Bill Watterson est un auteur américain de bandes dessinées à l’origine de la série «Calvin & Hobbes». Lauréat du Grand Prix d’Angoulême en 2014, le personnage détonne autant par son intégrité artistique à toute épreuve (il a refusé qu’on exploite son travail pour créer des produits dérivés), que pour sa très grande discrétion. Les seuls témoignages que j’ai pu trouver de lui se résument à deux préfaces: l’une rédigée à l’occasion de l’édition intégrale regroupant ses dix années de strips, et l’autre présente en introduction d’un recueil sorti à l’occasion du dixième anniversaire de son œuvre (le «Tenth Anniversary Book», publié en 1995 chez Time Warner Books) dont il sera question ici.
Dans les premières pages de cet ouvrage, Watterson présente entre autres la situation du comic-strip américain à l’aube des années 2000, en quoi il considère cette manière de faire de la BD comme un «médium d’expression» à part entière, la question épineuse de l’exploitation commerciale de l’art…
Je prends l’initiative de partager l’ensemble de ce rare témoignage (en deux parties, en raison de sa longueur), tiré d’un livre depuis longtemps épuisé, pour celles et ceux que cela intéresserait. Et ce en version originale, car je n'ai trouvé ni le courage ni le temps de le traduire à l'heure actuelle. Mes excuses donc aux non-anglophones (mettez-vous à l'anglais, pauvres fous!). M.Neuhnk

Note : je ne détiens aucun droit sur l'image qui ouvre l'article, ni sur le long texte qui suivra cet avertissement. Je le mets à dispositions du public dans un cadre purement didactique (fair-use).

THE COMICS IN TRANSITION

Comics are a wonderfully versatile medium. With the potent combination of words and pictures, the comic strip can depict anything a cartoonist has the imagination to envision.
Of course, the newspaper business put severe constraints on comic strips. Comics are produced on an inflexible daily deadline and are given very little space for writing or drawing. Moreover, because comics are frequently assumed to be children’s entertainment, and because comics must attract a huge and diverse readership to be profitable, there are editorial constraints as well: controversial subjects and opinions are rarely tolerated. The commercial, mass-market needs of newspapers are not often sympathetic to the concerns of artistic expression.
It is difficult for a new strip to get into newspapers, and few strips survive long even then. Newspapers already have their comics pages filled with popular strips, and the only way for a paper to bring in a new strip is to dump an old strip. The new strip must quickly establish itself in the hearts of readers, or it’s the first one to go when another new strip comes along. The competition far exceeds the avalaible spaces, and the results are Darwinian.
The top strips, however, can go on decade after decade, Blondie has been in the papers for sixty-five years, and Beetle Bailey, Dennis The Menace, and Peanuts are all in their forties. Even Doonesbury has been around for twenty-five years-that is to say, a quarter of the comics’ entire existence. There is very little turnover as the top of this business. The most popular strips become institutions and can hold their spaces in papers for generations.
I think the permanence of familiar strips and the lack of change within the strips account for much of their popularity. In a newspaper full of surprising horrors, it’s a comforting little ritual to see our favorite characters each morning for a few seconds over coffee. They become friends of sorts. We care about them when they’re in trouble, and we count on them to look at life with a slightly amusing twist that may even help us do the same. They are there for us sevend days a week, year after year.
Adding to that consistency, comic characters typically stay the same age and maintain the same appearance (often right down to the same outfit every day), no matter how things change in the real world. In most strips, certain predictable events and situations recur frequently with only minor variations. In most strips, every story can be expected to end with the characters right back where they began. In most strips, the regular cast is unvarying. The world of a comic strip is simple and enduring, a tiny oasis of stability in a mixed-up, everchanging world.
Or, at least they used to be. Lately, more strips have been addressing controversial subjects, and there have been sabbaticals, early retirements, size and formats demands, and fights over issues of creative control. Some commentators (including a few cartoonists) explain these recent events as the self-indulgent tantrums of the profession’s nine-hundred-pound gorillas, but I believe these critics are missing the bigger picture. On the hundredth anniversary of the American newspaper comic strip, the comics are in a period of major transition.
The first transition is a simple one: the comics are beginning one of their rare generation shifts. When a popular strip can easily last forty or fifty years, the top cartoonists define the profession that long. Cartoonists who started in the 1950s and 1960s changed the direction of the comic strip and have set the standards ever since. Recently, new talents have worked their ways to the top ranks, bringing along some different ideas about what cartooning should be.
The second transition is one of artistic interpretation. Over the course of the last century, the line between commercial art and fine art has been greatly blurred. Whereas original comic strip drawings were once given away to fans or were destroyed to save storage space, today original cartoons are sold in galleries for hundreds or thousands of dollars. Whereas cartoonists were once considered replaceable workers, now -in certains cases- syndicates are recognizing that unique vision.
Academics now write about the comics as social history and commentary. There are several cartoon collections and museums. Comics have been awarded Pulitzer prizes. Whether or not most comics are Great Art can be debated, but there is no denying that cartoonists and the public take the comics more seriously than they used to. Increasingly, cartoonists are regarding their creations as a form of personal expression. Issues of creative control are becoming relevant to cartoonists, and old assumptions about the way business is conducted are being questioned.
Third, the newspaper business itself is changing. The comics were invented in the late 1800s, when large cities had as many as a half-dozen newspapers, each trying to attract the readership of huge new immigrant populations. The comics were visual, easy to understand; funny, boisterous, and lowbrow by design and hence immediately popular. Cartoonist had few pretentions about the artistic or cultural significance of their work. From the beginning, the comics were regarded as a commercial product that existed for the purpose of increasing newspaper readership. Cartoonists considered themselves newspapermen, not artists. Their job, pure and simple, was to help sell newspapers.

