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.
Art and academia
Watterson used the strip to poke fun at the art world, principally through Calvin's unconventional creations of snowmen but also through other expressions of childhood art. For example, when Miss Wormwood complains that he is wasting class time drawing impossible things, Calvin proclaims himself "on the cutting edge of the avant-garde." Watterson explains that he adapted this jargon from an actual book of art criticism.Watterson also lampooned academia. Calvin indulges in what Watterson calls "pop psychobabble" to justify his destructive rampages and shift blame to his parents, citing "toxic codependency."
Calvin's alter-egos
Calvin imagines himself as many great creatures and other people, including dinosaurs, elephants, jungle-farers and superheroes. Three of his alter egos are well-defined and recurrent:- "Spaceman Spiff" is a heroic spacefarer who narrates his adventures in the third person. Watterson has stated the idea of Spaceman Spiff came from an earlier attempt as a cartoon, and is meant as a parody of Flash Gordon. The canyons and deserts that many of the Spaceman Spiff stories are set in are based on the landscapes of southern Utah.
- "Tracer Bullet" is a hardboiled private eye. He made his debut when Calvin donned a fedora in order to hide a terrible haircut Hobbes had given him. These strips are drawn in elaborate, shadowy black-and-white that evoke film noir. Watterson did not attempt Tracer Bullet stories often, due to the time-consuming way the strip needed to be drawn and inked.
- "Stupendous Man" is a superhero who wears a mask and a cape and narrates his own adventures. Calvin often tries to pretend he and "Stupendous Man" are two different people, but it fails to work. Stupendous Man has multiple "superpowers", including, but not limited to, super strength, the ability to fly, various vision powers such as "high-speed vision", "muscles of magnitude" and a "stomach of steel".
Cardboard boxes
In addition, Calvin uses a cardboard box as a sidewalk kiosk to sell things. Often, Calvin offers merchandise no one would want, such as "suicide drink", "a swift kick in the butt" for one dollar or a "frank appraisal of your looks" for fifty cents. In one strip, he sells "happiness" for ten cents, hitting the customer in the face with a water balloon and explaining that he meant his own happiness.
The box has also functioned as an alternate secret meeting place for G.R.O.S.S., as the "Box of Secrecy".
Calvinball
Calvinball is an improvisational sport/game introduced in a 1990 storyline that involved Calvin's negative experience of joining the school baseball team. Calvinball is a nomic or self-modifying game, a contest of wits, skill and creativity rather than stamina or athletic skill. The game is portrayed as a rebellion against conventional team sports and became a staple of the final five years of the comic. The only consistent rules of the game are that Calvinball may never be played with the same rules twice and that each participant must wear a mask.When asked how to play, Watterson stated: "It's pretty simple: you make up the rules as you go."
Wagon and sled rides
Calvin and Hobbes frequently ride downhill in a wagon or sled, as a device to add some physical comedy to the strip and because, according to Watterson, "it's a lot more interesting... than talking heads." While the ride is sometimes the focus of the strip, it also frequently serves as a counterpoint or visual metaphor while Calvin ponders the meaning of life, death, God, philosophy or a variety of other weighty subjects. Calvin and Hobbes' sled has been described as the most famous sled in American arts since Citizen Kane.G.R.O.S.S. (Get Rid of Slimy GirlS)
G.R.O.S.S. is a club in which Calvin and Hobbes are the only members. Calvin gave himself and Hobbes important positions in the club, Calvin being "Dictator-for-Life" and Hobbes being "President-and-First-Tiger". They go into Calvin's treehouse for their club meetings and often get into fights during them.Dinosaurs
Dinosaurs play a heavy role in many of Calvin's imagination sequences. These strips will often begin with hyper-realistic scenes of dinosaur interactions, only to end with a cut to Calvin acting out these scenes as part of a daydream, often to his embarrassment. Watterson placed a heavy focus on accurately depicting dinosaurs, due to his own interest in them as well as to reinforce how real they are to Calvin.Books
There are 18 Calvin and Hobbes books, published from 1987 to 1997. These include 11 collections, which form a complete archive of the newspaper strips, except for a single daily strip from November 28, 1985. Treasuries usually combine the two preceding collections with bonus material and include color reprints of Sunday comics.Watterson included some new material in the treasuries. In The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, which includes cartoons from the collections Calvin and Hobbes and Something Under the Bed Is Drooling, the back cover features a scene of a giant Calvin rampaging through a town. The scene is based on Watterson's home town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and Calvin is holding the Chagrin Falls Popcorn Shop, an iconic candy and ice cream shop overlooking the town's namesake falls. Several of the treasuries incorporate additional poetry; The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes book features a set of poems, ranging from just a few lines to an entire page, that cover topics such as Calvin's mother's "hindsight" and exploring the woods. In The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson presents a long poem explaining a night's battle against a monster from Calvin's perspective. The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes includes a story based on Calvin's use of the Transmogrifier to finish his reading homework.
A complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes strips, in three hardcover volumes totaling 1440 pages, was released on October 4, 2005, by Andrews McMeel Publishing. It includes color prints of the art used on paperback covers, the treasuries' extra illustrated stories and poems and a new introduction by Bill Watterson in which he talks about his inspirations and his story leading up to the publication of the strip. The alternate 1985 strip is still omitted, and three other strips have altered dialogue. A four-volume paperback version was released November 13, 2012.
To celebrate the release, Bill Watterson answered 15 questions submitted by readers.
Early books were printed in smaller format in black and white. These were later reproduced in twos in color in the "Treasuries", except for the contents of Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. Those Sunday strips were not reprinted in color until the Complete collection was finally published in 2005.
Watterson claims he named the books the "Essential, Authoritative and Indispensable", because, as he says in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, the books are "obviously none of these things."
''Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes''
An officially licensed children's textbook entitled Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes was published in a single print run in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1993. The book is composed of Calvin and Hobbes strips that form story arcs, including "The Binoculars" and "The Bug Collection", followed by lessons based on the stories.The book is rare and highly sought. It has been called the "Holy Grail" for Calvin and Hobbes collectors.
Reception
Reviewing Calvin and Hobbes in 1990, Entertainment Weekly Ken Tucker gave the strip an A+ rating, writing "Watterson summons up the pain and confusion of childhood as much as he does its innocence and fun."Academic response
In 1993, Gregory S. Paul, a paleontologist and paleoartist, praised Bill Watterson for the scientific accuracy of the dinosaurs appearing in Calvin and Hobbes.In her 1994 book When Toys Come Alive, Lois Rostow Kuznets theorizes that Hobbes serves both as a figure of Calvin's childish fantasy life and as an outlet for the expression of libidinous desires more associated with adults. Kuznets also analyzes Calvin's other fantasies, suggesting that they are a second tier of fantasies utilized in places like school where transitional objects such as Hobbes would not be socially acceptable.
Political scientist James Q. Wilson, in a paean to Calvin and Hobbes upon Watterson's decision to end the strip in 1995, characterized it as "our only popular explication of the moral philosophy of Aristotle."
A collection of original Sunday strips was exhibited at Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in 2001. Watterson himself selected the strips and provided his own commentary for the exhibition catalog, which was later published by Andrews McMeel as Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985–1995.
Since the discontinuation of Calvin and Hobbes, individual strips have been licensed for reprint in schoolbooks, including the Christian homeschooling book The Fallacy Detective in 2002, and the university-level philosophy reader Open Questions: Readings for Critical Thinking and Writing in 2005; in the latter, the ethical views of Watterson and his characters Calvin and Hobbes are discussed in relation to the views of professional philosophers. In a 2009 evaluation of the entire body of Calvin and Hobbes strips using grounded theory methodology, Christijan D. Draper found that: "Overall, Calvin and Hobbes suggests that meaningful time use is a key attribute of a life well lived," and that "the strip suggests one way to assess the meaning associated with time use is through preemptive retrospection by which a person looks at current experiences through the lens of an anticipated future..."
Calvin and Hobbes strips were again exhibited at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at The Ohio State University in 2014, in an exhibition entitled Exploring Calvin and Hobbes. An exhibition catalog by the same title, which also contained an interview with Watterson conducted by Jenny Robb, the curator of the museum, was published by Andrews McMeel in 2015.
