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Bill Watterson’s Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”
“Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. That’s the one thing we know for sure in this world,” Calvin says to Hobbes in the first panel of a two-panel strip that ran in more than two thousand newspapers on Monday, July 17, 1995. The two friends are in a wagon, plummeting perilously forward into the unseen—a common pastime for them. Outside the world of the cartoon, it’s less than half a year before Bill Watterson, thirty-seven at the time, will retire from producing his wildly beloved work. “Calvin and Hobbes,” which débuted in 1985, centered on six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, Hobbes, a tiger who to everyone other than Calvin appears to be a stuffed animal. Six days a week, the strip appeared in short form, in black-and-white, and each Sunday it was longer and in color. The second panel of the July 17th strip is wide, with detailed trees in the foreground, the wagon airborne, and Calvin concluding his thought: “But I’m still going to gripe about it.”
After retiring, Watterson assiduously avoided becoming a public figure. He turned his attention to painting, music, and family life. He kept the work he made to himself; he gave few, but not zero, interviews. (When asked in an e-mail interview that ran in 2013 in Mental Floss why he didn’t share his paintings, he replied, “It’s all catch and release—just tiny fish that aren’t really worth the trouble to clean and cook.”) Still, now and again his handiwork appeared. He wrote twice about Charles M. Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” whom he never met. For the charity of the cartoonist Richard Thompson, who had been given a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, Watterson illustrated three strips for “Pearls Before Swine,” by Stephan Pastis, and also donated a painting for auction. In other words, he came out for the team.
In 2014, he gave an extensive and chatty interview to Jenny Robb, the curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, on the occasion of his second show there. Robb asked if he was surprised that his strip was still so popular. “It seems the less I have to do with it, the higher the strip’s reputation gets!” he said. In the interview, he comes across as levelheaded, not egotistical, not very pleased with electronic devices, the Internet, the diminished size of cartoons—and also quietly intense, like the dad figure in the strip, who enthusiastically sets out on a bike ride through heavy snow. As a college student at Kenyon, Watterson spent much of a school year painting his dorm-room ceiling like that of the Sistine Chapel, and then, at the end of the year, painted it back dorm-room drab.
My ten-year-old daughter makes a detailed argument (it involves bicycles, ropes, and scratch marks) that Hobbes is indisputably real; millions of us have the more decisively illusory experience of having grown up with Watterson. But we haven’t! Will we be disturbed if, now that time has passed, he has changed? When word came out that Watterson was releasing a new book this year—“The Mysteries,” a “fable for grown-ups,” written by Watterson and illustrated in collaboration with the renowned caricaturist John Kascht—there was more than passing interest. There were also very few clues about the content, save that there’s a kingdom in trouble, living in fear of mysteries. With a different artist, I might interpret this as an enticement, but it seems more likely that Watterson is merely averse to marketing—he did no publicity for his first “Calvin and Hobbes” collection, and fought for years to prevent Hobbes and Calvin from appearing in snow globes, on pajamas, on chip-bag clips, on trading cards. (“If I’d wanted to sell plush garbage, I’d have gone to work as a carny,” he once said.) Yet Calvin and Hobbes are still everywhere, and forever young. Somewhere on the outskirts of Cleveland, their creator is probably irked that his old characters are pouncing into all these reviews of this other endeavor. As Calvin put it, the universe should have a toll-free hotline for complaints.
“The Mysteries” is clothbound and black, about eight inches square, with gray endpapers. The title font looks medieval; the text font looks contemporary. Words appear on the left page of each spread: one or two sentences in black, surrounded by a field of white. The images appear on the right, taking up most of the page, framed by a thick black line. Some of the illustrations appear to be photographs of small clay sculptures alongside elements composed in graphite and maybe paint—but the materials aren’t specified. Think Chris Van Allsburg’s “Jumanji” gone darker, crossed with Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The characters, unnamed, are drawn from that strange eternal medieval world of fantasy: knights, wizards, a king; peasants with faces like Leonardo grotesques, wearing kerchiefs or hoods. There are forty-three sentences in total, and one exclamation point. The magic of condensation that is characteristic of cartoons is also here, in a story with a quick, fairy-tale beginning: “Long ago, the forest was dark and deep.”