Since that time: - Syndicates have turned comics into big business: At first, cartoonists were hired by individual newspapers to produce comics exclusively for that paper. Today, cartoonists work for syndicates that sell their strips to newspapers worldwide. That means a strip today needs very broad appeal. Whereas the early cartoonists experimented, starting and stopping strips as their interests changed and discovering what appealed to the local audience along the way, syndication has encouraged the calculated production of strips to mirror trends and capitalize on the specific interests of desirable demographic groups. Marketing strips on a large scale encourages comics to be conservative, easily categorized, and imitative of previous successes. The comics have gained immense readerships and have become very profitable this way, but at some cost to the comics’ early exuberance. - There is now much less newspaper competition: Each big city used to have several papers battling each other for readers, and a well-liked comic strip could dramatically help a paper’s circulation. Popular strips would go to the highest bidding newspaper, and the other papers would scramble to buy other strips that might help them compete. Today, most cities have just one newspaper, and the surviving paper can have any strip it wants. It will obviously buy the most popular strips, and without other papers to grab other strips, the big strips get huge, and the small strips play musical chairs and vanish. There is little room anymore for a peculiar «cult» strip with a small but devoted following. There are fewer openings for new strips, fewer opportunities for marginal strips to survive, and there is less time for a strip to find its audience. - Television have replaced newspapers as the source of most people’s information: Newspaper production costs have gone up, circulations have not, and some of the big advertising accounts have abandonned newspapers. A comic strip might once have lured readers from one newspaper to another, but comics don’t lure people away from televisions. The comics are less helpful to newspapers than they used to be. They cram more strips into less space forcing cartoonists to write and draw more simply to stay legible. With fewer words and cruder drawings, the comics become less imaginative and less entertaining. The irony of this is that newspapers are desperate to attract readers reared on the visual impact of television. Papers have spent a lot of money to improve layouts and add colorful maps, charts, and photographs, while the comics –the one graphic feature unique to newspapers– typically languish on a single page of tiny black-and-white boxes arranged in a boring grid. By unimaginatively imposing standardized, reduced formats on all comics, papers give the comics cost-efficient space, not graphically effective space.
Because of these developpments, the traditional relationship between cartoonist, syndicate, and newspaper has been strained. As circumstances change, each party tries to protect its own interests. Newspapers are trimming costs by cutting space and features. Syndicates respond by diversifying into licensing and publishing. The top cartoonists are demanding greater control over their work, and some are leaving the business altogether. With fewer common goals and needs, there is less trust and cooperation.
As a cartoonist who’s done his share of aggravating the situation, it seems to me that good comics are in the interest of readers, newspapers, syndicates, and cartoonists. Yet the best strips of the past would have a tough time in newspapers today. The esoteric but brilliant Krazy Kat, barely marketable in its own day, would be hard pressed to find a publisher willing to champion its unique vision today. Adventure strips like Terry And The Pirates would be unlikely to sweep readers into their exotic stories now that beautiful illustration is stifled by the little boxes avalaible to strips. Popeye relied on up to twenty panels on Sunday to create its raucous energy, a sheer impossibility in today’s quarter-page Sunday slots. Continuous «soap opera» strips are all but gone now, unable to keep their plots gripping with the reduction of dialogue necessary in small panels. The comics are losing their variety.
Sixty years ago, the best strips weren’t just amusingly drawn, they were beautiful to look at. I can’t think of a single strip today that comes close to that standard of craftsmanship. Now we have plenty of simply drawn gag strips, but not much else. We’ve lost an essential part of what makes comics fun to read. As animated cartoons and comics books are becoming more sophisticated, more lavishly produced, and more popular than ever, newspaper comic strips are enervated.
I’ve heard it argued that today’s readers do not have the patience for involved storylines and rich artwork in comics anymore. Popularity polls are cited to show that comics are doing just fine the way they are. I disagree and think it’s a mistake to underestimate reader’s appetite for quality. The comics can be much more than they presently are. Better strips could attract larger audiences, and this would help newspapers. The comic’s potential –as a seller of newspapers, and as an art form– is great if cartoonists challenge themselves te create extraordinary work and if the business will work to create a sustaining environment for it.

