Every year, the company I work for buys us books at Christmas. The idea is to get a nice, hardcover book that you probably wouldn't get for yourself. For the first couple of years, I had no idea what I wanted. I got an atlas, I got a book with photographs of London. This year, I can barely wait to get my gift book. I knew what I wanted, and it fell within the spending constraints. Now I'm counting the days until we get the books. Why?
I pretty much own the complete Calvin and Hobbes collection in various tattered paperback books. I've loved Calvin and Hobbes since I was in fourth grade, when my friend Lindsey and I would read them non-stop. I still have an old strip where Calvin's mother is screaming at him to get up before he misses the bus, and he laments, "these mornings are going to kill me" tacked to my bedroom door at my Mom's house. There was one strip where Calvin said something that every time I read it to my brother, he and I would both crack up laughing for five minutes. It was something stupid, but for us kids, it was great.
As a kid, I kept waiting for the marketing blitz to begin. I waited for the movie, the Happy Meal toys, the Halloween costumes. But nothing came. I had a baseball cap with Calvin on it, and I think I had a t-shirt, but that was it. As a kid, I thought it was disappointing, but now I'm glad that Calvin didn't end up on my bedsheets like Garfield did. I'm disappointed (verging on angry when I read the dumb-ass comics in the newspapers now) that Bill Watterson didn't keep going with his strip, keep fighting the good fight against the limitations the syndicates (comic syndicates, not crime syndicates) place on cartoonists.
Bill Watterson said at the commencement speech he gave at his alma mater, Kenyon College:
As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons...
Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.
On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.
Watterson gave this speech in 1990, five years before he sent Calvin and Hobbes off on their metaphorical sled into the sunset, and the deep dissatisfaction with the industry was evident. The love of his craft is also clear. He was into comic strips because he felt that they could convey a lot of truth in that short space, that a good cartoonist could create strong characters. And, most importantly, the characters Watterson created appealed to me as much as they did my Mom. Adults and kids can relate to Calvin's frustrations with the world, and the hell he raises, sometimes unwittingly. Hell, I even got into philosophy when I found out Calvin and Hobbes were loosely based on real people's ideas. I'm sure I looked up more than a word or two, since Watterson used an adult's vocabulary in little Calvin. It was a strip that made me smarter, unlike others, Garfield.
As a writer, I admire Watterson's stubbornness in submitting to the unfair system that's set up for his craft. He laments the lack of space in the comic strips nowadays (Berkley Breathed managed to negotiate himself a half page in many markets as a condition to bring his popular Bloom County strip back) and the fact that the syndicates own the characters and can make films, commercials, lunchboxes, whatever out of them, and this makes the comic just "cute" and not meaningful. Watterson kept Calvin and his tiger in the realm of the imagination. Sure, you can find Calvin peeing on all manner of logos, but that was taken from a strip where Calvin's filling a water balloon at a spigot and creative types inserted the stream of urine and logo. But there's no Calvin and Hobbes movie. I don't think Calvin would do well on the screen-- I like imagining him sounding like the little boy I babysit when he's getting into trouble, a squeaky voice with an intelligence and a hint of mischief. I imagine Hobbes with a deep, adult voice, the opposite of Calvin, almost his id.
Be on the lookout for me at the work Christmas party. I'll be the one peeling back the paper on the book with my name on it, wondering if I can slip the actual books out before we get to open them.
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