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The Late, Great "Calvin and Hobbes"

This feature serves to bow a head to comics features that expired unnecessarily, marking a few polite observances at the graves of material that, from a consumer's level, deserved to live but ultimately collided with some force that drove it from publication. When one thinks of the demise of comics concepts, statistically this tends to implicate comic books rather than newspaper comics. After all, one finds testament to the longevity of the latter in examples of strips that survived their original creators by many years, just as Murat (Chic) Young's "Blondie" continues into its eighth decade even if Young no longer walks among us. Different commercial and creative forces drive newspaper comics, even if comic books still show some small family resemblance to this ancestral form.

And, furthermore, many newspaper strips provide little more than a forum for xeroxed talking heads to present a formula of statement: contest: punchline. To modern observers of the form, little about them suggests terms like "creative" or "cutting-edge;" one can occasionally find risk-takers among their creators (Lynn Johnston and Garry Trudeau, for instance, take small risks of having some dailies pulled by advancing controversial points from the contemporary liberal consensus), but political adventurism occurs rarely, and aesthetic experimentation even more rarely. Furthermore, terms like "clever" or "fun" don't come up as often as they might in reference to newspaper comics of the current day; the lightweight, disposable, and non-threatening gag has become the norm.

In recent memory - a term which I here might use to mean "post-Watergate," which might date me more than what I describe - distinguished itself in ways that remind the reader that newspaper comics could offer a great deal more. For a decade, it defied the lowered expectations that had attached to the form. It tried harder; it condescended less; it recurrently dabbled in bizarre concepts; and it featured experiments in art which, if they did not push the envelope of what the form could achieve in pen, ink, and the occasional watercolor, nonetheless showed a talent dying to expand into a wider territory of art. All of the previous statement, without hyperbole, describe Bill Watterson's much-lamented "Calvin and Hobbes," a piece which became a burden to its creator because of the manifold ways in which comics has come to earn the title of The Business That Eats Its Young.

The Kernel

Combine a young boy with too much energy, a stuffed tiger, and an imagination that frequently overwhelms the duller realm of the physical senses, and one has much of the core of the comic strip. Calvin has, as a companion, his tiger Hobbes, who enjoys a subjective reality for Calvin but appears as a plush toy to others, including other children. As a duo, this pair enjoy making trouble for each other as much as for others; of the two, Hobbes the tiger presents a saner, sounder viewpoint, even if his values tilt towards the feline virtues of sleeping, pouncing, and eating.

Calvin interacts with the rest of the world with considerable grit. Consider the term in more than one aspect. "Grit" in one sense means "gumption," "tenacity," and the like, and, indeed, he demonstrates an admirable persistence if mainly in the pursuit of his favorite misbehaviors (such as the manufacture of disturbing galleries of snowmen). In the sense of "friction," however, we find the more important meaning. Calvin abrades even when he does not intend to. Even routine activities like eating lunch become a platform from which this stout-hearted lad might annoy his peers, by reference to such hypothetical inventions as a mashed paste of insects for his sandwich (the euphonious "bug butter"). His inventions at the lunchroom table involve considerable imagination sometimes, and suggest a kind of anti-aesthetic we could still call art.

Parents, other relatives, and the occasional stranger provide frequent enough targets for Calvin's attempts to entertain himself by annoying others, but the canny Susie Derkins offers him his most difficult-to-resist target for all manner of abuses - snowballs, toy-kidnappings, endless gross-out soliloquies in the lunchroom, and occasional bizarre scams like Calvin's attempt to convince her that he had sunk waist-deep in quicksand in a sandbox. While some might sniff political correctness in Calvin's chronic inability to get the better of Susie (claiming that Watterson feared to offend by having a male character demonstrate some kind of momentary dominance through a successful scam), viewing years of the strip suggest more that Watterson realized that a formidable gadfly like Calvin required nemeses of comparable magnitude to provide any kind of challenge at all for his own pranks.