LICENSING

Comic strips have been licensed from the beginning, but today the merchandising of popular cartoon characters is more profitable than ever. Derivative products -dolls, Tshirts, TV specials, and son on- can turn the right strip into a gold mine. Everyone is looking for the next Snoopy or Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes were imagined to be the perfect candidates. The more I thought about licensing, however, the less I liked it. I spent nearly five years fighting my syndicate’s pressure to merchandise my creation.
In an age of shameless commercialism, my objections to licensing are not widely shared. Many cartoonists view the comic strip as a commercial product itself, so they regard licensing as a natural extension of their work. As most people ask, what’s wrong with comic strip characters appearing on calendars and coffee mugs ? If people want to buy the stuff, why not give it to them ?
I have several problems with licensing.
First of all, I believe licensing usually cheapens the original creation. When cartoon characters appear on countless products, the public inevitably grows bored and irritated with them, and the appeal and value of the original work are diminished. Nothing dulls the edge of a new and clever cartoon like saturating the market with it.
Second, commercial products rarely respect how a comic strip works. A wordy, multiple-panel strip with extended conversation and developped personalities does not condense to a coffee mug illustration without great violation to the strip’s spirit. The subtleties of a multi-dimensional strip are sacrificed for the one-dimensional needs of the product. The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life. I don’t want some animation studio giving Hobbes an actor’s voice, and I don’t want some greeting card company using Calvin to wish people a happy anniversary, and I don’t want the issue of Hobbe’s reality settled by a doll manufacturer. When everything fun and magical is turned into something for sale, the strip’s world is diminished. Calvin and Hobbes was designed to be a comic strip and that’s all I want it to be. It’s the one place where everything works the way I intend it to.
Third, as a practical matter; licensing requires a staff of assistants to do the work. The cartoonist must become a factory foreman, delegating responsabilities and overseeing the production of things he does not create. Some cartoonists don’t mind this, but I went into cartooning to draw cartoons, not to run a corporate empire. I take great pride in the fact that I write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration myself. My strip is a low-tech, one-man operation, and I like it that way. I believe it’s the only way to preserve the craft and to keep the strip personal. Despite what some cartoonists say, approving someone else’s work is not the same as doing it yourself.
Beyond all this, however, lies a deeper issue: the corruption of a strip’s integrity. All strips are supposed to be entertaining, but some strips have a point of view and a serious purpose behind the jokes. When the cartoonist is trying to talk honestly and seriously about life, then I believe he has responsability to think beyond satisfying the market’s every whim and desire. Cartoonists who think they can be taken seriously as artists while using the strip’s protagonists to sell boxer shorts are deluding themselves.
The world of comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize or will admit. Believable characters are hard to develop and easy to destroy. When a cartoonist licences his characters, his voice is co-opted by the business concerns of toy makers, television producers, and advertisers. The cartoonist’s job is no longer to be an original thinker; his job is to keep his characters profitable. The characters become «celebrities», endorsing companies and products, avoiding controversy, and saying whatever someone will pay them to say. At that point, the strip has no soul. With its integrity gone, a strip loses its deeper significance.
My strip is about private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships. Who would believe in the innocence of a little kid and his tiger if they cashed in on their popularity to sell overpriced knickknacks that nobody needs? Who would trust the honesty of the strip’s observations when the characters are hired out asadvertising hucksters? If I were to undermine my own characters like this, I would have taken the rare privilege of being paid to express my own ideas and given it up to be an ordinary salesman and hired illustrator. I would have sold out my own creation. I have no use for that kind of cartooning.
Unfortunately, the more popular Calvin and Hobbes became, the less control I had over its fate. I was presented with licensing possibilities before the strip was even a year old, and the pressure to capitalize on its success mounted from then on. Succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest expectations had only inspired wilder expectations.
To put the problem simply, trainloads of money were at stake –millions and millions of dollars could be made with a few signatures. Syndicates are businesses, and no business passes up that kind of opportunity without an argument.
Undermining my position, I had signed a contract giving my syndicate all exploitation rights to Calvin and Hobbes into the next century. Because it is virtually impossible to get into daily newspapers without a syndicate, it is standard practice for syndicates to use their superior bargaining position to demand rights they neither need nor deserve when contracting with unknown cartoonists. The cartoonist has few alterntaives to the syndicate’s terms: he can take his work elsewhere on the unlikely chance that a different syndicate would be more inclined to offer concessions, he can self-syndicate and attempt to attract the interest of newspapers without the benefit of reputation or contrats, or he can go back home and find some other job. Universal would not sell my strip to newspaper unless I gave the syndicate the right to merchandise the strip in other media. At the time, I had not thought much about licensing and the issue was not among my top concerns. Two syndicates had already rejected Calvin and Hobbes. Eager for the opportunity to publish my work, I signed the contract, and it was not until later, when the pressure to commercialize focused my opinions on the matter, that I understood the trouble I’d gotten myself into.
I had no legal recourse to stop the syndicate from licensing. The syndicate preferred to have my cooperation, but my approval was by no means necessary. Our arguments with each other grew more bitter as the stakes got higher, and we had an ugly relationship for several years.
The debate had its ridiculous aspects. I am probably the only cartoonist who resented the popularity of his own strip. Most cartoonists are more than eager for the exposure, wealth, and prestige that licensing offers. When cartoonists fight their syndicates, it’s usually to make money, not less. And making the whole issue even more absurd, when I didn’t licence, bootleg Calvin and Hobbes merchandise sprung up to feed the demand. Mall stores openly sold T-shirts with drawings illegally lifted from my books, and obscene or drug-related shirts were rife on college campuses. Only thieves and vandals have made money on Calvin and Hobbes merchandise.
For years, Universal pressured me to compromise on a «limited» licensing program. The syndicate would agree to rule out the most offensive products if I would agree to along with the rest. This would be, in essence, my only shot at controlling what happened to my work. The idea of bartering principles was so offensive to me and I refused to compromise. For that matter, the syndicate and I had nothing to trade anyway: It didn’t care about my notions of artistic integrity. With neither of us valuing what the other had to offer, compromise was impossible. One of us was going to trample the interests of the other.
By the strip’s fifth year, the debate had gone as far as I could possibly go, and I prepared to quit. If I could not control what Calvin and Hobbes stood for, the strip was worthless to me. My contract was so one-sided that quitting would have allowed Universal to replace me with hired writers and artists and licence my creation anyway, but at this point, the syndicate agreed to renegociate my contract. The exploitation rights to the strip were returned to me, and I will not licence Calvin and Hobbes.

