Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity The Republic of Letters Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity How Bill Watterson Stuck to His Guns - and Vanished The Republic of Letters and Matthew Morgan Maybe you liked Calvin and Hobbes as a kid but you probably have no idea of the scrupulous moral integrity that went into it, as Matthew Morgan demonstrates in this deeply-researched piece. CALVIN AND HOBBES AND THE PRICE OF INTEGRITY 1978, Kenyon College, sophomore year. Bill Watterson is lying on his dorm room bed, staring up at the ceiling. He hasn't yet invented six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes - though his studies have made him familiar with their philosophical namesakes - because the strip that will make Watterson's name is almost a decade away. Right now, he's thinking that his dorm room needs an amateur rendition of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam". There's a number of problems up front. The first is that (as Watterson will tell you himself) he's not a talented painter. Still, what the work will lack in "colour sense and technical flourish" it'll make up for with comedy - specifically "the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakeable odour of old beer cans and older laundry". Besides, Michelangelo wasn't Michelangelo until he'd painted and kept painting and became Michelangelo the painter. Watterson decides to go ahead and start painting. The next problem is structural: how to reach the ceiling? He can stand on the bed, but that'll mean hours with his head cocked all the way back, a young man developing an old man's spine. He needs a way to paint the ceiling without permanently disfiguring his posture. His friends help him with a solution: they stand two chairs on Watterson's bed, then lie a table across the chairs. By climbing up this tower and lying on the table, he comes two feet away from the ceiling. Watterson gets to work. He's sunk hours into hours of weeks upon weeks on his back when a third problem occurs to him. He should have thought of this and acted on it before the first brush stroke. He needs permission to paint his dorm room ceiling. But Watterson once admitted, "I never spent as much time or work on any authorised art project or any poli-sci paper as I spent on this one act of vandalism." He isn't giving up on it now. The housing director is understandably suspicious of this kid wanting to paint some elaborate picture on his ceiling with only a few weeks left of the academic year. He realises that the idea is being proposed retroactively. Maybe that's why he plays along and grants permission for something that's obviously already underway. Watterson is allowed to complete the painting on the condition that he returns the ceiling to normal before he leaves in summer. Watterson goes back to his room, climbs up the makeshift scaffolding, and gets back to work. A few weeks later, the project is finished. Watterson probably takes a moment to stand in the middle of the room and look up, contemplating the months of work, the tins of paint he went through, the things he learned about technique, about the joy of a job done for its own sake, about himself. Then he opens a tin of whitewash, climbs up the bed-chairs-table one last time, and paints over his work. He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh. In the years after Kenyon, Watterson has a recurring dream about his old college where he doesn't know what class he's taking or where he's meant to be. He roams the grounds, growing more flustered with each confused step. Right before he wakes, he thinks, "How many more years until I graduate...? Wait, didn't I graduate already? How old am I?" It's 1995 and Watterson is thirty-seven. He's sitting at the desk where he's worked for the last ten years, drawing the adventures of Calvin and his maybe-real or maybe-stuffed-toy tiger, Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes runs in over 2,400 newspapers across the world and, by a more meaningful metric, re-enchants life for millions of readers. It's pop-culture that transcends the 'pop" part of its nature; it feels like a private piece of each reader's soul. For a lot of grown-ups, Calvin and Hobbes is a bridge between who we were as wide-eyed, wondering children and who we are now. A few years after he found success with Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson told a graduating class at Kenyon that there's nothing like the joy of work done for your own creative satisfaction, rather than for fame or a few bucks. Watterson is convinced that an artist should do what he does for love, even if it fails, even if it costs him, even though it and everything else will eventually end. In fact, his editor has just okayed a strip in which Hobbes asks Calvin, "If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?" Which is what brings Watterson to his desk today. There's a few papers scattered beneath and around the single page that he's focused on. He has an unusual task this morning: he's not drawing, but writing, dealing exclusively in words. Maybe he starts right away, knowing exactly what he wants to tell the people who'll read this letter. I imagine him taking a moment to consider the current that's swept him along the last ten years to what he's preparing to do today. He takes a sip of what's left in his coffee mug (damn, it's gone cold), then starts to write. I don't know how Watterson drafted this letter, but in my telling of the story he's scribbling it down on paper with a pencil, the way he does dialogue