Celebrating the Depravity of Youth

Many strips about children have appeared since newspaper comics began to infest daily publications. We can move backwards from the twenty-first century, through the entirety of the twentieth, and find their beginnings in material like "The Yellow Kid" in the era of Hearst and Pulitzer publications. Some had more truth to the subject matter than others, but in general they present a few recurring distortions of real childhood. "Peanuts," perhaps the most successful and widely-distributed piece purportedly featuring children, seemed more about thoughtful and introspective young adults in juvenile drag, only occasionally involving themselves in the manic energy of youth and, more often, engaging in mild, benign philosophizing. In general, strips after World War II which featured children tended to whitewash the subject, toning down the kind of creativity of misbehavior that define the years of minority for many of us.

Watterson had a feel for the ways that children misbehave, and focused on these in a way that rings true, unsentimentally showing his protagonist Calvin not as a little angel. "Manic yard-ape" seems a more apt description. And, beyond an interesting visual similarity in character design to Schultz' children circa 1949, Watterson did not follow a Schultz-like path. One sees more of the foul-mouthed, hyperimaginative, surly child typical of Gahan Wilson's "Nuts," another rare strip taking a more honest view of childhood.

Calvin shows to demonstrate the formidable creative energy (both physical and intellectual) that children have to dedicate to things like misbehavior, without using this to push some theory of the nuclear family as some kind of syndrome (or, at least, an inherently pathological unit, a view one suspects underlays much of the humor in material like "The Simpsons"). Calvin's badness does not impugn this way; if Watterson had a social theory of families, he did not advance the like in a way that seems clear to the reader. His parents, instead, show the believable adult traits of impatience, fatigue, and the occasional flash of mischief themselves. Calvin's father, for instance, has an admirable love for the lie as an art form and frequently tries to sell the boy whoppers in the form of claims that Calvin had begun life as a grub or that Christmas had become too much trouble to bother with.

Grownups, in general, provide a mirror for the consequences of Calvin's gung-ho explorations into the world of Trouble. Between the dread babysitter and the persistent Miss Wormwood on one flank and his woefully wary parents on the other, the adult world just barely has Calvin in a box.

The concept and the format, acting together, allowed Watterson to present pieces of what scale and scope he preferred. A single, disconnected gag strip could fit between longer and more involved series involving adventures either wholly imaginary, like Calvin and Hobbes' trip to Mars and return, or semi-real like the sledding and wagon stunts that inevitably end in disaster. In another era of comics, Watterson might have worked in longer sequences, up to the formula three-month cycle of the adventure strips from their heyday.

The Walter Mitty Angle

Calvin's imagination played a central role in most of the strip, even where the action involved him in encounters with the objective world. One recurring gag Watterson exploited with recurring success juxtaposed the world Calvin imagines with the less pleasant one that confined him. From a James Thurber story of similar themes, we can describe this as the Walter Mitty Angle.

While the lad's imagination could frequently transform him into other things, including a bug-sized kid, an owl, a kid-shaped balloon, or whatever seemed like a handy way to get him into trouble, the wish-fulfillment angle of his fantasies created roles he would reuse, especially those of the occasional Stupendous Man and the classic Spaceman Spiff. Through the lens of the latter's universe, almost anything that displeased Calvin could take the form of something more dramatic and menacing. When confronted with the unspeakable horrors of a bath, for instance, Calvin might visualize Spiff as a captive whose tormentors attempt to boil him in a cauldron before breaking his rock-ribbed resistance by threatening to take him and wash his hair.

Strips in this vein sometimes bordered on the Little Nemo formula, in that one goes through the fantastic episode, followed, at the end, by the inevitable crack-up, but Watterson had more than one ending available, including the return-to-fantasy that involved more trouble (as, in one case, Calvin's imagining himself as a tyrannosaurus while making fake dinosaur-prints in the snow, Susie pointing out that the dino-tracks have his sneaker-tread, and Calvin's return to fantasy as a snow-ball flinging saurian). McKay ended Nemo strips in a ritualistic way, with him awakening or someone waking Nemo up; Watterson did not cement himself into any single ending for the products of Calvin's reveries.

The Aesthetic Experimentation

Cartoonists who have had the opportunity to work in full-page layouts as a routine matter - and even the opulence of two-page spreads, or the magnificent expanse of a Winsor McKay-type full newspaper page - would observe that the daily newspaper strip provides a tiny canvas from which to get anything across. Sadly, a number of daily strips don't seem to put much even in the three or four panels that one can cram, with pen and crowbar, into such a confining space.