SABBATICALS

I never expected, much less demanded, time off from the strip, but exhausted and disgusted after the licensing fight, I readily accepted the syndicat’s offer of two nine-month sabbaticals. By taking them within three years of each other, I became the Lazy Cartoonist poster boy, but in fact, I am not a big advocate of long breaks, or for that matter, of reruns.
Garry Trudeau and Gary Larson had previously taken sabbaticals, so I became the third cartoonist to announce a long break from the strip. Some other cartoonists have publicly denounced these vacations as unnecessary and self-undulgent. I find these criticisms incredibly presumptous. Some cartoonist can meet their own standards of quality and be on the golf course by noon, but that’s not the case for everyone. In my opinion, any creative person can be forgiven some occasional time off to recharge the batteries and pursue other interests.
That said, sabbaticals definitely strain the cartoonist’s relationship with newspaper editors and readers. Reruns are tedious, and after several months of them, there is always the risks that readers will break their habit of reading the strip and discover that they don’t miss it. Editors, of course, don’t like paying for the same material twice, and with such limited space for comics and great competition among new strips, an editor can hardly be blamed for dropping the reruns and substituting a fresher strip. To justify their place in the newspaper, the reruns have to be more popular than the other strips available as a replacement. This is one reason why there will never be many sabbaticals.
A better solution, obviously, is periodic short vacations. To its credit, the last year Universal Press Syndicate offered all its cartoonists four weeks off each year. Each cartoonist can decide for himself the need for time off and the risk of stopping the strip. With more frequent breaks, cartoonists may be able to preserve their sanity without long sabbaticals, and readers and editors will undoubtedly find shorter periods of reruns less irritating. I think this is more reasonable all around.

