The World of Calvin and Hobbes

Watterson should and has been commended on his great work. He was nominated for the 1992 Reuben Award for "Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year" by the National Cartoonists Society, and won the 1986 and 1988 Reuben Awards. In 1986, he was the youngest recipient to ever win the award. When he decided to leave the world of cartooning (at least for a while) in 1995 he gave this statement: "This is not a recent or easy decision, and I leave with some sadness. My interests have shifted, however, and I believe I've done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels. I am eager to work at a more thoughtful pace, with fewer artistic compromises. I have not yet decided on future projects, but my relationship with Universal Press Syndicate will continue." Even though Watterson is now retired, the world and characters he created will surely live on forever.

The Characters (told by Watterson)

Calvin

Calvin is named for a sixteenth-century theologian who believed in predestination. Most people assume that Calvin is based on a son of mine, or based on detailed memories of my own childhood. In fact, I don't have children, and I was a fairly quiet, obedient kid--almost Calvin's opposite. One of the reasons that Calvin's character is fun to write is that I often don't agree with him.Calvin is autobiographical in the sense that he thinks about the same issues that I do, but in this, Calvin reflects my adulthood more than my childhood. Many of Calvin's struggles are metaphors for my own. I suspect that most of us get old without growing up, and that inside every adult (sometimes not very far inside) is a bratty kid who wants everything his own way. I use Calvin as an outlet for my immaturity, as a way to keep myself curious about the natural world, as a way to ridicule my own obsessions, and as a way to comment on human nature. I wouldn't want Calvin in my house, but on paper, he helps me sort through my life and understand it.

Hobbes

Named after a seventeenth-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature, Hobbes has the patient dignity and common sense of most animals I've met. Hobbes was very much inspired by one of our cats, a gray tabby named Sprite. Sprite not only provided the long body and facial characteristics for Hobbes, she also was the model for his personality. She was good-natured, intelligent, friendly, and enthusiastic in a sneaking-up-and-pouncing sort of way. Sprite suggested the idea of Hobbes greeting Calvin at the door in midair at high velocity.With most cartoon animals, the humor comes from their humanlike behavior. Hobbes stands upright and talks of course, but I try to preserve his feline side, both in his physical demeanor and his attitude. His reserve and tact seem very catlike to me, along with his barely contained pride in not being human. Like Calvin, I often prefer the company of animals to people, and Hobbes is my idea of an ideal friend.The so-called "gimmick" of my strip--the two versions of Hobbes--is sometimes misunderstood. I don't think of Hobbes as a doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin's around. Neither do I think of Hobbes as the product of Calvin's imagination. The nature of Hobbes reality doesn't interest me, and each story goes out of its way to avoid resolving the issue. Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that's how life works. None of us sees the world in exactly the same way, and I just draw that literally in the strip. Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality that about dolls coming to life.

Parents

I've never given Calvin's parents names, because as far as the strip is concerned, they are important only as Calvin's mom and dad. Calvin's dad has been rumored to be a self-portrait. All my characters are half me, so it's true in some ways, but Calvin's dad is also partly a satire of my own father. Any strip about how suffering "builds character" is usually a verbatim transcript of my dad's explanations for why we were all freezing, exhausted, hungry, and lost on camping trips. These things are a lot funnier after twenty-five years have passed.Calvin's mom is the daily disciplinarian, a job that taxes her sanity, so I don't think we get to see her at her best. I regret that the strip mostly shows her impatient side, but I try to hint at other aspect of her interests by what she's doing when Calvin barges in. Early on, Calvin's parents were criticized by readers for being unloving and needlessly sarcastic. (Calvin's dad has remarked that what he really wanted was a dog.) At the time, I think it was unusual for a comic strip to concentrate on the exasperating aspects of kids without a lot of hugs and sentimentality to leaven it. We usually only see Calvin's parents when they're reacting to Calvin, so as secondary characters, I've tried to keep them realistic, with a reasonable sense of humor about having a kid like Calvin. I think they do a better job than I would.