It all sounds rather sombre, but also it doesn’t take long to read it nine or ten times. (The illustrations, slower to process, do much of the storytelling work.) The story is: Unseen mysteries have kept the populace in a state of fear. In response, a king bids his knights to capture a mystery, so that perhaps its “secrets could be learned” and its “powers could be thwarted.” When mysteries are caught, the public finds them disappointing, ordinary. One illustration is of a vender at a newspaper stand, looking askance. Below him are newspapers with headlines such as “So what?,” “Yawn,” and “Boring.” But modern technologies begin to appear: cars, skyscrapers, televisions. Mastering the secrets of the mysteries brought about a lot of technological marvels, and made the people less fearful. Or you might say insufficiently fearful: the woods are cut down, the air becomes acrid, and eventually the land looks prehistoric, desiccated, hostile to life. In one read, “The Mysteries” is a nephew of Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax.”
It’s also kin to the ancient story of Prometheus, a myth we now associate with technological advancements. Prometheus took pity on the struggling humans, and stole fire from the gods to share it with them. And how has that magnificently useful fire gone for the humans? Pretty well by some measures, pretty catastrophically by others. If only humans heeded the warnings within mysteries as well as they followed the blueprints for making Teflon pans and missiles. I don’t think I’ll spoil the plot of “The Mysteries” if I say that the story finds a distinctive and unsettling path to its final three words, which are “happily ever after.”
“It’s a funny world, Hobbes,” Calvin says, plummeting again down a hill in a wagon with his friend. “But it’s not a hilarious world,” he says, as they fall out of their wagon. “Unless you like sick humor,” Hobbes says after he and Calvin have both crashed to the ground.
Watterson has said, of the illustrations in “Calvin and Hobbes,” “One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what’s going on in Calvin’s head.” Only one reality in “Calvin and Hobbes” is drawn with a level of detail comparable to the scenes of Calvin’s imagination: the natural world. The woods, the streams, the snowy hills the friends career off—the natural world is a space as enchanted and real as Hobbes himself.
Enchantment! If disenchantment is the loss of myth and illusion in our lives, then what is the chant that calls those essentials back? An ongoing enchantment is at the heart of “Calvin and Hobbes.” It’s at the heart of “Don Quixote” and “Peter Pan,” too. These are stories about difficult and not infrequently destructive characters who are lost in their own worlds. At the same time, these characters embody most of what is good: the gifts of play, of the inner life, of imagining something other than what is there. If “The Mysteries” is a fable, then its moral might be that, when we believe we’ve understood the mysteries, we are misunderstanding; when we think we’ve solved them and have moved on, that error can be our dissolution.
Calvin offers the means of enchantment for seeing reality properly. This is well illustrated in the June 3, 1995, daily. (The brief black-and-white weekday strips of “Calvin and Hobbes” often feel as whole as the epic Sunday ones.) Calvin is digging a deep hole and Hobbes asks why. Calvin answers that he’s looking for buried treasure. Has he found any? Calvin replies, “A few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting grubs.” In the final panel, Hobbes: “On your first try??” Calvin: “There’s treasure everywhere!”
While rereading “Calvin and Hobbes” comics for this piece, I was surprised that almost all of them were not entirely forgotten. If I saw them on a crowded subway platform, I would recognize them, even after years of separation. Some of the silliest and most untethered of the strips have stayed with me the most: one in which Hobbes repeats the word “smock” again and again, just happy to say it; another in which Calvin writes down, “How many boards would the Mongol hoard, if the Mongol hordes got bored?”—then crumples up the paper.
Watterson has written, “Whenever the strip got ponderous, I put Calvin and Hobbes in their wagon and send them over a cliff. It had a nice way of undercutting the serious subjects.” “The Mysteries” doesn’t entirely lack that lightness—the contrast of modern and medieval in the illustrations is often funny—but humor is not its main tool. Reading “The Mysteries” after rereading “Calvin and Hobbes” reminded me of the Brothers Grimm story “The Goblins.” Goblins steal a mother’s child and replace it with a ravenous changeling. When the woman asks a neighbor for advice on how to get her child back, she is told to make the changeling laugh, because “when a changeling laughs, that’s the end of him.” She makes him laugh (by boiling water in eggshells? A trick perhaps lost across the centuries), and the goblins take the changeling away and return her child. She counters tragedy with a deliberate silliness—and it succeeds, even as the dark persists. In that sense, the old strip and the new fable work best, maybe, together. I’m also reminded of the strip in which Hobbes says, “I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life.”