THE SUNDAY STRIP

The format for Sunday strips is a rigid one, and as Calvin and Hobbes became more visually complex, I found that I could not design the strip to the story's best advantage. I would often need to eliminate dialogue or simplify the drawings so they’d fit in the arbitrary space the format alloted. At times, this threatened to ruin the idea, and it frequently made for an ugly, graceless strip. It aggravated me to think that I could draw a better strip than my readers were seeing, so I took advantage of my first sabbatical to propose a newly designed Sunday strip.
The prevailing Sunday format was invented to standardize comic strip layouts so as to give newspapers the utmost flexibility in printing them. The strip is drawn in three rows. Printed full size, this will fill half a newspaper page. Most papers are reluctant to run a strip that big, so they remove the top row of panels, which makes the strip take up only a third of a page. Because the cartoonist cannot count on readers seeing the top panels, he must waste them on «throw-away» gags that have little to do with the rest of the strip. To make the strip smaller still, editors can reduce the panels and line them up in two rows, so the strip takes only a quarter of a page. Some papers cut and reduce even more, at which point the strip is virtually illegible. To neatly accomodate all these variations, the panel divisions are specific and unyielding. The strip will fit the different space needs of different newspapers this way, but the cartoonist loses the ability to design his strip effectively.
Before all this, up until the 1940s, a Sunday strip often filled an entire newspaper page. I don’t think it’s coincidental that this was the «golden age» of comics. With all that space to fill, cartoonists produced works of extraordinary beauty and power. There has been nothing remotely like them since. It seemed to me that if readers in the 1990s were given a glimpse of what they’ve been missing, they might read the comics with more interest, and this would benefit newspapers. I believed I could offer newspapers a better cartoon for their money.
Universal agreed to sell my strip exclusively as a half-page feature with no panel restrictions. I was thrilled, but the syndicate warned me that many newspaper would balk at being told they couldn’t reduce and rearrange my work anymore. We talked in terms of losing half my Sunday client list, but I figured it would be worth the loss in income if I could work at the limits of my abilities for a change.
The syndicate was right: a number of editors were enraged. They threw syndicate sales people out of their offices and inundated Universal with cancellation threats.
Editors informed me that cartoonists had no business making space decisions on their behalf. They reminded me that newspaper space was expensive and the industry was struggling already. They worried what ridiculous demands would come next if this became a precedent. They pointed out that they had just paid for nine months of reruns. They argued that, so long as they paid for the strip, it should serve their needs, not mine. They questionned my familiarity with the real world and wondered if my ego had any boundaries at all. They threatened to cancel other Universal features in wholesale retaliation. They insisted that other popular strips would have to be canceled to make room for mine and that this was unconscionable grab for more of the newspaper. On this last point, several cartoonists joined in.
I was sorry to see that none of these objections addressed the issue of the graphic needs of comic strips. I also thought it was a curious oversight that no one bothered to ask what newspaper readers thought of a larger Sunday Calvin and Hobbes.
I still believe that the editors’ response was poorly reasoned and absurdly hot-tempered. I was in no way telling editors what to do. I was simply establishing the condition upon which I would sell my work, just as one sets a price. If an editor found my conditions unacceptable, he was perfectly free to cancel my strip and run something else. Any pressure he felt to take my strip came from his paper’s readers, not from me, and I do not apologize for offering papers a popular strip.
I also believe that with a little imagination, most Sunday comic sections could be redesigned to run one half-page strip without dumping others. Moreover, I expected my strip would be canceled in many papers, and that would have opened those spaces to other cartoonists.
And as for my sinister motives and my insensibility to the newspaper industry’s struggles, I can only argue that I was willing to do more work for less income, and I could easily have gotten more freedom and more money by abandoning newspapers altogether and publishing elsewhere.
With a firestorm of ill will directed at the syndicate, Universal compromised on the size issue and offered the strip two ways: as the half-page and as a much reduced version of the same thing. I was disappointed, but this still freed me from the panel constraints of the old format. I do not have to waste any panels on throw-away gags and I can design the space more effectively, even if the whole strip strip is ultimately reduced. Very few papers canceled, but many took the smaller strip. In some cases, this means Calvin and Hobbes actually lost space.
Despite that setback, with this new format I’ve drawn many strips I never could have drawn before. In some of my new Sunday strips, I’ve been able to draw large panels or as many as twenty small panels, and that has opened up new ways of storytelling. I do many wordless Sunday strips now, because the drawings can finally hold their own. I think I’ve been able to make Calvin’s world more vivid, and I think I’ve made the space more exciting to look at. These are not esoteric concerns, these are what make a comic strip fun to read.
Over the last several decades, comic strips have been reduced and reduced and reduced. Cartoonists have acquiesced, believing that cutting everyone’s size is better than cutting the number of strips a paper will print. Up to a point, that’s true, but I think the reductions have now gone so far as to take a serious toll on the art. The possibilities for expression are diminishing, and as a consequence, we don’t have well-drawn comics any more. It’s hard for me to argue that maintaining the quantity of comics is a reasonable substitute for maintaining their quality.