for his strip. He'll type it up later and post it out tomorrow afternoon, or maybe he'll type it up on a computer and electronically mail it. For now, he's writing a letter by hand, and it'll be sent to all the editors of the various newspapers that run Calvin and Hobbes. The letter goes like this: "I will be stopping Calvin and Hobbes at the end of the year. This was not a recent or an 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. That so many newspapers would carry Calvin and Hobbes is an honor I'll long be proud of, and I've greatly appreciated your support and indulgence over the last decade. Drawing this comic strip has been a privilege and a pleasure, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity. The letter is finished, ready to be typed up and sent out. Time now for the real work. At one edge of Watterson's desk are a couple of pencils, an eraser, the curled zigzags of shavings. On the other side of the desk are tools for different parts of the creative process. A small sable brush (for inking), a Rapidograph fountain pen (for lettering the dialogue), and a crowquill pen (for "odds and ends"). His set-up is "as low-tech as you can get". This is how he likes it. The simpler things are, the more control he has over the work - which is the hill on which he'll die and take everyone with him if he has to. For Watterson, it's a question of maintaining artistic integrity. He derives an enormous amount of pride from the fact that he can say, "I write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration myself." The strip is a "one-man operation" because he's convinced it's the only way to preserve the integrity of his craft. For Watterson, craft has never been a side dish to the main course. It's inextricable from the truths he wants to express and the meaning he hopes his work might have for its readers. It's his belief that half a century ago, the best comics were more than amusing to look at; they were beautiful and undoubtedly counted as capital-A Art. Here in the mid-nineties, he "can't think of a single strip today that comes close to that standard of craftsmanship". His readers think he's achieved that kind of quality, from know-nothings like me who intuit something special here that I haven't found anywhere else, to icons of the craft like Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts. In a foreword to The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, Schulz praises Watterson's ability to show us the numinous in the mundane by elegantly drawing "bedside tables ... and living room couches and chairs and lamps ... and all the things that make a comic strip fun to look at". He adds that this attention to the heightened depiction of the smallest details is what makes a strip truly great: if all the cartoonist does is "illustrate a joke", the cartoonist "is going to lose". It turns out there are a lot of ways a cartoonist can lose, and most of those wins and losses come out of one essential battle: creativity versus commerce. Here, commerce is represented by Universal Press Syndicate, which Watterson refers to as "the syndicate", like an organisation of villains in a comic book. (Once, he even publicly called them "a bloodsucking corporate parasite".) The syndicate act as middle-man between the artist and publishing outlets, and without them, there's no realistic chance of any cartoonist getting a strip printed in a major newspaper and making something like a livable income. Middle-man, except that Watterson sees them as taking a side - the side of the newspapers. The conflict comes out of the fact that, Watterson laments, the "commercial, mass-market needs of newspapers are not often sympathetic to the concerns of artistic expression". It's a dynamic that's made him face "countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions". These things that others regard as only or mostly artistic concerns, he looks at as questions of ethics, which explains his refusal to back down even when giving in was so much easier (not to mention more profitable). It was never a question of drawing a little differently or working to an altered schedule; it was a question of what truly mattered at a level Watterson perhaps thinks of as spiritual. Watterson's way of speaking about these things occasionally veers into the self-important register of grievance, the eternal complaint of someone for whom things-as-they-are never satisfy because things-as-they-were always seem better. But there's no denying the conviction with which he fought the fight, even before he had the name-brand authority he'd later earn, even back when it really looked like he was going to lose. And he came very close to losing some of his biggest battles with the syndicate. "When cartoonists fight their syndicates," Watterson says, "it's usually to make more money, not less." Yet for six years, Watterson kept his heels dug deep in the earth, fists up, boxing stance against his syndicate's plan to make them all millions of dollars. Watterson's contract meant the syndicate retained the right to turn Calvin and Hobbes into toys, t-shirts, and other ephemera, and it became clear pretty early that they could all expect stupid amounts of money from merchandising. As Nevin Martell puts it in his inimitable book Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, the eighties were a time when "big-name cartoonists were making big bucks by harnessing the selling power of their characters". The creator of Garfield, Jim Davis, became the head of his own empire just a few years after he'd started drawing his mopey