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STRIP COMMENTARIES

The first strip of Calvin and Hobbes was published November 18, 1985. At the time, I thought it was important to establish how Calvin and Hobbes got together, but now I think this was unnecessary.

The look of the strip changed over the years as the drawings evolved to meet the changing needs of the strip. At the very beginning, the strip had a more cartoony, flat look. The fantaisies were originally drawn that way too. At some point I realized that fantasies could be drawn in other styles and, in fact, it added a funny layer to the strip when the fantasies looked more «realistic» than «reality». As fantaisies became more visually complex, I needed the characters to be more three-dimensional, so I could draw them from different perspectives. This gradually changed their appearance.

Over the years, Hobbes got sleeker and more catlike, so he could function either horizontally (sneaking up and pouncing) or vertically (walking). In a few early strips, Hobbes had pads on his hands, similar to the pads on his feet. I liked the pads because they made Hobbes’s hands look more like paws, but they were visually distracting. Hobbes’s hands read better when they were simple and plain white. The strip adapted to its needs by trial and error, and now, the early strips look very strange to me.

In the beginning of a comic strip, the characters are vaguely defined, and they can develop in almost any direction. That’s kind of exciting, but the cartoonist can write himself into corners if he’s not careful. The characters are established by their actions, so it’s important to make choices that won’t limit the strip later on. I made a mistake in the early strips by putting Calvin in the Cub Scouts. I originally thought that hiking and camping trips might offer some humorous stories, but the situation was always awkward. Calvin and Hobbes need to be in their own world, so putting a troop of kids around didn’t provide much material. Eventually, I realized that Calvin is not the kind of kid who would join a group anyway. The strips worked again Calvin’s personality, so I abandonned them. Later I sent Calvin camping with his family, and that fits the strip’s world much better.

I always enjoy it when and Hobbes argue. Few strips play with real back-and-forth dialogue. A funny conversation is more interesting to me than a one-liner. Calvin’s transmogrifier sums up the spirit of the strip. A cardboard box becomes a series of great inventions with a little imagination. The transmogrifier shows the kind of kid Calvin is, and it added a new dimension to the strip’s world. This was an important story for Calvin and Hobbes, and I used the transmogrifier several times since.

Sunday strips must be drawn two months before publication to allow for color plates. To include a Sunday strip in a story, the entire story must be written that far in advance, and I’m almost never that far ahead on daily strips. Also, some papers don’t have Sunday editions or they don’t buy the Sunday strip, so a Sunday installment can’t be crucial to the plot. For these reasons, it’s rarely worth the trouble to coordinate Sundays and dailies.

SPACEMAN SPIFF

Spaceman Spiff predates Calvin and Hobbes by over a decade. I trace Spiff back to a comic strip I drew for a high school German class, called Raumfahrer Rolf. It was pretty silly two-page comic in which the protagonist got eaten by a monster at the end, but it was written in some sort of German, and that was what counted. I reworked the character in college, calling him «Spaceman Mort» but the strip was conceived as a fairly elaborate, continuing project and that didn’t seem like the best use of my academic time, so I never published it.
A year or so after college, the newly christened Spaceman Spiff was my first strip submission to newspaper syndicates. Spiff was a diminutive loudmouth, not unlike Calvin, albeit with a Chaplin mustache, flying goggles, and a cigar. He had a dimwitted assistant named Fargle, and they roamed through space in a dirigible. For obvious reasons, the syndicates rejected it. Years later, when I came with Calvin, I finally had the opportunity to bring Spiff back.
When I was a kid, I followed the Apollo moon program with great interest, so Calvin shares that fascination with space travel. Spaceman Spiff is also a bit of spoof on Flash Gordon. The narration in Flash Gordon is fairly overwrought, so I have Spiff describe his own exploits with a similar search for breathless superlatives.
The Spiff strips are limited in narrative potential, but I keep doing them because they’re so much fun to draw. The planets and monsters offer great visual possibilities, especially in the Sunday strips. Most of the alien landscapes come from the canyons and deserts of southern Utah, a place more weird and spectacular than anything I’d previously been able to make up. The landscapes have become a significant part of the Spaceman Spiff sequences, and I often write the strip around the topography I feel like drawing.
Like all of Calvin’s fantaisies, Spaceman Spiff provides a way for me to draw some other comic strip when I want a break from Calvin and Hobbes. I can draw and write things that wouldn’t fit in the strip otherwise, and this opens up opportunities to experiment with new interests.

