Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and his Revolutionary Comic Strip by Martell Nevin

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and his Revolutionary Comic Strip by Martell Nevin

Author:Martell, Nevin [Martell, Nevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-09-30T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 7

This is How You Disappear

Calvin’s the square peg in the round hole. He will not let society conform him or water him down. He doesn’t always win, but he never gives it up. That’s the part of Calvin and Hobbes that means so much to me. And who doesn’t like drawings of spaceships and dinosaurs? Those are both very high on the Neato Scale.

— Jeff Smith, creator of Bone

The 5 January 1989 Calvin and Hobbes shows the pair walking across a spare winter landscape. “What do you think is the best way to get what you want?” Calvin asks Hobbes. “Is it better to hold fast and never back down, or to compromise?” Hobbes stops to ponder for a second before responding, “I suppose it’s best to hold fast when you can, and compromise when you need to.” As the characters amble away towards the far side of the last frame, Calvin grumbles, “That’s a lot more mature than I think I care to be.”

“There were some very tough days in that period,” Salem admitted to me. “I regret to say that some of our discussions impacted his creative process and you can see those dark strains in the strip.” Watterson singled out several strips in particular in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. In one, Calvin only sees his world in black and white, just like the syndicate accused Watterson of doing. It ends with Calvin defiantly yelling at his father, “Sometimes that’s the way things are!” In another strip Calvin rants, “I stand firm in my belief of what’s right! I refuse to compromise my principles!” His mother makes him take a bath anyway, causing Calvin to grumble, “I don’t need to compromise my principles, because they don’t have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway.”

The irony of this was lost on no one at the syndicate. Watterson was using the very medium he was fighting for to argue his case. Thankfully, most readers were oblivious to the brutal back-and-forth that was going on behind the scenes and creeping into the panels of the strip. Calvin and Hobbes topped endless newspaper reader polls for favorite comic strip and Universal received large amounts of fan mail for their artist. His peers either didn’t notice — or didn’t care about — the darkness either. Watterson won the Harvey Award for “Best Syndicated Comic Strip” seven years in a row from 1990–6. In all those years he never once showed up to claim his award.

He did, however, show up when it was time to argue with Universal. Though Salem and others I spoke with were understandably hesitant to discuss the finer points of their business dealings with Watterson, they were able to confirm a few points. In early 1991, Watterson and Universal’s battle over the cartoonist’s contract intensified. Watterson wanted to control his creation and ensure that no licensing ever happened. Without this assurance he was going to walk away from his career. Everyone in the room knew that this wasn’t a bluff — it was either his way or no way at all.



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