t-p¡n¡•n: tipu interviews Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes

On November 18, 1985, Bill Watterson unleashed a hyper tot and his tiger friend upon some thirty-odd newspaper cartoon pages. Stretching the envelope of the comic strip art form from the start, Watterson breathed fresh air into an industry that had largely relapsed into rehashing ideas and reworking clichés in its tired foundries. Accused of harboring arrogant and elitist principles about the responsibility of artists to their audience and creations, he nevertheless won the respect, albeit grudging, of his peers. But his creation, Calvin and Hobbes, undeniably gained the unconditional approval and admiration of millions of daily comic strip readers worldwide, appearing in over 2300 newspapers nearing the end of its decade of print run.

The cast stars six-year old hellion Calvin, a castaway within his peer group who compensates for the loneliness with a vibrant imagination, which Hobbes may or may not be a part of. Hobbes the tiger seems real only to Calvin; others always see him as a lifeless stuffed toy. It doesn’t make sense, but six-year-olds have always been beyond the reach of logic.

Calvin’s mom and dad try to cope with their tiny terror, some days with good humor, and other days. . . best left unmentioned—all parents have had those days when they wished they’d gotten a canary instead. Of course, one has to wonder exactly how often during a normal day Calvin wishes he could sell his parents to aliens just passing by in their UFOs.

In addition to putting up with the grinding horrors of Parental Authority (file under: The Meal, The TV, The Bath, The Bedtime, Character Building, Miscellaneous), our young hero also must deal with the marrow-numbing misery of School (file under: The Bus Stop, Math, The Tor-ahmTeacher, Math, The Bully, Gym Class, Math, Homework, Math, Miscellaneous Math).

And of course, one can’t forget the singular danger to all six-year old male lovers of freedom, the Saturday morning cartoons with a bowl full of sugar and Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and The Perfect Slushball: The Babysitter (file under: Hell, Fiend of), and Girls (file under: Yechhh, subcategory Gross).

Wielding a gracefully balanced pen and brush, Watterson kept the strip from sinking into truisms, focusing on refining character dynamics, presenting fresh ideas, and staying true to his directive of exploring the world we live in through Calvin’s eyes. While strips from the early days might now seem pedestrian on a cursory glance, a scan of Calvin’s face contorted in an evil grin revealing a triangle of teeth and shifty eyes gleaming with glee should tell viewers that this is no ordinary wisecracking little brat. Calvin and Hobbes is no placebo, it probably is no panacea either, but the day they scientifically prove that laughter is the best tonic, these strips will show up on many a prescription.

I caught up with Watterson at The Electric Banana in his hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Not many have seen the few (I’ve found only three) photos of Watterson available on various fan sites over the ‘Net. Seeing him in person, I found myself a bit taken aback.

t-þoo (t): Good morning. Thank you for agreeing to talk to fans.
Bill Watterson (B): It’s afternoon.
t: Uh, right, sorry, a bit nervous, you know.
B: Hrm. Is that why you’re staring at me?
t: Um. No. You look. . . you look so much like Calvin’s dad, with a moustache!
B: Oh. Yes, I suppose that with my glasses and a sort of wiry biker build, I can see where that comes from. But really, as I’ve said before in my collections and interviews, I based Calvin’s dad mainly on my own father. I remember a lot of those character building pep talks while growing up.

t: But Calvin isn’t based upon you.
B: Good heavens, no! I’m more of the Hobbes analytical type. Well, yeah, if you started spouting psychobabble, you might say that Calvin does what I wanted to do when I was young and kind of innocent—you could go into repressed ids and all that, but I hate that sort of talk.
t: Growing up. . . you were born in D.C.
B: Right, but the family moved to Chagrin Falls, Ohio during my sixth year of existence, and I grew up here.
t: And cartooned?
B: Yes, more or less from the start. For my high school paper. Political cartoons for the Kenyon College rag. The Cincinnati Post hired me immediately for a trial period as their political cartoonist right after my graduation in 1980, and just as quickly fired me.
t: You’ve said elsewhere that it was a case of mismatch of expectations between you and your editor. . .
B: Yeah. . . he wanted a surefire whiz kid who hit the ground running, but I found myself in an environment where I didn’t feel comfortable enough to experiment.
t: So within a year out of college you found yourself out of a job. How did it affect you?
B: Within six months actually. The immediate effect hurt. I spent five years writing ad jingles in a windowless basement, and hated every second of it. Meanwhile, I kept drawing comics and sending them off for approval. . . or rather, for the rejection slips that I eventually came to expect. In hindsight, this period ended up influencing me deeply. I realized that I wanted to work in cartooning not for the pay, but for the sheer fun I had with it. . . hmm, that reminds me of my college sophomore year. . .
t: Go ahead.