Susie

Susie is earnest, serious, and smart--the kind of girl I was attracted to in school and eventually married. "Derkins" was the nickname of my wife's family's beagle. The early strips with Susie were heavy-handed with the love-hate conflict, and it's taken me a while to get a bead on Susie's relationship with Calvin. I suspect Calvin has a mild crush on her that he expresses by trying to annoy her, but Susie is a bit unnerved and put off by Calvin's weirdness. This encourages Calvin to be even weirder, so it's a good dynamic. Neither of them quite understand what's going on, which is probably true of most relationships. I sometimes imagine a strip from Susie's point of view would be interesting, and after so many strips about boys, I think a strip about a little girl, drawn by a woman, could be great.

Miss Wormwood

As a few readers guessed, Miss Wormwood is named after the apprentice devil in C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. I have a lot of sympathy for Miss Wormwood. We see hints that she's waiting to retire, that she smokes too much, and that she takes a lot of medication. I think she seriously believes in the value of education, so needless to say, she's an unhappy person.

Moe

Moe is every jerk I've ever known. He's big, dumb, ugly, and cruel. I remember school being full of idiots like Moe. I think they spawn on damp locker room floors.

Rosalyn

Probably the only person Calvin fears is his baby-sitter. I put her in a Sunday strip early on, never thinking of her as a regular character, but her intimidation of Calvin surprised me, so she's made a few appearances since. Rosalyn even seems to daunt Calvin's parents, using their desperation to get out of the house to demand advances and raises. Rosalyn's relationship with Calvin is pretty one-dimensional, so baby-sitter stories get harder and harder to write, but for a later addition to the strip, she's worked pretty well.

Spaceman Spiff

Spaceman Spiff predates Calvin and Hobbes by over a decade. I trace Spiff back to a comic strip I drew for high school German class, called Raumfahrer Rolf. It was a 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 like Calvin, albeit with a Chaplin mustache, flying goggles, and a cigar. He had a dimwitted assistant named Fragile, and they roamed through space in a dirigible. For obvious reasons, the syndicates rejected it. Years later, when I came up 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 a spoof on Flash Gordon. The narration in Flash Gordon is fairly overwrought, so I have Spiff describe his own exploits with the 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 fantasies, 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.

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 bush to map a pond, or 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.

G.R.O.S.S.

The Get Rid Of Slimy girlS 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.

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 dinosaurs 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 60's, 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 with each new 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 exciting 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.

Some Calvin & Hobbes Poems.

The Snow Song
(From Scientific Progress Goes "Boink")
Snow! Snow! Snow!
High and low!
Wherever we go!
Let it blow!
To and fro!
Hi-de-ho!
Snow! Snow! Snow!


The G.R.O.S.S. Song
(The Days Are Just Packed)
Attention! all rise! This meeting of G.R.O.S.S. Is now called to order by the great grandiose Dictator for life, the ruler supreme, The fearless the brave, the held-high-in-esteem, Calvin the Bold! Yes stand up and hail His humbleness now! May his wisdom prevail! Three cheers for first tiger and el presidente Hobbes, the delight of all cognoscenti! He's savvy! He has a prodigious IQ, and lots of panache, as all tigers do! In his fancy chapeau, he's a leader with taste! May his orders be heeded and his views be embraced.

G.R.O.S.S. Passwords
Tigers are mean
Tigers are fierce
Tigers have teeth
And claws that pierce

Tigers are great
They can't be beat
If I was a tiger
That would be neat

Tigers are nimble
And light on their toes
My respect for tigers
Continually grows

Tigers are perfect
The e-pit-o-me
Of good looks and grace
And quiet dignity

Tigers are great
They're the toast of town
Life's always better
When a tiger's around


The Snowball Prayer
(Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat)
Oh lovely snowball, packed with care Smack a head that's unaware.
Then with freezing ice to spare Melt and soak through underwear.
Fly straight and true, hit hard and square, This, oh snowball, is my prayer.