INFLUENCES

Three comic strips have been tremendously inspirational to me: Peanuts by Charles Schulz, Pogo by Walt Kelly, and Krazy Kat by George Herriman. These strips have very different sensibilities, but they’ve helped me discover what a comic strip can do. Peanuts books were among the first things I ever read, and once I saw them, I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist. I instantly related to the flat, spare drawings, the honesty of the children’s insecurity, and to Snoopy’s bizarre and separate world. At the time, I didn’t appreciate how innovative all that was –I just knew it had a kind of humor and truth that other strips lacked. Now when I reread the old books, I’m amazed at what a melancholic comic strip it was in the '60s. Surely no other strip has presented a world so relentlessly cruel and heartless. Charlie Brown’s self-torture in the face of constant failure is funny in a bitter, hopelessly sad way. I think the most important thing I learned from Peanuts is that a comic strip can have an emotional edge to it and that it can talk about the big issues of life in a sensitive and perceptive way.
Pogo, in some ways, is the opposite of Peanuts. Whereas Peanuts is a visually spare strip about private insecurities, Pogo was a lushly drawn strip, full of bombast and physical commotion. The strip’s dialogue was a stew of dialect, pun, and nonsense, and word balloons were often filled with gothic type or circus poster letters to suggest the character’s personnailty and voice. With the possible exception of Porkypine, there was not a soul-searching character in a cast of dozens. The drawings were beautifully animated and the stories wandered down back roads, got lost, and forgot their destinations. Kelly’s animals satirized the day’s politics, back when comics were expected to avoid controversy altogether. Beneath the chaos and bluster though, the strip had a basic faith in human decency and an optimism for bumbling through. Pogo had a pace and an atmosphere that will probably never be seen again. The strip is a wonderful lesson in what a lively, rich world the comics can present.
It is Krazy Kat, however, that fills me with the the most awe today. Krazy Kat is more poetic than funny, with a charm that’s impossible to describe. Everything about the strip is idiosyncratic and peculiar –the wonderful scratchy drawings, the bold design and color of the Sunday strips, the kooky, austere Arizona landscapes, and the bizarre conglomeration of Spanish, slang, literary allusion, dialect, and mispronunciation that makes up the dialogue. The circular plot, such as it is, can be interpreted (and over-interpreted) as an allegory about good and evil, love and hate, society and individual… or it can simply be enjoyed for its lunatic machinery. For me, the magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but how its says it. In a singular, uncompromised vision, its subtle whimsy and its odd beauty, Krazy Kat stands alone.
Other cartoonists and artists have inspired me as well, but these three strips shaped my idea of what a comic strip could be. All the strips work on several levels, entertaining while they deal with bigger issues of life. Most important, these strips reflect uniquely personal views of the world. They argue that comics can be vehicles for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression. They set the example I wanted to follow.
The challenge of any cartoonist is not just to duplicate the achievements of the past, but to build on them as well. Comic strips have a short history, but their traditions are important. Cartoonists learn about cartooning by reading cartoons. Unfortunately, the history of comics is not very accessible. Popular strips were not regularly collected in books until very recently. Peanuts and Pogo collections are often difficult to find and are increasingly expensive. Krazy Kat still has not been adequately published in book form. It has only been in the last few years that I’ve seen any extended runs of the true classics of the medium. Early strips are amazing –some are far more inventive than today’s –but they can’t educate future cartoonists if they’re not collected and republished. Sometimes I wonder what strips would be like if every generation didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