cat. There are Garfield plush toys, Garfield pyjamas, Garfield slot machines, Garfield movies, Garfield-themed cruises, all of it bringing in a fortune between 750 million and one billion dollars a year - and Davis gets a share of that. "So here's a math problem for the kids," writes Martell. "If there were 255 million suction-cupped Garfield dolls sold over the course of the decade, how many small tropical islands was Jim Davis able to buy with the proceeds?" Maths like this led Watterson's syndicate to include licensing rights in their contract with him, assuming the artist would have no problem with it. All that money for doing what he loves? Seemed a no-brainer. The problem was that Watterson had an exacting idea of what it was he loved doing, and it was at odds with toys and tat, indifferent to silos of cash. "I went into cartooning to draw cartoons," Watterson says, "not to run a corporate empire." It was still early days in the ten-year run of Calvin and Hobbes when the syndicate approached Watterson with its big ideas of Calvin sweatshirts, Spaceman Spiff bumper stickers, an animated Calvin and Hobbes Saturday show, maybe a movie, and - worst of all - a Hobbes doll. Watterson really loathed the Hobbes doll. To make sense of how much it bothered him, we need to talk about the tiger in the room. When Watterson created Hobbes, his focus was on the character more than the conceit of a teddy that comes to life. Watterson told Rich West for The Comics Journal that "there's something a little peculiar about [Hobbes] that's, hopefully, not readily categorised". But Watterson's readers often wanted Hobbes categorised into either "real" or "imaginary". So Watterson came up with a compelling non-answer to the question: "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." You could say Hobbes is both imaginatively real and really imaginary, depending on your perspective. Hobbes can be either, which also means he's both. Is Hobbes a tiger or a toy? Yes. Watterson insisted that if he wasn't going to settle the question of Hobbes, then he definitely wouldn't let some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes "into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic". He'd sound off wherever he could on how "licensing usually cheapens the original creation" by saturating a market with characters until readers are bored of seeing them; how a multi-paneled story with dynamic action cannot be respected by the vagaries of a coffee mug illustration; how subtlety is sacrificed for immediacy; how selling off "everything fun and magical" means "the strip's world is diminished". He has a hundred lines like these, articulations of higher reasoning against merchandising, but just once, in the Tenth Anniversary Book, he drops the high-and-mighty in favour of I-the-mighty: "Calvin and Hobbes was designed to be a comic strip and that's all I want it to be. It's the one place where everything works the way I intend it to." Here again is the artist as lone genius, the one-man operation he jealously guards. Watterson's convictions are sincere, and he's put a lot of thought into defending those values, but maybe there's some emotion involved too. Maybe part of Watterson's aversion to what his syndicate were asking for has something to do with not wanting to play with others. It often seems with Watterson like he's never quite made peace with the public nature of the private world he created in Calvin and Hobbes. He seems uncomfortable with compromise. There's a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin discovers the world has lost all colour. There's "no hue, value, or chroma" as he moves through his house depicted in negative relief. The cause of this aberration was an argument with his dad, who in the final (full colour) panel says, "The problem is, you see everything in terms of black and white, " to which Calvin cries, "SOMETIMES THAT'S THE WAY THINGS ARE!" Watterson wrote that strip to get onto the page and out of his head the way he felt when fighting his syndicate. This move to a reductive black-white binary is a difficult circle to square with the artist who refuses to settle the ontology of Hobbes with a definitive answer. How is it that Watterson both adores and rejects ambiguity? Maybe Watterson is neither one thing or the other. Maybe he's both. Lee Salem, president of Universal Press Syndicate, says, "Bill is both refreshingly different and exasperatingly different, depending on one's perspective." The syndicate found out just how different he could be. Other cartoonists wanted fame, wanted to be printed in every newspaper in the world, wanted an ocean of money where the tide was always in. But other cartoonists could swim; Watterson felt like he was drowning. So he told his syndicate, "No." No t-shirts, no merchandise, no stuffed Hobbes toys. But the argument wouldn't go away, and even Watterson understood why. As he put it, "Trainloads of money were at stake - millions and millions of dollars could be made with a few signatures. Syndicates are businesses, and no business passes up that kind of opportunity without an argument." So Watterson and the syndicate had that argument. For six years. The struggle went on until 1991. It was a fight that few knew much about - certainly not the happy majority of readers who met with Calvin each morning in the paper and had nothing but fun - but Watterson viewed the conflict as something Biblical in its intensity and stakes. On one side of the battle: the conglomerated corporate power of the syndicate-as-Goliath, with their money and lawyers