The problem with Hobbes still being around when Calvin’s older than about 14 is it would make Calvin come off as nuts to most people.
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Screeme, do you think the Far Side went bad before Gary Larson canned it or was I misreading you? I thought Larson was as smart as Watterson and canned it before it went boring. It was only around a couple of years longer than C&H as well.
My two favorite strips as well.
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Last I heard he as back in his old hometown in Ohio, being an artist AND being reclusive. He also signs C&H books for the local bookstore - his mom picks them up, he signs them and she returns them to the bookstore. This is the ONLY place to find signed C&H books.
I don’t see that a problem–a strip titled “Calvin the Ordinary Guy” probably wouldn’t be very entertaining.
Wonder and you shall receive. Thanks!
What really ticks me off is when I see some redneck’s Chevy (or Ford) pickup adorned with a sticker showing a character who looks an awful lot like Calvin, peeing on an emblem representing Ford (or Chevy). Obviously, Watterson never licensed any such thing, so whoever is selling these goddamned things is a copyright thief and should be in jail.
hmm… maybe I’ll get a chance to code this one right. I swear I’m like a retarded monkey when it comes to this stuff.
The Far Side is my favorite strip of all time. But I believe the last couple of years were not nearly as good as the multitude of good years before them. Not that it didn’t still have its moments, but I felt Larson was running out of ideas.
Just my opinion, I’m pretty sure I’m in the minority on this one.
I also miss Calvin and Hobbs and the great way they were drawn. I bought all of the books out on them, but I miss them in the daily paper. They were a great way to start the day.
I wish they would return, that Bill would get inspired again for his was truly a unique and grand comic strip. Much better than Peanuts ever was.
My favorite C&H moment is not one of the traditional classics, and what endears me to it is not the dialog, but the combination of the dialog and the art.
It’s when Calvin and Hobbes are trying out the transmogrifying gun, and Calvin has just turned Hobbes into a duck. Hobbes, calmly outraged at being a waterfowl, points a wing at Calvin and says, “You, my friend, just made a big mistake.”
It’s the expression on the duck’s face that really gets me.
Strong runner up: Calvin and Hobbes are running around shooting each other with toy guns… yelling “Bang!” “Bang!” “I got you!”
“No, you missed,” says Hobbes.
A brief argument ensues as they stand next to each other: “Yes, I did so get you!”
Hobbes counters with impeccable logic: “I’m standing here talking to you, aren’t I?”
Goaded beyond frustration, Calvin, at point blank range: “Alright then: BANG!”
Hobbes merely looks at him calmly and replies, “My, what a miserable shot you are.”
Oh, I’m a huge fan of C&H, and I miss them too, but I always felt Watterson was wayyyyyy too full of himself. Comic strips are a visual medium of pop culture. To bitch about not wanting to “cheepen the art” by licensing and the like is beyond naieve and into willful blindness. No matter how brilliant the strips were, part of the reason syndicates license and distribute them, thereby generating the income to pay Mr. Watterson is because of the money they get from T-Shirts and the like. To make a living off a certain artform while at the same time bitching about the economics driving it is hypocritical in the extreme. If he truly felt that strongly, he did the right thing in stopping when he did. Perhapse a self funded web-strip would be a good outlet for someone like him. Total creative control.
As to comic books, well, I’ve seen comic books that blow anything Watterson ever did out of the water, both in story content and in art. Sandman springs immediately to mind. Watterson couldn’t tell a series of multi-issue stories like that if you held a gun to his head.
Funny you would say that, because retrospect, growing up in the 60s, Peanuts filled very much the same niche Calvin and Hobbes did later. Just a very subjective feeling. I always felt Peanuts was making fairly biting commentary on American societal values of the 1950s, such as that all men were macho, all women were beautiful and adoring, all cars had useless fins and whitewall tires. In Peanuts, all the characters seemed to be struggling. Reading Peanuts now, I don’t find it amusing. Pogo has stood the test of time much better.