Science Fiction Story
(The Days Are Just Packed)
The aliens came From a far distant world In a large yellow ship That blinked as it twirled. It rounded the moon And entered our sky We knew they had come But we didn't know why. Bright the next morning With noisy commotion, The ship moved Out over the ocean. It lowered a tube And drained the whole sea For transport back home To their galaxy. The tube then sucked up The clouds and the air, Causing no small amount Of earthling despair. With nothing to breathe We started to die "help us! Please stop!" Was the public outcry. A hatch opened up And the aliens said, "We're sorry to learn That soon you'll be dead, But though you may find This slightly macabre, We prefer your extinction To the loss of our job."

A Quandary
(The Days Are Just Packed)
Mom once said she loved me Just the way I am, So I wonder what would happen If I became a clam If her son was gray and grimy Slippery and slimy An oversized hors d'oeuvre, Would mom still have the nerve?

Christmas Eve
(Scientific Progress Goes "Boink")
On window panes, the icy frost Leaves feathered patterns, crissed & crossed, But in our house the christmas tree Is decorated festively With tiny dots of colored light That cozy up this winter night. Christmas songs, familiar, slow, Play softly on the radio. Pops and isses from the fire Whistle with the bells and choir. My tiger is now fast asleep On his back and dreaming deep. When te fire makes him hot, He turns to warm whatever's not. Propped against him on the rug, I give my friend a gentle hug. Tomorrow's what I'm waiting for, But I can wait a little more.


A Nauseous Nocturne
(The Essential Calvin and Hobbes)
Another night deprived of slumber,
Hours passing without number,
My eyes trace 'round the room. I lay

Dripping sweat and now quite certain
That tonight the final curtain
Drops upon my short life's precious play.

From the darkness, by the closet
Comes a noise, much like a faucet
Makes: a madd'ning drip-drip-dripping sound.

It seems some ill-proportioned beast,
Anticipating me deceased,
Is drooling poison puddles on the ground.

A can of Mace, a forty-five,
Is all I'd need to stay alive,
But no weapon lies within my sight.

Oh my gosh! A shadow's creeping,
Omnious and black, it's seeping
Slowly 'cross a moonlit square of light!

Suddenly a floorboard creak
Announces the bloodsucking freak
Is here to steal my future years away!
A sulf'rous smell noe fills the room
Heraldingmy imm'nent doom!
A fang gleams in the dark and murky gray!

Oh, blood-red eyes and tentacles!
Throbbing, pulsing ventricles!
Mucus-oozing pores and frightful claws!

Worse, in terms of outright scariness,
Are the suckers multifarious
That grab and force you in its mighty jaws!

This disgusting aberration
Of nature needs no mitivation
To devour helpless children in their beds.
Relishing despairing moans,
It chews kids up and sucks their bones,
And dissolves inside its mouth their li'l heads!

I know this 'cause I read it not
Two hours ago, and then I got
The heebie-jeebies and these awful shakes.

My parents swore upon their honor
That I was safe, and not a goner.
I guess tomorrow they'll see their sad mistakes.

In the morning, they'll come in
And say, "waht was that awful din
We heard last night? You kept us both from sleep!"

Only then will they surmise
The gruesomeness of my demise
And see that my remains are in a heap.

Dad will look at Mom and say,
"Too bad he had to go that way."
And Mom will look at Dad, and nod assent.

Mom will add, "Still, it's fitting,
That as he was this world quitting,
He should leave another mess before he went."

They may not mind at first, I know.
They will miss me later, though,
And perhaps admit that they were wrong.
As memories of me grow dim,
They'll say, "We were too strict with him.
We should have listened to him all along."

As speedily my end approaches,
I bid a final "buenas noches"
To my best friend here in all the world.
Gently snoring, whiskers seeming
To sniff at smells (he must be dreaming),
He lies snugled in the blankets, curled.

HEY! WAKE UP, YOU STUPID CERTIN!
YOU GONNA SLEEP WHILE I GET EATEN?!
Suddenly the monster knows I'm not alone!

There's an animal in bed with me!
An awful beast he did not see!
The monster never would've come if he had known!

The monster, in his consternation,
Demonstater defenestration,
And runs and runs and runs and runs away.

Rid of the pest,
I now can rest,
Thanks to my best friend, who saved the day.


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