and binding legalese, and their teams of people with vested interests working against the simple artist. On the other side: Bill Watterson, pencil in hand and heart full of uncompromisable values. In one of Watterson's strips from that time, Calvin refuses to get in the bath, shouting about how he'll never compromise his principles; cut to Calvin in the bath, sullen and grumbling, "I don't need to compromise my principles, because they don't have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway." The way Watterson tells it, he was powerless to stop them forcing him to merchandise Calvin and Hobbes, and all he could do about it was quit, in which case the syndicate would just hire a team of anonymous ghost-artists to churn out more stories for Watterson's duo. He was one small man facing down a global behemoth that had risen from the swamp of modern capitalism. What could he do? I'm not so convinced by the case he makes. For any merchandising opportunities to be worth much, the strip had to continue enchanting readers, and to do that it had to be written and drawn by the man who'd brought it into the world. Calvin and Hobbes, as Nevin Martell notes, "was not your run-of-the-mill, gag-a-day strip with average artwork that anyone could do". That's why Lee Salem acknowledged in a conversation with Martell that the syndicate was "lucky that [Watterson] didn't call one day and say, 'I quit.'" That's not the only source of fishy odour around Watterson's suggestion that all the cards were held by other players. There's also the plain fact of how long the argument ran for. Every week, month, and year that passed with Watterson holding out and the syndicate essentially shrugging and saying, "Okay, we won't force it," revealed how unwilling they were to simply bend him to their will. Then there's the offer they made to him not long before the whole thing was decided. Lee Salem went to Watterson's house with a box of bootleg t-shirts with Calvin and/or Hobbes printed on them. (I first found out this was a thing when, in an episode of Friends, Joey tells Rachel he can't take his sweater off in public because his t-shirt "has a picture of Calvin doing Hobbes". I remember scrunching my young eyes up and thinking no no no no no as if the word could scrub out the unwanted mental picture that had been forced on me.) Salem told Watterson that the best way to choke off the flow of this stuff was to license Calvin and Hobbes. Granting merchandising rights would mean that an entirely separate company, whose interest would be controlling the legal use of those rights, would come down tough on the pirates making illegal merchandise. On top of that, all the profits from merchandising would go into a brand-new fund for saving tigers across the world. This debate didn't take five years; sounds like it didn't take five minutes: Watterson said no. So, maybe it's the clarity of hindsight, an unimpressive backwards prediction, but I don't find it surprising that when the dispute was finally resolved after six years, it fell Watterson's way. The syndicate backed off, agreed not to license any merchandise, and went as far as rewriting their contract with Watterson in his favour. And it really went in his favour. Who knows for sure how the sabbaticals came about? Well, Watterson knows and the people at the syndicate know, but they're telling different stories. In Nevin Martell's book, Watterson demanded two sabbaticals as part of his renegotiated contract, which is presumably what Universal says went down. On the other hand, Watterson (who gave no input to Martell's book except to ask Lee Salem of it, "Who cares?") maintains that Universal offered him the sabbaticals and he accepted. This seems unusually generous for a syndicate Watterson also portrays as essentially money-grubbing, but again - who knows? Sabbaticals were basically unknown for syndicated cartoonists. It was a huge ask of readers to take some months away from a strip and not lose interest or replace it with another strip. For editors, re-runs were a kick in the crotch, paying for a strip they'd already paid for. Universal knew all of this and rallied to craft a message supporting their artist's need to recharge his creative batteries. Watterson knew all of this too and thought, They can have a worn out Calvin and Hobbes, or I can take this break and come back with work I'm proud of, that they'll be eager to print. In May of 1991, Calvin and Hobbes went into re-runs. For the next nine months, Watterson lived like he didn't have millions of dollars in merchandise a mere signature away, like his work wasn't so widely adored that national newspapers were publicly counting down the days until he brought them all something new. Instead, at the age of thirty-three and mid-career, he was living the low-key life of a retiree. As the months slipped by, Watterson started meeting up with his art professor from Kenyon. They painted together, the older man with skill and the younger man with inelegance slowly turning into basic proficiency. A dynamic developed between them that helped Watterson's recovery. No longer teacher and student, they were (as the professor told Martell) "just two guys who liked to do a couple of things really well". The time off did what it was supposed to for Watterson, and in early 1992, he returned to drawing Calvin and Hobbes. He was three years away from quitting forever. Watterson threw himself into his next big swing with the syndicate. He wanted to radically change the Sunday strip. Links
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