Let's Go Exploring by Michael Hingston

Author:Michael Hingston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2018-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

The end of Calvin and Hobbes came faster than almost anyone at the time expected. Watterson had told his syndicate as early as the contract renegotiations in 1990–1991 that he was considering ending the strip within a year or so. That struck fear into the heart of Universal, who — having already forgone millions of dollars in licensing money — were banking on a steady stream of book sales and newspaper revenue for many years to come. Watterson was, after all, one of the syndicate’s star cartoonists, and Calvin and Hobbes was a critical and commercial juggernaut. Hence the sabbaticals. Despite perceptions at the time about the “uppity” cartoonist,46 these were actually Universal’s idea, not Watterson’s, as a means of prolonging the strip’s total run. Salem says the two nine-month breaks were designed to do two things: “Give [Watterson] a little time off, so he could catch his breath, but also help stretch out the contract a bit.”47 The goal was to extend the run to an even ten years — which would carry the strip to the end of 1995.

By the time Watterson returned from his second sabbatical, on January 1, 1995, there were signs that his creative flame was starting to flicker. The daily strips had started to lean more and more on simple jokes and observations. The drawings were sparer. And there was less dialogue, and longer silences. At the same time, Watterson’s Sunday strips were becoming more elaborate than ever. It’s hard to find one from that entire last year with a traditional visual structure; more often you’d find intricate rhyming poems, 32-part flipbook animations, or first-person POV sled rides off cliffs, complete with all-black panels whenever Hobbes has closed his eyes. “My self-imposed rule was that the Sunday strip had to be something that would work no other way,” Watterson said later. “So that generally pushed the Sundays toward elaborate drawings or ideas that required many panels.”48 Some of these strips, though technically stunning, have the feel of an artist more interested in the stray details than in the story he’s telling, as if Watterson were doodling around the margins of a school assignment — which is how Raumfahrer Rolf was first born, all those years earlier. After relentlessly pushing the envelope for so many strips, challenging his readers to expand their conceptions of what a daily comic strip could do, this was the first time Watterson’s own imagination appeared to be coming back to earth.

Then the other shoe dropped. On November 9, the following letter ran alongside the strip in hundreds of papers across North America:

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