Why the Short-Lived Calvin and Hobbes Is Still One of the Most Beloved & Influential Comic Strips

If you know more than a few mil­len­ni­als, you prob­a­bly know some­one who reveres Calvin and Hobbes as a sacred work of art. That com­ic strip’s cul­tur­al impact is even more remark­able con­sid­er­ing that it ran in news­pa­pers for only a decade, from 1985 to 1995: bare­ly an exis­tence at all, by the stan­dards of the Amer­i­can fun­ny pages, where the likes of Garfield has been lazi­ly crack­ing wise for 45 years now. Yet these two exam­ples of the com­ic-strip form could hard­ly be more dif­fer­ent from each oth­er in not just their dura­tion, but also how they man­i­fest in the world. While Garfield has long been a mar­ket­ing jug­ger­naut, Calvin and Hobbes cre­ator Bill Wat­ter­son has famous­ly turned down all licens­ing inquiries.

That choice set him apart from the oth­er suc­cess­ful car­toon­ists of his time, not least Charles Schulz, whose work on Peanuts had inspired him to start draw­ing comics in the first place. Calvin and Hobbes may not have its own toys and lunch­box­es, but it does reflect a Schulz­ian degree of thought­ful­ness and per­son­al ded­i­ca­tion to the work. Like Schulz, Wat­ter­son eschewed del­e­ga­tion, cre­at­ing the strip entire­ly by him­self from begin­ning to end. Not only did he exe­cute every brush­stroke (not a metaphor, since he actu­al­ly used a brush for more pre­cise line con­trol), every theme dis­cussed and expe­ri­enced by the tit­u­lar six-year-old boy and his tiger best friend was root­ed in his own thoughts.

“One of the beau­ties of a com­ic strip is that peo­ple’s expec­ta­tions are nil,” Wat­ter­son said in an inter­view in the twen­ty-tens. “If you draw any­thing more sub­tle than a pie in the face, you’re con­sid­ered a philoso­pher.” How­ev­er mod­est the medi­um, he spent the whole run of Calvin and Hobbes try­ing to ele­vate it, ver­bal­ly but even more so visu­al­ly. Or per­haps the word is re-ele­vate, giv­en how his increas­ing­ly ambi­tious Sun­day-strip lay­outs evoked ear­ly-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry news­pa­per fix­tures like Lit­tle Nemo and Krazy Kat, which sprawled lav­ish­ly across entire pages. Even if there could be no return­ing to the bygone gold­en age of the com­ic strip, he could at least draw inspi­ra­tion from its glo­ries.

Iron­i­cal­ly, from the per­spec­tive of the twen­ty-twen­ties, Wat­ter­son­’s work looks like an arti­fact of a bygone gold­en age itself. In the eight­ies and nineties, when even small-town news­pa­pers could still com­mand a robust read­er­ship, the comics sec­tion had a cer­tain cul­tur­al weight; Wat­ter­son has spo­ken of the car­toon­ist’s prac­ti­cal­ly unmatched abil­i­ty to influ­ence the thoughts of read­ers on a dai­ly basis. In my case, the influ­ence ran espe­cial­ly deep, since I became a Calvin and Hobbes-lov­ing mil­len­ni­al avant la let­tre while first learn­ing to read through the Sun­day fun­nies. It took no time at all to mas­ter Garfield, but when I start­ed get­ting Calvin and Hobbes, I knew I was mak­ing progress; even when I did­n’t under­stand the words, I could still mar­vel at the sheer exu­ber­ance and detail of the art.

Calvin and Hobbes also attract­ed enthu­si­asts of oth­er gen­er­a­tions, not least among oth­er car­toon­ists. Joel Allen Schroed­er’s doc­u­men­tary Dear Mr. Wat­ter­son fea­tures more than a few of them express­ing their admi­ra­tion for how he raised the bar, as well as for how his work con­tin­ues to enrap­ture young read­ers. Its time­less­ness owes in part to its lack of top­i­cal ref­er­ences (in con­trast to, say, Doones­bury, which I remem­ber always being the most for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge in my days of incom­plete lit­er­a­cy), but also to its under­stand­ing of child­hood itself. Like Stephen King, a cre­ator with whom he oth­er­wise has lit­tle in com­mon, Wat­ter­son remem­bers the exot­ic, often bizarre tex­tures real­i­ty can take on for the very young.

He also remem­bers that child­hood is not, as J. M. Coet­zee once put it, “a time of inno­cent joy, to be spent in the mead­ows amid but­ter­cups and bun­ny-rab­bits or at the hearth­side absorbed in a sto­ry­book,” but in large part “a time of grit­ting the teeth and endur­ing.” Being six years old has its plea­sures, to be sure, but it also comes with strong dos­es of tedi­um, pow­er­less­ness, and futil­i­ty, which we tend not to acknowl­edge as adults. Calvin and Hobbes showed me, as it’s shown so many young read­ers, that there’s a way out: not through stu­dious­ness, not through polite­ness, and cer­tain­ly not through fol­low­ing the rules, but through the pow­er of the imag­i­na­tion to re-enchant dai­ly life. If it gets you sent to your room once in a while, that’s a small price to pay.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Make Comics: A Four-Part Series from the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Praised as the Great­est Com­ic Strip of All Time, Gets Dig­i­tized as Ear­ly Install­ments Enter the Pub­lic Domain

17 Min­utes of Charles Schulz Draw­ing Peanuts

The Dis­ney Artist Who Devel­oped Don­ald Duck & Remained Anony­mous for Years, Despite Being “the Most Pop­u­lar and Wide­ly Read Artist-Writer in the World”

The Comi­clo­pe­dia: An Online Archive of 14,000 Com­ic Artists, From Stan Lee and Jack Kir­by, to Mœbius and Hergé

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.