t-p¡n¡•n: Don’t Forget to Pack Bill Watterson’s The Days Are Just Packed in Your Library

Bill Watterson reminded us of a very special type of friendship when he introduced Calvin and Hobbes to the world of daily comics back in November 18, 1985. What kind of friendship do I speak of? Consider:
Calvin and Hobbes watch a bug twist and turn through the air.
C: Bugs fly in such crazy loops and zigzags. I wonder why they don’t get dizzy and barf.
H: Maybe they do!
C: (making a disgusted face) Eww, gross! Ha ha ha! But then why would they keep flying that way?
H (eyes closed in laughter): Maybe bugs like to barf!
C: (hand clapped over eyes, tongue still out in an expression of disgust) EWWWW! They would!! Ha ha ha ha! Blaugh! (walking away together) I tell you, Hobbes, it’s great to have a friend who appreciates an earnest discussion of ideas.

Hobbes is a tiger, so that immediately makes him a good friend. However, Calvin, a whiny loudmouthed stubborn confusing rabble-raising
arrogant
Calvin talking to Hobbes
C: I want to be a one-in-a-million, overnight success! I want the world handed to me on a silver platter!
H (walking away rolling eyes): Good luck.
C: (shouting after Hobbes) Surely you concede I deserve it!
cantankerous belligerent rude inconsiderate short wild disgusting lazy
not the sharpest cookie in the jar
confronted with his mom’s exasperated question: What on earth would make you do something like that? after being found inside the house with a baseball bat and rocks strewn all around, he replies: Poor genetic material? Wrong answer, Einstein.
maniacal obnoxious little doo-doo-brained six-year-old brat, has some issues to work out. For a parental type, finding something to despise in Calvin is easier than falling down. It takes a special friend like Hobbes to uncover the uncommon germ of reluctant goodness in the booger. You will need to peruse this collection of comics (one of seventeen Andrews and McMeel collections featuring the duo) for clues to the depth of their friendship and the troughs to which it can sink.

By some weird stroke of luck, I find myself in the Electric Banana in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, listening¹ to the creator Bill Watterson. Some band called the Abominable Top is spinning around the stage, but I pay them no heed.

t-þoo (t): Let’s get right to it! All of a sudden the books are oversized. Explain.
Bill Watterson (B): I covered this in the tenth anniversary book. I had been struggling with the Universal Features syndicate, trying to prevent licensing of the Calvin and Hobbes strip—I didn’t want any of the characters turning into mannequins modeling the must-have de jour. The wrangling dragged on over years, draining much of my reserves. It got ugly, surreal, often absurd, and finally reached a point where I was ready to quit rather than running a mass merchandising empire.
t: You’d stated that you were probably the only cartoonist displeased by the popularity of his strip.
B: Well, for a few realistic reasons, I felt. The contract battle sucked a lot out of me. Then there was the loss of privacy. . . anyway, at this point, Universal relented, renegotiated my contract, giving me control over my creation.
They also threw in the new half page Sunday format. Though the earlier format offered the same space, it had rigid constraints that I felt stifled the strip. I felt the prescribed layout of the panels prevented me from presenting Calvin’s world as it really appeared to him. And if the daily cartoon editors wanted to cram an extra strip into the page, they could choose to delete the top third of the strip, so I had to make sure whatever I drew up there wasn’t important to the rest of the story.
t: I’d always noticed that the early Sunday strips often started with two or at most three panels that seemed a bit separate from the main story in the rest of the panels, but didn’t know why that happened. You know, I did like the quick one liners you threw in there. They reinforced Calvin’s wisecracking nature. . .
B: There were a few places where I preferred the throwaway joke to the rest of the story, but overall, I felt that I could deliver the better strips if I didn’t have to worry about losing that top third of the strip.
t: And that you did! It looks like you became delirious during this period, trying quite a few things in a short time. You also started using quite a few ‘silent’ Sunday strips.

B: Since I knew that everything I drew within the half page format would now be seen, I went to town. With the extra space, I tried to go back to the essence of cartooning as a visual medium, and so tried to tell some tales without using any words.
t: You got quite imaginative with the panels. There’s one of Hobbes creeping up on and pouncing on Calvin. At the top, we see slices of Hobbes’s body and a closeup of his face before he jumps. The middle third contains several short horizontal ‘freeze frame’ panels of a startled Calvin trying to run away and then bracing for the impact. Then the bottom panels resolve the story neatly. Bah, I can’t really describe it well in words, but it looks great!
B: Thank you. Much of what I learned about panel layout and framing devices came from Krazy Kat’s Herriman. While I enjoyed the scope the new Sunday format allowed, the downside was that I was taking two to three times longer to finish them. But overall, I felt most of them were worth it.
t: Yeeees, I really like the symmetrical layout of the panels where Calvin fills a water balloon and then gives the universe half a minute to give him a sign that dousing Susie with it is wrong. You felt free to create long vertical panels that would’ve been cut off earlier, such as the strip in which a UFO sucks all the air and water from the earth. The text in this strip is another poem. I love your poems, though in that strip you got a bit allegorical—I think your UFO stood for all the polluting industries. . .
B: Perhaps. I don’t remember anymore. I may have been reacting to the Kyoto Protocol. . .

t: Ah well. Stepping away from the Sunday strips, some of my favorite minor recurring themes show up in here: snow sculptures and the household poll of all six-year-olds.
B: I basically used the snow creations to parody artistic pretensions.
t: While I get that part, I just get a kick out of finding out what kooky type of snow art Calvin’s made this time. I discovered early on that I have no talent for doing anything with snow—can’t even make a proper snowball. But Calvin’s snowmen would always make my fingers itch with the desire to emulate his twisted creations. . . I think if I was polled, I’d say my favorite in this book is the line of snowmen saluting his father when he returns home from work.
B: Ah, those household polls were driven by my perception that a large amount of today’s political decisions were based on statistics. You’re aware of Twain’s position on statistics?
t: Yea. And you can probably figure out how to massage the stats to support any position and its polar opposite. . .
B: So the polls are another spoof, of platforms based on untenable statistics. I have Calvin try to influence parental policy by conducting polls with a sample size of one; it just seems like something he’d do.

