Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes, American newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson. It ran from 1985 to 1995, chronicling the high jinks of Calvin, a six-year-old boy, and his tiger companion, Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes was renowned for its vivid portrayal of a child’s imagination and its thoughtful ruminations on life’s big questions, grounded in its charming depiction of everyday suburbia.

Creation

Throughout the early 1980s Watterson pitched syndicates several comic strips, even as he drew editorial cartoons for Sun Newspapers and worked some freelance gigs. One of his early attempts was the sci-fi spoof Spaceman Spiff, whose lead character—a galaxy-hopping space adventurer—Watterson would lightheartedly refashion into one of Calvin’s playtime alter egos. Of the various strips he developed at this time, the most significant was In the Dog House (later reworked and retitled Fernbusterville), a strip about a man in his twenties named Sam and his slacker friend, Fester. Of particular interest, however, was Sam’s younger brother, Marvin, who owned a stuffed tiger named Hobbes. Incorporating feedback from United Features Syndicate, Watterson dropped the other characters and made the boy and his tiger the stars of a new strip, fleshing out their personalities and rechristening Marvin as Calvin. The names of the two central characters in Calvin and Hobbes reference the 16th-century theologian John Calvin and the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, respectively. The resulting strip was picked up by Universal Press Syndicate.

In creating Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson drew inspiration from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–44), Walt Kelly’s Pogo (1948–73), and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (1950–2000), among other precursors.

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Characters and style

The feature’s small central cast of characters remained essentially unchanged throughout its run. Calvin’s parents—never named—are constantly exasperated by his antics and seldom successful in reining in his chaotic impulses. Miss Wormwood is Calvin’s older, long-suffering teacher whom he sometimes imagines as a foe to the alter egos he assumes in his daydreams. Susie Derkins, a prim classmate, is a frequent target of Calvin’s pranks and perhaps his hidden affections.

The heart of the strip is the relationship between the two characters for whom the strip was named. To Calvin, Hobbes is a life-size, walking, talking friend, sharing in the mischief but often questioning him, commenting wryly on his behavior and attitudes, and serving as a sounding board for Calvin’s quasi-philosophical ramblings. To other people, however, Hobbes appears as a stuffed toy. Watterson maintained that Hobbes should not be interpreted simply as an imaginary friend, that the strip was more ambiguous.

Several panels are dedicated to illustrating the breadth of Calvin’s escapist fantasies, which are almost always anchored to his real-world circumstances in unexpected ways. In many of these reveries, Calvin assumes several alter egos, including cosmonaut Spaceman Spiff, masked crime fighter Stupendous Man, and private detective Tracer Bullet. Other times, he may metamorphose into a dinosaur, a werewolf, an insect, a slinky, and any other creature or object he can dream up, sometimes in anachronistic settings. For example, one of Calvin’s most celebrated flights of fancy puts a Tyrannosaurus rex in the cockpit of a fighter jet. Yet even amid Calvin’s thrilling imaginary escapades and his high-speed sled rides with Hobbes, Watterson made space for genuine political critique, introspection, and humanity.

Watterson used dynamic, gestural calligraphic brushstrokes to ink the strip. After a painstaking ideation process, Watterson kept his initial pencil sketches intentionally loose, leaving room for spontaneity during the inking process. The Sunday comics, which covered more real estate on the page than the daily black-and-white comic strips, were enlivened by Watterson’s sprightly, expressive use of color in depicting the strip’s many seasonal woodland sceneries and the fantastical otherworlds of Calvin’s imagination.

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Publication history and reception

Calvin and Hobbes debuted in about 35 newspapers on November 18, 1985. As the strip gained a loyal readership and positive feedback, that number reached 900 by the late ’80s and more than 2,400 by the end of its run in December 1995. The naturally reclusive Watterson, however, was less than enthused by the celebrity and public attention that came with the strip’s galloping success. He wrote in the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (2005):

Cartoonists are a very low grade of celebrity, but any amount of it is weird. Besides disliking the diminishment of privacy and the inhibiting quality of feeling watched, I valued my anonymous, boring life. In fact, I didn’t see how I could write honestly without it.

He went to great lengths to protect the privacy and isolation that he deemed indispensable to his work, choosing to live a largely secluded life with his wife and rarely agreeing to interviews.

Watterson steadfastly resisted the commoditization of his characters, refusing virtually all merchandising opportunities. He vehemently opposed the licensing and commercialization of comic strip characters, which he viewed as ultimately detrimental to the medium’s integrity as an art form. At his insistence his syndicate placed unusual restrictions on how newspapers could tamper with the presentation of the longer Sunday strips, allowing him greater freedom to experiment with layout. Also unusual were the two sabbaticals the comic strip went on, the first from May 1991 to February 1992 and the second from April to December 1994—a demand that Watterson’s syndicate acceded to only because Calvin and Hobbes had become one of the most popular and critically acclaimed American comic strips of its era. In 1995 Watterson announced that he was retiring his creation to pursue work with fewer constraints. Watterson was twice awarded the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year (1986 and 1988) and won the Harvey Award for Best Syndicated Comic Strip seven consecutive times (1990–96).

Starting in 1987, Watterson published several compilations of the comic strips, which became instant hits and have collectively sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.