I’d like to respectfully disagree about the strip entropying… In fact, I found that later strips FAR funnier and more humorous than the earlier ones, to the point where the last few books are my absolute favorites. I guess it’s really just a difference of opinion.
If Calvin and Hobbes had been made into saturday morning cartoons and breakfast cereals, I think it would have seriously undermined its ability to connect with people on a personal level. I shudder just thinking of what would have happened if Watterson wanted to get all the money he could. Calvin and Hobbes the movie? shudder I think you are the one being “naieve.”
I don’t know if you would call Little Nemo in Slumberland a comic strip or book, but I liked it a lot, as well as Tin Tin and Sandman as well. And I have a lot of superhero type comics. But they are really quite different than C&H. They connect with me on a different level. There is no need to compare them.
Just a word on Watterson quitting when he did:
It’s a well-known phenomenon among cartoonists that, after drawing the same strip with the same characters every day for years on end, all the creative energy gets sapped out of you. The strip stops being an outlet for your creativity and becomes a chore – an albatross around your neck that stops you from enjoying your success. You begin to resent your fans, who expect you to produce ceaselessly like some kind of robot, and eventually your exasperation begins to show up in your work. Quality goes down the drain, your strip becomes a ghost of it’s former self, and your fans begin to hate you for allowing their favorite strip to degrade. At this point you either quit, hire someone else to draw the strip, or continue producing rubbish.
Watterson was smart enough to avoid this trap by throwing in the towel before the strip began to seriously tank. Trust me – you wouldn’t’ve wanted to see Calvin and Hobbes go downhill. It would’ve been painful. One of the reasons we all like the strip so much is that we never had to see things get messy. We’ll always remember Calvin and Hobbes at it’s best
Ooooooh. Don’t even get me started about those decals. I hope I never see one of those accursed things while I have my baseball bat handy, because they’ll have to haul me off to jail on some serious destruction of property charges.
Osiris, you just put your finger on my favourite strip, too… it makes me grin just reading your description.
Oh, and remember the one where Calvin puts the end of the toilet roll in the toilet and flushes and watches the roll spin around and around and around? [sub]I tried it once… it made me giggle for hours[/sub]
Or when he pretends to be archy and writes “help i’m a bug” on his mother’s letter to Grandma?
Professional Calvinball league, anyone? 
I love CalvinBall! Let me go make a mask and I will play.
Weirddave, I see where you are coming from, but all the syndicate was paying him for was the cartoons, and apparently they had no trouble paying him for all those years. What they missed out on was the cash cow that they would have had if they could have marketed the product. Heck, I would have bought a Hobbes plush toy.
Here’s something to give you nightmares…
Calvin was 6 years old in 1987, when the first strip came out.
He was born in 1981.
Today, he could buy beer.
Actually the first strip was November 18, 1985, so he was born in 1979.
First, Watterson never bitched about anything, except under extreme duress. Considering his mania for privacy, I would guess that he did not want to air his views on the subject at all, just believe in them.
His rationale is that, to him, Calvin and Hobbes is a package deal. You get the characters, their personalities, their lives and their stories. Once you start peeling away the characters and turn them into stickers, lunch boxes, balloons, etc., you move away from the point of having C&H around in the first place: the stories and the world.
Since under law and contract he had a right to oversee the use of his characters, his work, he had a right to say no.
He may have been working in pop culture, but he was doing more than just making ha-has. He said things about life and death, the use of the imagination, family relationships and sometimes what it’s like to be a little kid again, to have the freedom to dream about flying through space, free from the adult knowledge that FTL travel is not possible, that you can’t design a saucer, and that aliens probably won’t work like that.
The problem is that he felt attached to his creations, but so do we. We admitted Calvin and Hobbes into our imaginations, and we feel like we own a part of them, too. Yes, I’d like to have a plus Hobbes, but I can deal with the disappointment. I may not agree with Bill W., but he has a right to his beliefs and it wasn’t conceived on a whim and in a snit. I respect that.