Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity

Dear Republic, 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.-ROLCALVIN AND HOBBES AND THE PRICE OF INTEGRITYI.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.II.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.Sincerely,Bill Watterson”III.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.IV.“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.