B: Well, one day, during the middle of the semester, for some reason I decided to paint Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam scene from the Sistine Chapel on my dorm room’s ceiling. I worked for a few hours each day, but the process took months. I finished near the end of the semester, and my friends and I liked it so much that we decided to ask for permission to paint the ceiling.
t: Heh, reminds me of the time when Calvin decides to jump off the roof and Hobbes asks if he’d asked his mother. Calvin replies, something like, “Questions I know the answers to I don’t need to ask, right?” He hoped to use his blanket as a parachute and ends up crash-landing in his mom’s rose bushes.
B: I don’t remember most of my early strips now, but yeah, that sounds right. In this case, the housing director okayed it as long as I returned the ceiling to its original state at the end of the semester. And that’s exactly what I did. I find pursuing such seemingly futile exercises often yields surprising results.

t: So is that how the strip originated? From you going down a path of folly?
B: You can say that. . . it’s a slightly convoluted story.
t: All right!
B: During those five boring years, I used to send about a month’s worth of comic strips to the major syndicates. Calvin and Hobbes were actually minor characters in a strip idea I submitted. United Features liked them and suggested developing a strip centered about them. They had the same relationship in that strip as the one I crystallized in Calvin and Hobbes—Hobbes came alive in Calvin’s imagination. Calvin played a supporting role as the major character’s little brother, and though I too found them to be the funniest characters, I shied at creating a strip entirely about them, thinking that the humor came from the interaction between this odd pair and the normal characters in the rest of the strip.
With United’s initial encouragement, I proceeded and created the strip, and I had fun doing it since the characters clicked. Then they rejected it. I sent it around, Universal thought it had potential so I drew another month’s worth of strips, and they accepted it.
t: The syndicate that suggested the strip declined it? Boy, they must have felt like the guy who decided the Beatles had no future. . .
B: Yeah, I still don’t know to this day what went wrong. I think their sales personnel couldn’t sell it to their higher ups. I was offered a chance for reconsideration if I added Robotman to the strip.
t: What?
B: Look, I don’t want to disparage United. They were the first to listen to me in the industry. But here they thought up a character that could be sold as television shows and toys, and wanted me to insert it into Calvin’s world. They didn’t much care how—Robotman just had to be a major character. United essentially wanted to take over at the helm, guiding the direction of the strip.
t: Ah. What you call ‘cartooning by committee.’
B: Yeees. I struggled with the decision for a while; I realized that if I agreed to their offer, I would return to that basement, writing ad jingles to sell a cartoon character instead of groceries and cars this time.
t: Thankfully you held on to the reins, and Universal gave the strip a chance.
B: And I think we were both surprised when it stuck.
t: I think you underestimate the appeal. Or perhaps the comic reading public had gotten bored of the same old thing in the comic pages.
B: Mmmaybeeee. . . but I wonder if it was luck. . . whatever it was, I mostly enjoyed the decade I got out of it.

At this point, the hard rock band on stage launched into a fast and furious rendition of pure noise that they called Big Bottom. Someone in the stage crew had turned the volume up to 11 by mistake, and couldn’t get the sliders to work to decrease the sound pressure. Conversation proved futile, so we watched the longhaired band members gyrating on the stage until the sound problem got fixed.

t: Oookayy. . . let’s move on to the first treasury book. . .

part 1 of 5
2 http://www.epinions.com/content_47177240196
3 http://www.epinions.com/content_47078936196
4 http://www.epinions.com/content_47052066436
5 Find it. here should be enough clues.

Calvin and Hobbes
Foreword by Garry Trudeau
Collects daily strips from 11/18/85 – 8/17/86
Contains a few extra drawings of various characters

trivia: The 11/28/85 strip (Calvin ordering pizza after being sent to his room from the dinner table) shown in the book did not run on all the newspapers carrying the strip.

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

rosaphile
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-1499-6777457-3959FE9A-prod1
thom413
http://www.epinions.com/content_30223928964

t-edication

For MSP, a.k.a. Hobbes in southern mufti.

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, 11.08, 11.15-8
11.20.01
Edited to add links to some of the parts