THE PROCESS

I think I learned to be a writer so I could draw for a living. Actually, I enjoy writing as much as drawing, but working on a deadline, the drawing is easier and faster.
People always ask how cartoonists come up with ideas, and the answer is so boring that we’re usually tempted to make up something sarcastic. The truth is, we hold a blank sheet of paper, stare into space, and let our minds wander. (To the layman, this looks remarkably like goofing off) When something interests us, we play around with it. Sometimes this yields a funny observation; sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s about all there is to it. Once in a while the cartoonist will find himself in a beam of light and angels will appear with a great idea, but not often.
Occasionnally, I’ll have a subject or issue in mind that I want to talk about, but if I don’t have a ready topic, I try to think of what I’d like to draw. My goal is to feel enthusiastic about some aspect of the work. I think one can always tell when an artist is engaged and having a good time: the energy and life comes through in the work. I like to sit outside when I write, partly because it seems less like a job that way, and partly because there are bugs and birds and rocks around that may suggest an idea, so my writing schedule varies a great deal. Sometimes I can write several strips in an afternoon; sometimes I can’t write anything at all. I never know if another hour sitting there will be wasted time or the most productive hour of the day.
When I come up with a topic, I look at it through Calvin’s eyes. Calvin’s personnality dictates a range of possible reactions to any subject, so I just tag along and see what he does. The truth of the matter is that my character write their own material. I put them in situations and listen to them. A line for Hobbes never works for Calvin or Susie, because Hobbes reacts differently and he expresses himself in a different voice. Virtually all the strip’s humor comes from the characters’ personnalities: I would never think of Calvin’s retort if Calvin weren’t the one saying it.
I write my ideas in an ordinary school notebook. I spend a lot of time fussing with the wording, juggling the various concerns of timing, clarity, brevity, and so on. I write in pencil, and go through erasers at an alarming rate. Once I bang an idea into form, I make a small doodle of the characters to give the strip a rough outline. My purpose at this point is mostly to show who’s speaking each line, but I try to suggest gestures and rough compositions, so I will think about the idea in visual terms when it comes time to ink it up. I reevaluate the roughs over several days, when I’m fresher and more objective. Often the writing needs more work, and sometimes I just cross the whole thing out. On occasion, I’ve ripped up entire stories –weeks of material– that I didn’t think were good. Obviously, if I’m right on the deadline, that kind of editing becomes a luxury, so I try to write well ahead of due dates. It’s very embarrassing to send out a strip I think is bad, so I like a long lead time and, given the need to fill newspaper space every day, I weed out as much mediocre work as possible.
After I have about thirty daily strips, I show them to my wife. She can usually intuit what I’m trying to say, even when I don’t get it right, so she’s a good editor and a pretty accurate Laugh-o-meter. After reworking or scrapping weak strips, I ink up the ones I like.
I typically ink six daily strips, or one Sunday strip, in a long day. I’d enjoy the inking more if I could take more time, but I need to draw efficiently in order to gain back the time lost writing bad ideas. I lightly pencil in the dialogue first as that determines the space left for drawing. Next, I sketch in the characters very loosely, establishing the composition of each panel. I frequently make revisions, so I use a light pencil and I erase as needed. If the picture is unusually complex, I’ll render the difficult parts completely, but generally, I try to do as little pencil work as possible. That way, the inking stays spontaneous and fun, because I’m not simply tracing pencil lines. Inking mistakes and accidents are whited out.
I draw the strip with a small sable brush and waterproof India ink on Strathmore bristol board. I letter the dialogue with a Rapidograph fountain pen, and I use a crowquill pen for odds and ends. It’s about as low-tech as you can get.
The Sunday strips also need to be colored.This is a time-consuming and rather tedious task, but the color is an integral part of my Sunday strip, so I think it’s important to choose all the colors myself. (Foreign collections of my work are sometimes recolored, and the results rarely please me.) When I first started Calvin and Hobbes, there were 64 colors available for Sunday strips; now we have 125 colors, as well as the ability to fade colors in each other. The colors are incremental percentage combinations of red, yellow and blue, and we have a pretty good range, although I wish there were more pale colors. Each color has a number, so I color my strip on an overlay, and mark this corresponding numbers. The syndicate sends this to American Color, a company that processes all the Sunday comics into color negatives for newspaper printing.
After a batch of strips is inked and colored, I send them to the syndicate, where my editor corrects my spelling and my grammar, and looks for anything offensive. A copyright sticker is affixed and the strip is printed up and sent to suscribing newspapers. Then I start writing again.

THE CAST

Calvin: Calvin is named for a sixteen-century theologian who believed in predestination. Most people assume that Calvin is based on a son of mine, or based on detailed memories of my own childhood. In fact, I don’t have children, and I was a fairly, quiet, obedient kid –almost Calvin’s opposite. One of the reason that Calvin’s character is fun to write is that I often don’t agree with him.
Calvin is autobiographical in the sense that he thinks about the same issues that I do, but in this, Calvin reflects my adulthood more than my childhood. Many of Calvin’s struggles are metaphors for my own. I suspect that most of us get old without growing up, and that inside every adult (sometimes not very far inside) is a bratty kid who wants everything his own way. I use Calvin as an outlet for my immaturity, as a way to keep myself curious about the natural world, as a way to ridicule my own obsessions, and as a way to comment on human nature. I wouldn’t want Calvin in my house, but on paper, he helps me sort through my life and understand it.

