An Excuse to Write About Calvin & Hobbes

This is a mighty fine find, a collection of Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson's college newspaper cartoons.


It's fun, if a little circular, to find the seeds of that quintessential comic. The quasi-recurring Mr. Groobman character above, for instance, is an obvious Calvin prototype. The clip below is also kin with many a C&H strip:


One of the features of Watterson's art style that I, obliviously, never really picked up on before is his ink technique. He uses shadow not just to add depth, but to determine the shape of objects and figures, which is still fairly novel for newspaper funnies. Instead of a straight outlining of the different shapes, and then using shadows to fill the detail, the shadows are the shapes. The bike, the dark clothing and hair; the way the solid black guides the eye was, even in those early days, a treat.

Watterson later used these techniques to great effect. The C&H Tracer Bullet strips in particular are like a burlesque of Frank Miller's Sin City, before Sin City even existed:


The play of light and shadow even served as the basis of one of Watterson's most clever Sunday strips.



Watterson is famously reclusive, and so I wonder a little what he makes of the devoted fans who have tried to catalogue his artistic obscurities. I actually imagine he doesn't mind all that much; he did after all end Calvin & Hobbes at the height of his powers in order to keep its reputation untarnished. And I'm sure he much prefers his work being collected than anatomized by way of Lacan.

Worn-Out Welcomes

There's not much surprising in this interview with Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson, ostensibly the first since 1989. Watterson made his intentions clear in the 10th Anniversary Collection that he wanted his creation to maintain its integrity, which would have been hard to do if it had been licensed onto every manner of stuffed animal, cartoon, lunchbox, etc. etc. (He didn't name names, but it's patently obvious that he had the odious Garfield in mind.) For that same reason he decided to quit while he was ahead:

This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I've never regretted stopping when I did.

Those who wish Watterson had kept going would be well-advised to compare the last ten years' output of The Simpsons to their mid-1990s heyday. Are we really glad it's still around?