One of the cozy pleasures of “Calvin and Hobbes” is the prominence of the seasons. This was felt even more acutely when the comics appeared daily in the paper, as they did throughout my childhood, when my brother used to call the Sunday comics insert “the intellectual pages.” (Now we both read the nearly comic-free online news instead of the material papers, into which, Watterson has said, “little jokes” were placed as a respite from “atrocities described in the rest of the newspaper.”) In the fall, a leaf pile transforms into a Calvin-eating monster; in winter, Calvin sculpts a snowman swimming away from snow-shark fins; spring is rainy, and in summer the days are just packed. Time hurries along through the year, but the years never pass—a great comfort. In “The Mysteries,” time’s arrow can’t be missed for a moment. Though the story starts in the misty forever-medieval, it quickly javelins forward. By its close, aeons have passed, and the perspective is no longer even earthbound. The book reads like someone saying goodbye. The outcome feels inevitable.
Calvin isn’t the only comic-strip character who doesn’t age. The characters in “Peanuts” never grow up, either. Schulz drew the strip for fifty years, and the final strip was published the day after he died. George Herriman drew “Krazy Kat” for more than thirty years, through to the year of his death, 1944. The characters in “Krazy Kat” also didn’t age or really change much: Krazy Kat is a black cat forever in love with Ignatz, a white mouse who serially hits Krazy with bricks, an action that Krazy misinterprets as a sign of love. Watterson has expressed admiration for both Schulz and Herriman. Yet Watterson, after ten years, moved on to other interests.
“Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography,” by David Michaelis, makes vivid that no amount of success ever separated Schulz from his sense of himself, carried over from childhood, as a lonely and overlooked “nothing.” In 2007, Watterson reviewed the biography for the Wall Street Journal, and reminded readers that “Peanuts” had as much darkness—fear, sadness, bullying—as it had charm. “Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy,” Watterson wrote. “I think that’s a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world.” Herriman, born in the nineteenth century in New Orleans to a mixed-race family, often presented himself, in his adult life, as Greek. It would be oversimplifying to say that Herriman’s background fuelled “Krazy Kat,” just as it would be oversimplifying to say that Schulz was forever a Charlie Brown—but it would be delusional to think that the persistent situations and sentiments of those comics weren’t inflected by their makers’ lives. As Krazy Kat put it, in that magic mixed-up Kat language, “An’ who but me can moddil for me, but I!”
Watterson must have been working out something in his strip, too. By his own account, he had a pretty nice childhood, with supportive parents and a house that bordered a mysterious wood. It’s possible that Watterson quit because he tired of the demanding work, or because he’d said all he had to say, or because he was worn out by the legal battles over his characters. But maybe he just changed. Growing up is always a loss—a loss of an enchanted way of seeing, at the very least—and for some people growing up is more of a loss than for others. Perhaps part of what drove Watterson, “Ahab-like” by his own telling, back to the drawing board with his boy and his tiger day after day was a subconscious commitment to staying a child. Maybe he chose to stop publishing because, in some way, for whatever reasons, he became O.K. with growing up.
In a Sunday strip on April 22, 1990, Calvin’s dad tells Calvin and Hobbes a bedtime story, by request, that is about Calvin and Hobbes. All he does, pretty much, is describe, to his rapt audience, the first part of their actual day. Calvin complains that his dad ends the story too early, that he hasn’t even gotten to lunchtime. His dad says the story has no end, because Calvin and Hobbes will go on writing it “tomorrow and every day after.” The friends are pleased to learn they’re in a story that doesn’t end.
Here’s another story, kindred to “The Mysteries,” about a knight who journeys into a dark and unknown wood. The first scene of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which is thought to have been written in the late fourteenth century, takes place in Camelot during New Year’s festivities. A good time, with feasting and friends, is interrupted by the arrival of a stranger: a massive knight, whose skin and hair are all green, who is dressed all in green, who is riding an all-green horse. The knight carries a huge axe and makes a strange proposal, in such a way that the honor of the whole court feels at stake. He invites someone to swing at his neck with his axe; in return, he will have a chance, a year and a day later, to swing the same axe at the neck of the volunteer, who ends up being Sir Gawain. The resonance of the story with facing the perils of a dark and unknown wood, of nature itself, is pretty clear.
Gawain chops off the head of the Green Knight, who then picks up his head; says, See you in a year; and rides away. Pretty quickly, the feasting and the merry mood return. How, I remember thinking the first time I read the tale, could this possibly end? It’s not satisfying if the Green Knight is killed, or if Gawain is. Maybe both of them die, I supposed.
But no. Gawain keeps his word, despite the perilous terms. En route to his meeting with the Green Knight, in the Green Chapel, he tries to behave well with the seductive wife of the lord who graciously hosts him. Then he bravely bares his neck for the terrifying Green Knight—but he learns it was an enchantment! To me, the ending follows from both good behavior and enchantment—good behavior being something Calvin despises, and enchantment being the realm in which he is king. ♦
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