Hobbes: Named after a seventeenth-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature, Hobbes has the patient dignity and common sense of most animals I’ve met. Hobbes was very much inspired by one of our cats, a gray tabby named Sprite. Sprite not only provided the long body and facial characteristics for Hobbes, she also was the model for his personnality. She was a good-natured, intelligent, friendly, and enthusiastic in a sneaking-up-and-pouncing sort of way. Sprite suggested the idea of Hobbes greeting Calvin at the door in midair at high velocity.
With most cartoon animals, the humor comes from their human-like behavior. Hobbes stands upright and talks of course, but I try to preserve his feline side, both in his physical demeanor and his attitude. His reserve and tact seem very catlike to me, along with his barely contained pride in not being human. Like Calvin, I often prefer the company of animals to people, and Hobbes is my idea of an ideal friend.
The so-called «gimmick» of my strip –the two versions of Hobbes– is sometimes misunderstood. I don’t think of Hobbes as a doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin’s around. Neither do I think of Hobbes as the product of Calvin’s imagination. The nature of Hobbes’ reality really doesn’t interest me, and each story goes out of its way to avoid resolving the issue. Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I thinks that’s how life works. None of us sees the sorld in exactly the same way, and I just draw that literally in the strip. Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality than about dolls coming to life.

Calvin’s parents: I’ve never given Calvin’s parents names, because as far as the strip is concerned, they are only important as Calvin’s mom and dad. Calvin’s dad has been rumored to be a self-portrait. All my characters are half me, so it’s true in some ways, but Calvin’s dad is also partly a satire of my own father. Any strip about suffering, «builds character» is usually a verbatim transcript of my dad’s explanations for why we were all freezing, exhausted, hungry, and lost on camping trips. These things are a lot funnier after twenty-five years have passed.
Calvin’s mom is the daily disciplinarian, a job that taxes her sanity, so I don’t think we get to see at her best. I regret that the strip mostly shows her impatient side, but I try to hint at other aspects of her personality and her interests by what she’s doing when Calvin barges in.
Early on, Calvin’s parents were criticised by readers for being unloving and needlessly sarcastic. (Calvin’s dad has remarked that what he really wanted was a dog) At the time, I think it was unusual for a comic strip to concentrate on the exasperating aspects of kids without a lot of hugs and sentimentality to leaven it. We usually only see Calvin’s parents when they’re reacting to Calvin, so as secondary characters. I’ve tried to keep them realistic, with a reasonnable sense of humor about having a kid like Calvin. I think they do a better job than I would.

Susie Derkins: Susie is earnest, serious, and smart –the kind of girl I was attracted to in school and eventually married. «Derkins» was the nickname of my wife’s family beagle. The early strips with Susie were heavy-handed with the love-hate conflict, and it’s taken me a while to get a bead on Susie’s relationship with Calvin. I suspect Calvin has a mild crush on her he expresses by trying to annoy her, but Susie is a bit unnerved and put off by Calvin’s weirdness. This encourages Calvin to be even weirder, so it’s a good dynamic. Neither of them quite understands what’s going on, which is probably true of most relationships. I sometimes imagine a strip from Susie’s point of view would be interesting, and after so many strips about boys, I think a strip about a little girl, drawn by a woman, could be great.

Miss Wormwood: As a few readers guessed, Miss Wormwood is named after the apprentice devil in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. I have a lot of sympathy for Miss Wormwood. We see hints that she’s waiting to retire, that she smokes too much, and that she takes a lot of medication. I think she seriously believes in the value of education, so needless to say, she’s an unhappy person.

Moe: Moe is every jerk I’ve ever known. He’s big, dumb, ugly and cruel. I remember school being full of idiots like Moe. I think they spawn on damp locker room floor.

Rosalyn: Probably the only person Calvin fears is his baby-sitter. I put her in a Sunday strip early on, never thinking of her as a regular character but her intimidation of Calvin surprised me, so she’s made a few appearance since. Rosalyn even seems to daunt Calvin’s parents, using their desperation to get out of their house to demand advances and raises. Rosalyn’s relationship with Calvin is pretty one-dimensional, so baby-sitter stories get harder and harder to write, but for a later addition in the strip, she’s worked pretty well. Bill Watterson