any of the others. The artist and the reporter will get into an off-the-record “almost collegiate” debate about the nature of privacy. It won’t matter if the reporter wins on points, because Watterson is never going to concede.
In any case, even as Watterson distances himself from Calvin and Hobbes, his readers will remain as close to them as ever. We go on reading the comics, seeing ourselves in Calvin, hoping for a Hobbes, looking for an adventure.
“My strip,” Watterson once said, “is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships.” Well, ditto for my relationship with the boy Calvin and his tiger Hobbes. Those adventures of a weirdo from another planet and his homicidal psycho jungle cat, their magical world in which the days are just packed with deranged mutant killer monster snow goons, that place where scientific progress goes “boink” and there’s treasure everywhere — they belong to their readers.
Back to his desk and that final strip. This one is made up of only five panels. The last panel is the largest. There’s a lot of un-inked page showing through here, just Calvin and Hobbes in the snow and a few trees to indicate the forest around them. Watterson has already pencilled in the dialogue. “Wow,” Calvin says to Hobbes in the first panel, “it really snowed last night! Isn’t it wonderful?” These two figures have been lightly pencilled in carrying a sled through waist-deep snow. Now, Watterson’s inking the lines, which sit with some weight on the otherwise blank paper.
When Watterson first started drawing Calvin and Hobbes in the eighties, there were only 64 colours for him to choose from. Here at the end of his run, he has 125 colours available to him. But he’s keeping it simple. He usually colours in the panel borders and the word balloons, but he’s decided, here, to leave it all white. Only the characters and their sled are given colour, because he wants this drawing to have “a very spare and open look”.
He leans back in his chair to look at what he’s done. All that white he’s left offers the effect of wiping the page clean, the strip stripped down until the page is empty for something new. Something different. Like he’s opened a tin of whitewash and painted over his work. He leaves the page white, empty, and fresh.
Matthew Morgan writes Volumes, a Substack about the places where books and life overlap.
Sources used:
Unattributed quotations come from Calvin and Hobbes: Tenth Anniversary Book (1995).
References to specific Calvin and Hobbes strips come from the Calvin and Hobbes collections published between 1988 and 1996.
Looking for Calvin and Hobbes (2009) Nevin Martell;
“Some thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled” (1990) Kenyon College graduation speech;
“The Bill Watterson Interview” in The Comics Journal (1989) Richard West;
“Bill Watterson” in Honk! (1987) Andrew Christie.
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