BACK TO STRIP COMMENTARIES

I regret introducing Uncle Max into the strip. At the time, I thought a new character related to the family would open up story possibilities: the family could go visit Max, and so on. After the story ran, I realized that I hadn’t established much identity for Max, and that he didn’t bring out anything new in Calvin. The character, I concluded, was redundant. It was also very awkward that Max could not address Calvin’s parents by name, and this should have tipped me off that the strip was not designed for the parents to have outside adult relationships. Max is gone.

I’ve never understood people who remember childhood as an idyllic time.

I think this is one of the better Rosalyn stories. With each one, it gets harder to top the previous conflict, so this time I added Stupendous Man to the mix.

This is part of a story where Calvin keeps getting bigger. At this point, I stopped trying to put humorous dialogue, and just let the pictures advance the plot. My original idea was to do this for a month and see how long readers would put up with it. I wisely chickened out, since the idea wasn’t all that interesting to begin with. It’s just weird for weirdness’s sake, and I don’t think it holds up very well.

Most cartoon characters have a generic white collar job, but eventually I decided that Calvin’s dad, like my dad, is a patent attorney. I think it’s funnier when things are specific, rather than generalized.

CALVIN’S WAGON

Calvin’s wagon is a simple device to add some physical comedy to the strip, and I most often use it when Calvin gets longwinded or philosophical. I think the action lends a silly counterpoint to the text, and it’s a lot more interesting to draw than talking heads. Sometimes the wagon ride even acts as a visual metaphor for Calvin’s topic of discussion.
Calvin rides the wagon through the woods, bouncing off rocks and flying over ravines. When I was a kid, our backyard dropped off into a big woods, but it was brambly and swampy, not like Calvin’s, which seems to be more like a national forest. I was not a real outdoorsy kid, but occasionally I’d tramp out through the brush to map a pond, or to try to see unusual birds and animals. Calvin’s woods is important to the strip, because it’s the place where Calvin and Hobbes can get away from everyone and be themselves. The solitude of the woods brings out Calvin’s small, but redeeming, contemplative side.

BACK TO COMMENTARIES

I never write stories with the ending in mind, because I want the stoy to develop a life on its own, and I want the resolution of the dilemma to surprise me. Sometimes I really get myself struck that way. This story spun completely out of control and surprised me throughout, so it’s one of my favorites. I think most of us would be horrified to meet ourselves and discover what everyone else already knows about us.

Trace Bullet stories are extremely time-consuming to write, so I don’t attempt them often. I’m not at all familiar with film noir or detective novels, so these are just spoofs on the clichés of the genre. Cartoonists don’t use black much anymore (the eye, being lazy, is attracted to empty white space, especially when the panels are so small), and we miss some dramatic possibilities that way.

The G.R.O.S.S club is based on similar clubs my next-door neighbor and I formed when we were kids. Our mission was to harass neighborhood girls, but if they wouldn’t come out, we’d often settle for harassing my brother. We prepared for a lot of great struggles that never happened. Once we gathered big hickory nuts, loaded them into a suitcase, locked it so nobody else could open it, and stashed it up high in a tree. When the critical moment came, we planned to scramble up the tree and unleash a hail of nuts upon our astonished pursuers. Six months later, when the leaves were down, we looked up and discovered the suitcase was still in the tree. The hinges had rusted, the nuts had rotted, and the suitcase was ruined. Our great plans often had this kind of boring anticlimax, which is why fiction comes in so handy.

