Calvin and Hobbes
Calvin and Hobbes is a daily American comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995.
The strip features two titular characters, six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes, and a small recurring cast that also includes Calvin's unnamed parents, his classmate and neighbor Susie Derkins, his teacher Miss Wormwood, his school bully Moe, and his babysitter Rosalyn.
Commonly described as "the last great newspaper comic", Calvin and Hobbes has enjoyed enduring popularity and influence while also attracting significant academic and philosophical interest.
At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. As of 2010, reruns of the strip appeared in more than 50 countries, and nearly 45 million copies of the Calvin and Hobbes books had been sold worldwide.
History
Development
Calvin and Hobbes was conceived and developed by Bill Watterson, while working in advertising. United Feature Syndicate agreed to publish one strip called The Doghouse, which featured a side character who had a stuffed tiger. United identified these characters as the strongest and encouraged Watterson to develop them as the center of their own strip. United Feature ultimately rejected the new strip as lacking in marketing potential, although Universal Press Syndicate took it up.Publication and syndication
The first Calvin and Hobbes strip was published on November 18, 1985 in 35 newspapers. Within a year of syndication, the strip was published in roughly 250 newspapers and proved to have international appeal with translation and wide circulation outside the United States.Calvin and Hobbes earned Watterson the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in the Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year category, first in 1986 and again in 1988. He was nominated another time in 1992. The Society awarded him the Humor Comic Strip Award for 1988. Calvin and Hobbes has also won several more awards.
As his creation grew in popularity, there was strong interest from the syndicate to merchandise the characters and expand into other forms of media. By 1991, Watterson secured a contract that granted him legal control over his creation and all future licensing arrangements.
After gaining creative control over his creation, Watterson relocated to New Mexico, and largely disappeared from public engagements, refusing to attend the ceremonies of any of the cartooning awards he won.
In 1994, Watterson announced that Calvin and Hobbes would be concluding at the end of 1995. Stating his belief that he had achieved everything that he wanted to within the medium, he announced his intention to work on future projects at a slower pace with fewer artistic compromises.
The final strip ran on Sunday, December 31, 1995, depicting Calvin and Hobbes sledding down a snowy hill after a fresh snowfall, with Calvin saying his final lines, "It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy... Let's go exploring!"
Speaking to NPR in 2005, animation critic Charles Solomon opined that the final strip "left behind a hole in the comics page that no strip has been able to fill."
Sabbaticals
Bill Watterson took two sabbaticals from the daily requirements of producing the strip. The first took place from May 5, 1991, to February 1, 1992, and the second from April 3 through December 31, 1994. These sabbaticals were included in the new contract Watterson managed to negotiate with Universal Press in 1990. The sabbaticals were proposed by the syndicate themselves, who, fearing Watterson's complete burnout, endeavored to get another five years of work from the artist.Watterson remains only the third cartoonist with sufficient popularity and stature to receive a sabbatical from their syndicate, the first two being Garry Trudeau in 1983 and Gary Larson in 1989. At least one newspaper editor noted that the strip was the most popular in the country and stated that he "earned it".
The battle over merchandising
Calvin and Hobbes had almost no official product merchandising. Watterson held that comic strips should stand on their own as an art form and although he did not start out completely opposed to merchandising in all forms, he did reject an early syndication deal that involved incorporating a more marketable, licensed character into his strip.When Calvin and Hobbes was accepted by Universal Syndicate, and began to grow in popularity, Watterson found himself at odds with the syndicate, which urged him to begin merchandising the characters and touring the country to promote the first collections of comic strips. Watterson refused, believing that the integrity of the strip and its artist would be undermined by commercialization, which he saw as a major negative influence in the world of cartoon art, and that licensing his character would only violate the spirit of his work. However, having initially signed away control over merchandising in his initial contract with the syndicate, Watterson commenced a lengthy and emotionally draining battle with Universal to gain control over his work. Ultimately Universal did not approve any products against Watterson's wishes, understanding that, unlike other comic strips, it would be nearly impossible to separate the creator from the strip if Watterson chose to walk away.
One estimate places the value of licensing revenue forgone by Watterson at $300–$400 million. Almost no legitimate Calvin and Hobbes merchandise exists.
Animation
In a 1989 interview in The Comics Journal, Watterson described the appeal of being able to do things with a moving image that cannot be done by a simple drawing: the distortion, the exaggeration and the control over the length of time an event is viewed. However, although the visual possibilities of animation appealed to Watterson, the idea of finding a voice for Calvin made him uncomfortable, as did the idea of working with a team of animators. Ultimately, Calvin and Hobbes was never made into an animated series. Watterson later stated in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book that he liked the fact that his strip was a "low-tech, one-man operation," and that he took great pride in the fact that he drew every line and wrote every word on his own. Calls from major Hollywood figures interested in an adaptation of his work, including Jim Henson, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, were never returned and in a 2013 interview Watterson stated that he had "zero interest" in an animated adaptation as there was really no upside for him in doing so.Style and influences
The strip borrows several elements and themes from three major influences: Walt Kelly's Pogo, George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. Schulz and Kelly particularly influenced Watterson's outlook on comics during his formative years.Elements of Watterson's artistic style are his characters' diverse and often exaggerated expressions, elaborate and bizarre backgrounds for Calvin's flights of imagination, expressions of motion and frequent visual jokes and metaphors. In the later years of the strip, with more panel space available for his use, Watterson experimented more freely with different panel layouts, art styles, stories without dialogue and greater use of white space. He also experimented with his tools, once inking a strip with a stick from his yard in order to achieve a particular look. He also makes a point of not showing certain things explicitly: the "Noodle Incident" and the children's book Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie are left to the reader's imagination, where Watterson was sure they would be "more outrageous" than he could portray.
Production and technique
Watterson's technique started with minimalist pencil sketches drawn with a light pencil on a piece of Bristol board, with his brand of choice being Strathmore because he felt it held the drawings better on the page as opposed to the cheaper brands. He would then use a small sable brush and India ink to fill in the rest of the drawing, saying that he did not want to simply trace over his penciling and thus make the inking more spontaneous.Mistakes were covered with various forms of correction fluid, including the type used on typewriters.
Watterson was careful in his use of color, often spending a great deal of time in choosing the right colors to employ for the weekly Sunday strip; his technique was to cut the color tabs the syndicate sent him into individual squares, lay out the colors, and then paint a watercolor approximation of the strip on tracing paper over the Bristol board and then mark the strip accordingly before sending it on. When Calvin and Hobbes began there were 64 colors available for the Sunday strips. For the later Sunday strips Watterson had 125 colors as well as the ability to fade the colors into each other.
Watterson lettered dialogue with a Rapidograph fountain pen, and he used a crowquill pen for odds and ends.
Characters and recurring elements / themes
The strip features two titular characters, six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes, and a small recurring cast that also includes Calvin's unnamed parents, his classmate and neighbor Susie Derkins, his teacher Miss Wormwood, his school bully Moe, and his babysitter Rosalyn.Frienship and antics
The biggest recurring theme is the antics that Calvin and Hobbes get into. This usually leads them getting into trouble or one of them foreshadowing that they will get into trouble.Another recurring theme is they argue and fight a lot. This happens because one of them tries to prove that they're superior than the other when they're outside, either playing together, in the treehouse, or discussing something and they have a disagreement. The fights usually end up in a truce.