t: Just like him deciding one day to believe in astrology?
B: Well. . . I guess that was just me clearing out my cynicism on that issue. I’ve always tried to make Calvin and Hobbes reveal a little bit about my thoughts, filtered through Calvin’s mind. But that horoscope story did allow for some nice dialogue and comic situations involving Hobbes and Susie.
t: Calvin and Susie still don’t know what to make of each other.
B: Yeah. . . Susie’s a pretty normal kid, dedicated and driven to succeed. . . maybe that’s how she ended up not being much of a part of the her peer circle. Living in Calvin’s neighborhood, she has to put up with him. He, I believe, must have some form of crush on her just because she does engage him in conversation, albeit grudgingly at times. Susie’s early appearances were a bit top-heavy with this semi-romantic thread.
t: Yea, I remember an early Valentine’s Day strip. . .
B: Later, I think I got better at putting the two together and having their personalities ricochet off each other.
t: And when you throw Hobbes into the mix, hoping for ‘muchas smoochas’ from Susie, which drives Calvin absolutely batty, you’ve got a runaway train. you’ve got some classic storylines in here. Another long one introduces the time machine, which seems to be the duplicator box turned upside down, which of course makes sense in Calvin’s world.
B: I had fun with that story, and such stories kept me going. Discovering nuances within your established characters, experimenting with the strip’s visual representation, such ideas occupied my mind. I found myself more excited than I’d been in the earlier years, knowing that I was stretching myself. . .

t: Huh, that reminds me. . . in an early interview, you commended Bloom County, Doonesbury, & For Better Or For Worse by name for going beyond most cartoons in terms of characterization and storylines. Those strips, along with Wizard of Id were among my favorites when I used to go though newspaper comic sections—well, I read more Outland than Bloom County but anyway.
t: In the same interview, when asked what you thought of Jim Davis, and I quote you: Uh. . . Garfield is. . . (long pause). . . consistent.
B: Um, yeah.
t: Any more comments today?
B: Other than asking who is Jim Davis? Hmmm. . . are you trying to get me into trouble?
t: No, really.
B: Welllll. . . I might go on for a while.
t: That’s all right, go on.

B: Hum. You may have seen studies citing air traffic controllers as having the most stressful occupations. I doubt that whoever organized these studies bothered looking at daily newspaper cartoonists. The best of us, excuse me, I should say the most successful of us have our work viewed daily by many. We command millions of eyes for a few seconds everyday.
Now maybe most of those eyes are satisfied by some quick pun or some three panel visual slapstick. But I think we as cartoonists can offer so much more to make those seconds shoutworthy, truly magical. I know back when I scoured the newspaper for comics, sparks passed between me and the strips I enjoyed greatly. And with Calvin and Hobbes, I tried to return this feeling.
When you have cartoonists who cater to the lowest common denominator, who crank out drivel by the bushel, well. . . I don’t want to condemn. Perhaps he or she has decided cartooning is a job rather than a hobby. . . that isn’t a problem. Perhaps a group of cartoonists have started pandering to the LCD. . . even that is not a big problem—certainly it’s a disappointment. The problem is that the public comes to see their produce, their cookbook creations as the Real Thing. If the public won’t demand more, then others will give up challenging and worthwhile projects, drawn like moths to the fire by the whispers of easy Street. Who knows where that might lead?
But what galls me is when the public associate substandard work with cartooning in general, just because there’s so much of it out there.

Imagine having your occupation so categorically slighted. The images and text on these pages, the squiggles and scribbles, are nothing less than our bread and butter. Certainly gallons of our sweat and tears and not a few drops of blood have gone into these pages! The wholesale relegation of our work, our livelihood, into quick carnival sideshow kiosks providing cheap momentary thrills is nothing short of cruel and callous, yet it seems that anyone daring to describe themselves as a cartoonist is prescribed that fate.
Unfortunately, this unrelenting stigma haunts every scribe who takes pen and paper in hand to create the art form we call cartoons. The artist/writer creating art and entertainment in the cartoon form immediately gets handed the handicap of lowered expectations.
t: Whew! Wouldn’t that make it easy for comic artists to exceed those expectations?
B: You would think so, but the problem occurs when the artists themselves fall for it, never realizing that there’s much more they could do.
t: So, okay, if I mention Scott Adams, what would you say?

A loud bang followed by some screams slapped an exclamation point on Watterson’s lengthy silence. Someone onstage screamed “Not a-gain!” into the microphone. Apparently the band’s drummer had spontaneously combusted. The initial chaos following the event was herded out of the Electric Banana by emergency personnel. A light snow had started to drop, a soft still-fuzzy blanket covering the ground. Wrapping our coats about ourselves in reflex to the chill, we walked into it.

t: I guess we’re running out of time here. Might as well go all the way to the end; I have a fan letter to show you. . .

part 4 of 5
¹ Continued from
http://www.epinions.com/content_47078936196

The Days Are Just Packed
First Calvin and Hobbes book collection in large format to accommodate new Sunday strips
Collects daily strips from 4/11/91 – 5/4/91, 2/2/92 – 11/1/92, 11/8/92

trivia: Watterson’s renegotiated contract with Universal allowed two nine-month sabbaticals. He decided to take his first sabbatical from 5/5/91 – 2/1/92.

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

t-edication

For GAF, a.k.a. Susie Derkins.

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, 11.18-20
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