During my fight to keep the syndicate from licensing my work, I sometimes drew strips that had additional private meanings for myself. The cartoon above mocked my ability to argue with the syndicate, and the cartoon below is how I interpreted the syndicate’s position. I wouldn’t have drawn these if the material didn’t stand on its own, or if it was in any way inconsistent with the characters, but cartoons such as these helped me laugh at my predicament at a time when very little about it seemed funny.

DINOSAURS

The dinosaurs I put in Calvin and Hobbes have become one of my favorite additions to the strip. Dinosaurs have appeared in many strips before mine, but I like to think I’ve treated them with a little more respect than they’ve often received at the hands of cartoonists.
When I was Calvin’s age, I had a nicely illustrated dinosaur book and some dinosaur models, so it was a natural step to have Calvin share that interest. The first dinosaurs I put in the strip were based on my childhood memories of them. Back in the ‘60s, dinosaurs were imagined as lumbering, dim-witted, cold-blooded, oversized lizards. That’s how I drew them in the first strips, and these drawings are now pretty embarrassing to look at. When I realized that dinosaurs offered Calvin interesting story possibilities, I started searching for books to rekindle my interest in them. It was then I discovered what I’d missed in paleontology during the last twenty years.
Dinosaurs, I quickly learned, were wilder than anything I’d ever imagined. Tails up, with birdlike agility, these were truly the creatures of nightmares. My drawings began to reflect the new information, and which each strip, I’ve tried to learn more and to depict dinosaurs more accurately. I do this partly for my own amusement, and partly because, for Calvin, dinosaurs are very, very real.
Dinosaurs have expanded Calvin’s world and opened up some graphic possibilities. The biggest reward for me, however, has been the fun I’ve had exploring a new interest. I enjoy dinosaurs more now than I did as a kid, and much of the job of being a cartoonist lies in keeping alive a sense of curiosity and wonder. Sometimes the best way to generate new ideas is to go out and learn something.

BACK TO COMMENTARIES

Here is another story with Calvin and his cardboard box. Unlike most stories I write, this one creates some suspense at the beginning by dropping the reader into events without explaining what’s going on. The humor of this story depends on the reader being familiar with Calvin’s personalilty, so I could only do this sort of thing after the strip was established. Writing is most fun after readers are willing to enter the strip’s world on its own terms.

Drawing the strip as if it were a soap opera strip is a fun visual surprise, and the «serious» pictures make the dialogue even more ludicrous. For the sake of the satire, I wish I’d drawn this more stylishly, the way the best cartoonists of those strips did.

A political cartoon does not have to have labels written across everything, or make its point with a sledgehammer.

Preachy cartoons get tiresome quickly.

You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a «graphic novel», but comic books are still incredibly stupid.

I entered a school safety poster contest when I was a kid. I labored over a careful drawing of Snoopy, which got me disqualified. I was crushed, but it was a pretty good lesson about the value of originality.

The strip was drawn before the movie Jurassic Park came out, and the deinonychus here is a smaller relative of the velociraptors in the film. I stopped doing dinosaur strips for about six months when the movie was released. A few little drawings can’t create the visceral response of large-screen computer special effects, and I didn’t want Calvin’s imagination to look less vivid for the comparison.

Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie (like the «Noodle incident» I’ve refered to in several strips) is left to the reader’s imagination, where it’s sure to be more outrageous.

Some of my strips end up being little sermons, and this can be annoying and sappy if it’s not handled lightly. One of the ongoing jokes in the strip is that Calvin learns the wrong lesson from his experiences, if he learns anything at all. Calvin’s expression in the last panel suggests that he is resisting the moral here too.

Comic strips have historically been full of ugly stereotypes, the hallmark of writers too lazy to honestly observe the world. Offended parties often suggest the further sanitization of the comics, but one of the great strenghts of cartooning is its ability to criticize through distortion. The trick is to remember that the way we describe things reveals the way we think. The cartoonist who resorts to stereotypes reveals his own bigotry.

