7 Things You Might Not Know About Calvin and Hobbes

January 2, 2022 8:27 PM

For the December 2013 issue of mental_floss magazine, we scored a rare interview with the famously private Mr. Watterson. Here are seven more notes about the author, the boy, and his stuffed tiger (Internet Archive link)

Tuna fish sandwich and toboggan optional.

1. Watterson to Spielberg and Lucas: Thanks, But No Thanks
2. Calvin and Hobbes … and Robotman?
3. The Complete Collection Isn’t Quite Complete
4. Watterson Did License. A Little.
5. Urine Trouble
6. Spaceman Spiff Was Originally the Whole Idea
7. The Last Calvin Strip Wasn’t Watterson’s Swan Song

posted by dancestoblue (22 comments total)

More Bill Watterson: 1986 interview from Honk! magazine #2 (which I've actually got, somewhere around here; but fortunately for you I found the article online).
posted by Rash at 10:37 PM on January 2, 2022 [5 favorites]

That last item made me sad, since Petey Otterloop was from Cul De Sac, the creation of Richard Thompson, who passed away years ago now, but the RSS feed of his blog still sits, forlornly, hopefully, in my feed reader. Cul De Sac was one of the few comic strips to possibly be Calvin and Hobbes' equal, and it's missed by me as much as the boy and his tiger.
posted by JHarris at 1:31 AM on January 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

Thanks, Rash - I have seen that interview quoted, but not the original before. It's excellent with the cartoons included!
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 1:45 AM on January 3, 2022

(Robotman got his own strip in 1985. And no, we don’t remember him, either.)

Robotman's creation may have been the product of crass commercialism and the syndicate's suggestion that the character appear in Calvin and Hobbes was just plain wrong, but the character's own strip ended up being something worth reading. Not Calvin-and-Hobbes-great, but still pretty good in it's own subversive way (and it's still going sans-Robotman as the comic strip "Monty"). I used to read it along with FoxTrot every day.

I distinctly remember a really awesome X-Files crossover in the 1990s with a gag that involved Mulder shining a flashlight on the strip's own copyright notice and speculating about how the "United Features Syndicate" was everywhere.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:51 AM on January 3, 2022 [9 favorites]

Robotman's creation may have been the product of crass commercialism and the syndicate's suggestion that the character appear in Calvin and Hobbes was just plain wrong, but the character's own strip ended up being something worth reading.

This! I loved Robotman!
posted by Thorzdad at 5:13 AM on January 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Robotman was great. I haven't thought about it in a while but I really enjoyed it.
posted by synecdoche at 5:22 AM on January 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

I would have laid money that there was more than a few Calvin & Hobbes merch at Barnes and Noble back in the day. I imagine I'm mixing it up in my head with The Far Side, whose branded stuff was ubiquitous in the 80's and 90's.

Also: A look at every New Years Resolution themed Calvin & Hobbes strip.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:40 AM on January 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

With every year that goes by, I like Bill Watterson better, not least because he is so emphatically out of the public eye and therefore incapable of becoming a disappointment. But there's more to it than that, and most of it remains rooted in the time when he was actively practicing the art that made him famous. There's his commitment to preventing the concerns of capitalism from interfering with his work. He was a successful advocate on behalf of cartoonists for better pay, more time off, and a less successful advocate to get more space allocated to the funny pages. Over the life of the strip, you can see him pushing at the limits of his own abilities, which in my mind is the real final frontier for artists of all types, something they have in common with athletes (although neither side generally notices).

And finally, his withdrawal from public life looks more and more admirable as the years pile up. I doubt very much that we'll ever see much (if any) in the way of new work from Watterson, certainly not enough to satisfy those of us who loved the strip. From what I can tell, he felt like he'd reached the limits of his capacity to express himself in cartooning, and had less and less patience for negotiations over the money issues, and had never really had any interest in being a celebrity to begin with, which would have been more and more difficult to avoid if he'd kept going.

Basically, we had a genius churning out brilliant art for us every day for about a decade, more or less. It's very very easy to wish there were more. I want to suggest that it might be better to be grateful for what we got, or even to contemplate that there might be a multitude of reasons to be grateful for the ending itself.
posted by Ipsifendus at 7:46 AM on January 3, 2022 [13 favorites]

I would have laid money that there was more than a few Calvin & Hobbes merch at Barnes and Noble back in the day.

Barnes & Noble? Way too classy. Try the counter of a non-franchise filling station-convenience store, down South, right by the cash register -- that's the only place I ever saw this merch. With no Hobbes -- you know what I'm talking about. The tasteless history of the peeing Calvin decal. And even worse, praying.
posted by Rash at 8:39 AM on January 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

I bought a (licensed) calendar back in the day, possibly Barnes & Noble; I framed a couple of the pages and they've hung on my walls over the years. Thanks for MetaFilter for introducing me to GoComics, I can now replace those faded pages with the exact same size, all new!
I'm in agreement with Ipsifendus-- I'm grateful for the work that exists, and glad it hasn't been sucked through the maw of undead commercialization. Except for those decals mentioned by Rash, but they are handy for identifying people to avoid.
posted by winesong at 9:03 AM on January 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

I just want to say, as a parent there are a lot of things I remember fondly from my childhood that don't hold up or that don't land well with my kids. But my children love Calvin and Hobbes just as much as I did - maybe more. My 8yo draws comics for fun and you can absolutely see Watterson's influence in there, in how she times her beats and in the facial expressions she uses. It's so delightful to be able to share this with them. By contrast, while I still really like The Far Side (and think it probably was more influential to my sense of humor at my kids' age), a lot of the jokes really don't make sense to modern elementary schoolers.