Particularly in later Sunday color pages, we can see Watterson attempt to expand beyond the confines of a rigid panel structure imposed on cartoonists by the desire of newspapers to select several sizing options. This structure requires, essentially, that everything in a Sunday page break into several uniform rectangles, some of which a publisher may choose to omit, depending on if they wish to print a piece as a half-page, a quarter-page, and possible other combinations. This constrains page layout considerably, and in the late days of the strip, the artist often created strips that lacked these resizing options.

Watterson did not confine him to these layout experiments. As in the scanned panel above, we can note a humorous jab at the early 20th-century style of cubism. At other times, experiments included a no-outline approach that used only black and white areas essentially devoid of outlines (for a strip whose theme involved a philosophical position frequently referred to as the Law of the Excluded Middle); also, some of the strips involved the artist's more realistic style, particularly some of the Spaceman Spiff planetscapes, dinosaur strips, and genre pieces like the soap-opera strip reflecting an ill-fated episode of attempting to play house with Susie Derkins.

If those experiments failed to establish Watterson as capable of much more than the clean and pleasant line of his normal strips, one can find on the covers of the various anthologies of his work some dabbling in watercoloring that establishes him as a comprehensive cartoonist - meaning one capable of starting with the blank page and presenting the completed, inked, colored work with no particular need for a cadre of specialists who sometimes provide a smokescreen for cartoonists no longer much involved with the work that bears their name. Indeed, just the quality of his work as a colorist makes for grounds to regret his departure from comics pages.

In some ways, though, comics - whether in newspapers or the increasingly-obscure format of the comic book - seem wasteful of their best talent, often driving out its best people. The brain drain shows particularly on the daily pages, with the same strips from 20 to 70 years ago playing the same gags. If critics deride the comic book for its failure to take advantage of the potential of the form, the comics in newspapers carry the sin further, generally offering little beyond the familiar.

Surviving the Medium That Eats Its Young

Calvin and Hobbes ran for around a decade, and provided something during that time that not many pieces achieve: In this strip, readers had comics that reached even people who didn't much care for newspaper comics.

When "Calvin and Hobbes" ended, my own interest in daily comics pages more or less ended. Somehow this piece classed the place up, making its less inspired peers in the comics section more credible; in its absence, they seemed much less worthwhile, showing little more than the formula gag strip. While other readers probably did not react quite as strongly to this, the notion that the quality of a particular strip could make neighboring pieces more palatable by simple association much commends the product.

The very things that made Watterson and his work different - and better - seem to have worked against his satisfaction in an often-thankless business. The form had a confining aspect, both by the definition of the dimensions of acceptable newspaper comics and by the limited territory available to cartoonists in that form since the general demise of adventure strips. Editorial decisions imposed upon him seemed less about quality and more about control. And, furthermore, as in comic books, questions of intellectual property plagued the creator, with Watterson entering into disputes about licensing. Watterson details much of this in The Calvin and Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book.

Combine the following features of working in newspaper comics: a Draconian publishing schedule (six daily strips and one Sunday strip which generally must come out every day of the year, even if many newspapers do not); the by-default loss of certain intellectual property rights, especially royalties; the format that literally boxes in creativity in one or more rectangles of prescribed dimensions; and, as success of the product increases, the need to submit one's creativity to the approval of money people rather than art people; having to choose between drawing the same faces over and over again, with or without inspiration, and moving on to another line of work. Though if the big comic-book publishing concerns collapsed overnight we could expect newspaper comics to survive somewhat longer, since they distribute on a completely different model, nonetheless the business on the newspaper side has a grinding aspect that seems more able to suck the life out of its creative people. Superhero comics lost the likes of Jim Steranko, Neal Adams, and others over less.

Newspaper comics, like the descendant form the comic book, suffers from an ephemeral nature. If monthly comic books only irregularly issue more than one printing, newspaper print runs confine to a window of only a few hours with no return to earlier material. In such an environment, one could expect even the finest work to vanish after the disposal of the daily edition. With "Calvin and Hobbes," as many features, the modern availability of so many collections of so many different works points to the reprint as a major vector of transmission of comics culture, and, perhaps, the hope for passing it on to the future.

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Column 293. Completed 11-DEC-2001.