Legacy
Years after its original newspaper run, Calvin and Hobbes has continued to exert influence in entertainment, art, and fandom.In television, Calvin and Hobbes have been satirically depicted in stop motion animation in the 2006 and 2018 Robot Chicken episodes "Lust for Puppets" and "Jew No. 1 Opens a Treasure Chest" respectively, and in traditional animation in the 2009 Family Guy episode "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven." In the 2013 Community episode "Paranormal Parentage," the characters Abed Nadir and Troy Barnes dress as Calvin and Hobbes, respectively, for Halloween.
British artists, merchandisers, booksellers, and philosophers were interviewed for a 2009 BBC Radio 4 half-hour programme about the abiding popularity of the comic strip, narrated by Phill Jupitus.
The first book-length study of the strip, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip by Nevin Martell, was first published in 2009; an expanded edition was published in 2010. The book chronicles Martell's quest to tell the story of Calvin and Hobbes and Watterson through research and interviews with people connected to the cartoonist and his work. The director of the later documentary Dear Mr. Watterson referenced Looking for Calvin and Hobbes in discussing the production of the movie, and Martell appears in the film.
The American documentary film Dear Mr. Watterson, released in 2013, explores the impact and legacy of Calvin and Hobbes through interviews with authors, curators, historians, and numerous professional cartoonists.
The enduring significance of Calvin and Hobbes to international cartooning was recognized by the jury of the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2014 by the awarding of its Grand Prix to Watterson, only the fourth American to ever receive the honor.
From 2016 to 2021, author Berkeley Breathed included Calvin and Hobbes in various Bloom County cartoons. He launched the first cartoon on April Fool's Day 2016 and jokingly issued a statement suggesting that he had acquired Calvin and Hobbes from Bill Watterson, who was "out of the Arizona facility, continent and looking forward to some well-earned financial security." While bearing Watterson's signature and drawing style as well as featuring characters from both Calvin and Hobbes and Breathed's Bloom County, it is unclear whether Watterson had any input into these cartoons or not.
Several artists published comics that were identified as being inspired by Calvin and Hobbes. Some of them were the 2002 comic strip Macuando, by Liniers, and 2005 Marvel comic book Fantastic Four Presents: Franklin Richards - Son of A Genius, by Chris Eliopoulos and Marc Sumerak.
Some of other notorious art made in Calvin and Hobbes style are the 2015 drawings of characters from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, from Disney artist Brian Kesinger, and memes created by the subreddit Donald and Hobbes, parodying Donald Trump during the 2016 elections.
Calvin and Hobbes has also been published on the internet. GoComics publishes the comic strips and it remains their most viewed comic, which cycles through old strips with an approximately 30-year delay. Michael Yingling created Calvin and Hobbes: The Search Engine, capable of interacting with GoComics archive for reading online or downloading the comic strips. The comic strip was published online in Portuguese by the website CalvinBR, hosted on iG, and the blog Depósito do Calvin.
Grown-up Calvin
Portraying Calvin as a teenager/adult has inspired writers.In 2011, a comic strip appeared by cartoonists Dan and Tom Heyerman called Hobbes and Bacon. The strip depicts Calvin as an adult, married to Susie Derkins with a young daughter named after philosopher Francis Bacon, to whom Calvin gives Hobbes. Though consisting of only four strips originally, Hobbes and Bacon received considerable attention when it appeared and was continued by other cartoonists and artists.
A novel titled Calvin by CLA [Young Adult Book Award]–winning author Martine Leavitt was published in 2015. The story tells of seventeen-year-old Calvin—who was born on the day that Calvin and Hobbes ended, and who has now been diagnosed with schizophrenia—and his hallucination of Hobbes, his childhood stuffed tiger. With his friend Susie, who might also be a hallucination, Calvin sets off to find Bill Watterson in the hope that the cartoonist can provide aid for Calvin's condition.
The titular character of the comic strip Frazz has been noted for his similar appearance and personality to a grown-up Calvin. Creator Jef Mallett has stated that although Watterson is an inspiration to him, the similarities are unintentional.