Calvin and Hobbes

Growing up, we always took the Daily Journal, either at home or at my grandmother’s house, and I read the newspaper just about every day. I’d read the sports page and the editorial page and I’d check out Calvin and Hobbes. I don’t know what got Bill Watterson’s strip back on my mind, but I acquired The Complete Calvin and Hobbes for my birthday, and it is a four-volume set of every Calvin and Hobbes strip published during Watterson’s ten-year run from 1985-1995. It’s one of the finest things I know to exist. Masterpiece is an understatement.

It makes sense to take it on the whole, as a piece. From the first strip to the last, Watterson’s world in Calvin and Hobbes is fully formed and consistent. The characters are well defined and the characters never break character, but Watterson keeps the roster small all the way through. Off the top of my head, there’s Calvin and his best friend Hobbes, Mom and Dad, Susie Derkins, Moe the Bully, schoolteacer Mrs. Wormwood and the principal, babysitter Rosalyn. Lesser characters are calvin’s doctor, a baseball coach Mr. Lockjaw, and Calvin’s Uncle Max visits once early-on, and a handful of school kids. It’s a spare cast. That world creates the stage for Calvin’s imagination, which is absolutely real to Calvin. That’s the master rule of the strip start to finish, and Watterson executes it all with amazing dicipline.

The art, too, is great. Calvin is Watterson’s vehicle for expressions, for sure. Calvin show’s every imaginable emotion, the full spectrum.

Watterson has a lot of fun with Hobbes, especially in communicating movement and story with minimal details. Hobbes moves across the strip, stalking Calvin in silence, and then he pounces! It is one of the strip’s biggest running gags. I remember when I discovered Calvin and Hobbes that it was Hobbes that drew me in. He’s twice as tall as Calvin and he’s dynamic and interesting.

As I read the third and fourth books I became aware the Rosalyn had gone missing. Rosalyn is Calvin’s babysitter, the only girl in the neighborhood brave enough to babysit Calvin. The two have what amounts to a war during the first half of the run, with Calvin pulling some mean tricks on Rosalyn in his rebellion against her authoritarian 6:30 bedtimes, but Rosalyn goes missing for most of the second half of it. Probably my favorite moment when I read this was Rosalyn’s appearance at the end, not the very end, but about five or six pages from the end, and I’m sure Watterson deliberately wanted to make peace with Rosalyn, because that’s exactly what happens. Rosalyn figures out how to handle Calvin, and the two end up playing a game Calvinball, and it was awesome.

This collection is one of the finer things I know to exist, as I’ve said.

I have to mention it, the cruel irony that the only Calvin merchandise was a rip-off, those Calvin urinating stickers you’d see on people’s cars years ago. Watterson called it vandalism. Calvin never urinates in the strip, and such imagery couldn’t be more counter to the spirit of strip, which is never, never vulgar. Calvin’s world is civilized and it is very sweet and full of wonder.

Watterson himself is an interesting figure. He did his ten-year run of Calvin and Hobbes, and he retired it. Done. He doesn’t give interviews. He doesn’t license the intellectual property. Calvin and Hobbes is a completed work. One hopes that Watterson’s decendents keep it that way, too. How do people like Watterson come to the understanding that fame and fortune aren’t the point? I find that especially interesting, because most people don’t come to understand that at all. Most people are going to cash in, but Watterson has refused. There’s no Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, and no Hobbes plushies or keychains. If you want to experience Calvin and Hobbes, you have to read it. You really need to buy a big, heavy book collection and set aside some time here and there to relax and read. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, which I can verify.