It really is a miracle that Watterson shared his gift with us for ten years. I'm glad I got to experience so much of it as it was being published, and I'm glad I was grateful for it at the time. It was just so clearly the most special thing in the newspaper, every single day. On the same funny page you could see so many oldsters cranking out the same jokes every day that they'd done for decades - I remember even as a kid in 1995 having so much respect for Watterson's commitment to artistic integrity.
posted by potrzebie at 9:21 AM on January 3, 2022 [9 favorites]

Our 5-year-old found our Calvin and Hobbes collection on his own, and I cannot overemphasize what a huge fucking mistake it was to let a five year old introvert in the middle of a pandemic read this stuff. As far as he knows, this is how kids are supposed to act, and holy shit is Calvin an awful role model. Having your kid jump up and down on the bed every night shouting this is tyrrany! until 9pm sounds funny, but trust me on this, it completely sucks
posted by phooky at 10:52 AM on January 3, 2022 [16 favorites]

As someone who likes to link topically-related C&H strips here (most recently about 5 minutes ago), I thoroughly approve of this post.
posted by TedW at 11:19 AM on January 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

The tasteless history of the peeing Calvin decal. And even worse, praying.

From the article: “Owing to spite or just a foul mood, have you ever peeled one of those stupid Calvin stickers off of a pickup truck?

I figure that, long after the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to immortality.”

It seems Mr. Watterson shares Hobbes’s droll sense of humor.
posted by TedW at 11:26 AM on January 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

I could have sworn that I remember reading an interview with Bill Watterson in an old issue of Boys Life, but it turns out I was mistaken. The September 1993 issue of Boys Life includes a brief overview of the comic along with some generally-available information about Watterson including that "privacy is very important to him".
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:49 AM on January 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

There are several “Hobbes in the washing machine” strips, so that specific one definitely wasn’t disappeared because of any implication about the reality of the character. I’ve seen it suggested that it was because of concern that it might encourage kids to play in the washing machine, though again it kinda applies to some of the others as well. But then I also could swear I do have that one in a collection.
posted by atoxyl at 12:02 PM on January 3, 2022

One of the things about having his job is that it's every day. Every day he'd have to have something from the well. And, being Watterson, it would have to be good, alive, fun, funny, both the writing and the drawing. He never gave us garbage. And once these mopes gave him Sunday as an open canvas -- damn. It was great.

Young, I used to read Mike Royko, and once I was old enough to figure it out I'd marvel at it. Don't feel good? Write your column. Are you sick? Write your column. Don't feel inspired? Write your column. Hung over? Write your column. I *think* he had Saturdays off, no column needed on Saturdays.

Royko set a pretty high bar but it's one that Watterson cleared, seemingly with ease.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:16 PM on January 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

Lol, phooky, we told our kids if they ever acted like Calvin in any way they wouldn't get to read the books anymore. Totally worked
posted by potrzebie at 12:17 PM on January 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah sorry phooky but I have to admire any 5-year-old who can already read C&H, and furthermore grasp concepts like tyranny. Bodes well for your kid's future development IMO.

Reminds me vaguely of the sequence of Peanuts strips where Linus ran for student council president, which somebody colorized and animated, here.
posted by Rash at 1:00 PM on January 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Once upon a time I dated a guy who was, on balance, pretty shite. We were in our twenties and I guess he decided at that age he'd 'outgrown' comics, so when he found out I wasn't familiar with them he gave me all of his old Calvin and Hobbes books. After many years and a few domestic and international moves I still have them, and still read them regularly. And though none were in very good nick when he gave them to me, and I've often considered replacing them with the big clothbound slipcovered omnibus version, somehow I've never quite got round to it. Possibly because those books are the only unambiguously good thing to come out of that relationship.

Winters here are long and cold, with shedloads of snow, and I've got a snowbank going that's nearly as tall as me at the moment. It's currently about -20C and far too dry, but if things warm up enough to get good snow-packing conditions I may need to entertain myself by staging a little Calvinesque snowman tableaux.
posted by myotahapea at 1:33 PM on January 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

He was a successful advocate on behalf of cartoonists for better pay, more time off, and a less successful advocate to get more space allocated to the funny pages.

Related.
posted by CaseyB at 9:47 AM on January 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

The webcomics folder in my RSS reader has a Calvin and Hobbes feed (via ComicsRSS.com), and recently it re-ran the classic "dancing to classical music at 78 RPM" strip that inspired so much knock-off merch. I was always curious about what that would sound like, exactly -- my parents had an old record player (and I'd heard of Alvin and the Chipmunks) so I got the gist, but had never tried it with classical music. I did a little searching and found an example on the /r/calvinandhobbes subreddit that was so good I just had to set it to (limited) animation. Make sure to unmute the video player when it starts -- it works really well!
posted by Rhaomi at 2:22 PM on January 12, 2022 [2 favorites]