CARTOONING AND CALVIN AND HOBBES

I don’t think of comics as just entertainment. It’s a rare privilege to be able to talk to millions of people on a given day, so I’m eager to say something meaningfull when I can. There is always pressure to write some snappy one-liner that will buy me another twenty-four hours of lead time on deadlines, but nothing depresses me like thinking I’ve become a joke factory to fill newspaper space. Whenever possible, I use the strip to talk about the things that are important to me.
I think the best comics (like the best novels, paintings, tec) are personal, idiosyncratic works that reflect a unique and honest sensibility. To attract and keep an audience, art must entertain, but the significance of any art lies in its ability to express truths –to reveal and help us understand our world. Comic strips, in their own humble way, are capable of doing this.
The best comics expose human nature and help us laugh at our own stupidity and hypocrisy. They indulge in exaggeration and absurdity, helping us to see the world with fresh eyes and reminding us how important it is to play and be silly. Comics depict the ordinary, mundane events of our lives and help us remember the importance of tiny moments. They cleverly sum up our unexpressed thoughts and emotions. Sometimes they show the world from the perspective of children and animals, encouraging us to be innocent for a moment. The best comics, that is to say, are fun house mirrors that distort appearances only to help us recognize, and laugh at our essential characteristics.
Surprise is the essence of humor, and nothing is more surprising than truth. When cartoons dig beyond glib punch lines, cheap sentimentality, and tidy stories to a deeper, truthful experiences, they can really touch people and connect us all. As frustrated as I am by the way this business works, I continue to believe that comics are an art form capable of any level of beauty, intelligence, and sophistication.
I’ve written and drawn over three thousand Calvin and Hobbes strips now, and to the extent that the strip reflects my interests, values, and thoughts, my cartoons are a sort of self-portrait. The longer I’ve worked, the more I’ve used the strip to explore personal issues. When I come up with an idea that surprises me, I’m happy to offer it to anyone who shares my interests. I’m flattered when people encourages calculation, and the strip is valuable to me only insofar as it’s honest and sincere.
It’s not hard to write jokes –good characters will always have something amusing to say about their situation– but it’s very difficult to keep the strip’s world energized and expansive year after year. At the beginning of a strip, virtually every installment explores new territory, but it’s frightening how fast stories and situations become predictable. Today’s funny innovation is tomorrow’s stale formula.
My early strips look crude and forced to me now, but the characters were still introducing themselves to me. The first couple of years were exploratory efforts to create an engaging world and rounded characters. I began writing longer stories when I saw how they added dimension to the characters’ personalities and relationships. Lately, I’ve had trouble writing extended narratives that satisfy me, and I’ve been doing fewer of them. Instead, my enthusiasm has drifted to the visual possibilities of the larger Sunday strips. Over the years, Calvin and Hobbes has changed directions, but I don’t control where it goes. When everything is working, I’m more surprised by the strip’s destination than anybody.
The trick to writing a comic strip is to cultivate a mental playfulness –a natural curiosity and eagerness to learn. If I keep my eyes open and follow my interests, sooner or later the effort yields questions, thoughts, and ideas –unexpected paths into new territory. Like Calvin, I just head out into the yard in search of weirdness, and with the right attitude, I make discoveries. Putting myself in the head of a fictitious six-year-old and a tiger encourages me to be more alert and inquisitive than I would otherwise be. Sometimes I resent the pressure to exploit every waking moment for strip ideas, but at its best, the strip makes me examine events and live more thoughtfully. I love the solitude of this work and this opportunity to work with ideas that interest me. That is the greatest reward of cartooning for me.
I’ve always loved cartoons. With Calvin and Hobbes, I’ve tried to return some of the fun, magic, and beauty I’ve enjoyed in other comics. It’s been immensely satisfying to draw Calvin and Hobbes, and I will always be grateful to have had the opportunity to work in this wonderful art form. Bill Watterson