Tech Brew Ride Home - (BNS) Calvin And Hobbes - With Daniel Kibblesmith

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

Was Calvin And Hobbes the greatest comic strip ever? Or maybe a great work of art of the 20th Century? Why did Bill Watterson disappear? Was Calvin "good" (morally)? Was Hobbes "real"? Why were there never any toys? Would we ever really want Calvin and Hobbes to come back? With special guest @kibblesmith! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Calvin and Hobbs the greatest comic strip of all time or one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century? What if we had gotten a spaceman spiff strip instead? It almost happened. And why did Bill Waterson walk away from Calvin and Hobbs at the height of its popularity? Jump on this

sled with me and let's glide off a cliff because today Radd in 80s 90s history podcast is taking on Calvin and Hobbs. Welcome to Rad in 80s 90s history podcast recounting the history of the last time things were relatively normal and chill. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Today, my amazing special guest is writer and comedian, five-time Emmy nominee, Daniel Kibblesmith. Daniel, welcome to Rad. I'm waving with my hand in case anybody's watching the video component of this. Actually, we should probably set the background for non-80s and 90s kids listening. Calvin and Hobbs was a comic strip that was created by cartoonist Bill Waterson. It was syndicated from November 18, 1985 to December 31, 1995. At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbs was

featured in over 2400 newspapers worldwide. Calvin and Hobbs books have sold 45 million copies worldwide. The strip revolves around a six-year-old boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger, but is Hobbs just a stuffed tiger, or is he a sentient creature, or an aspect of Calvin's imagination, or Calvin's literal spirit animal or a manifestation of Calvin's id and or spirit or all of the above. More on that later. The story of Calvin and Hobbs is fascinating, partly because the creator is a bit of a J.D. Salinger figure, created his art, walked away, a creative genius that made a body of work that is beloved, but then has not done anything since almost three decades at this point.

But the why we're doing this episode is also because I would argue that, Calvin and Hobbs had an almost spiritual philosophical role in shaping gen Xers and how we think of the world. Do you agree with that, Daniel? What's your background with Calvin and Hobbs? I mean, I completely agree about its influence. I think that it's pretty unarguable whenever you speak to somebody who has a relationship with it. I think if you've heard of it, you love it. It's one of those bodies of work where it's pretty much universal.

beloved by anybody who's encountered it. You get people who are contrarians about like the Beatles or contrarians about The Simpsons or you know other long-running institutions like Saturday Night Live where you can kind of chart their ups and downs. I think Calvin and Hobbs is one of the very few sort of like consensus choices of a perfect thing to be created in society. I don't know. I don't know of anybody who is like, yeah, I've read all of it.

B minus. minus. And it tailed off at the end. It was great at the beginning, but I feel like it was also consistent all the way through. Right. Exactly. And as an elder millennial who badly wanted to be in Gen X was just scratching at the dog door of Gen X. Yeah, this was seminal for me. You know, I write comics. And, you know, newspapers for people who weren't familiar are, it was like a TikTok made of trees that used to come to your house every morning. You know what? I was afraid to do this because it would be reductive or insulting. But like, there were once things called newspapers, but I mean, like, seriously, my background with it is, like, this was a routine part of my day

growing up. Like, you come down for breakfast, pour a bowl of churios, and the newspaper's on the table, and your dad is maybe reading the news section. And later on in my teen years, maybe I would go to the sports section first. But from the time I could read, you know, my brother and I would pass the comics pages back and forth. That was, that was for us. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And if you're seven or eight and there's this one strip that jumps out at you that really speaks to you, it was Calvin and Hobbes. Yeah, it did an incredible job of reaching you without talking down to you. And I think that that's sort of one of the cornerstones of its appeal, you know, then and enduring was that it was so unflinchingly honest about what it felt like to be a child, that it allowed kids to, acknowledge their own cynicism and dissatisfaction and ambition in a way that I think was really

rare in children's media, which especially at the time was largely made by adults who had forgotten what it felt like to be kids and were marketing to a version of kids that they'd created in their heads. Well, and I don't know if you got this sense too, but like, you know, a lot of the other comics like Peanuts, like Family Circus, like Beetle Bayer or the Lockhorns or something like that, we're clearly from a different generation. And, you know, that's not true for everything. Like Garfield was, you know, contemporaneous. Kathy, for better or for worse. Is it for better or worse? Yeah. And especially like the far side. So there were things that felt of a time, but like half the comics page, you sort of got the sense that, oh, this was written by people that maybe

wrote jokes for comics in the 50s or something. Right, yeah. It definitely was, you know, new and fresh. And one of the things that I think makes it sort of an underreported tentpole of the Gen X kind of pop culture pantheon and mentality is that sort of like, it's a fresh look at something that has so long been dominated by a previous generation. You know, it's a rejection of the premise the same way that a lot of the music was, a lot of the movies was. You know, these are, this is work that is created by people who have seen all of those movies and listened to all of that music and are acknowledging that it exists instead of sort of continuing in the same track that kind of, you know, is in a parallel universe.

Like, it's a comic strip that felt like things that were happening in real life. I think Peanuts is the only thing comparable. Right. You know, Peanuts was allowed to introduce cynicism into monoculture. But it was, as you're saying, very much the product of a different generation. You know, I think we'll come back to Peanuts when we talk a little more about influences. But, yeah, I'm going to make an argument for why the subtle difference between the Peanuts characters and Calvin and Hobbs. But let's go ahead and dive into, you know, a portrait of the artist as a young,

man. So again, the strip was created by Bill Watterson, William Boyd-Watterson the second, who was born July 5th, 1958. So we're already talking generations and things like that. If we count 64 as the tail end of the boomers, he's the tail end, but he's definitely a boomer, which again is interesting, if I'm making the assertion that he molded Gen X in a way. Waterson lived in Alexandria, Virginia until age six. His father was a patent examiner for the Department of Commerce. But in 1965, the family, which also now included a younger brother, moved to Chagrin or Chagrin. It's spelled chagrin, but Chagrin Falls, Ohio, I think, which is a suburb of Cleveland.

And apparently the house that he grew up and did have a big hill in the backyard, according to his biographer, which is useful because you know, sledding down hills is a big part of the Calvin and Hobbs strips. By the way, I should mention that a lot of the biographical stuff I got from a book called Looking for Calvin and Hobbs by Nevin Martel. But the bottom line is, is Shagrin Falls, by all accounts, is a classic Midwestern, idyllic town with, you know, a still functional downtown picket fences and the like. And, Daniel, I've given you, as I always do, a list of rabbit hole. facts that I found while doing research. So could you do me a favor and hit me with number one real quick? Absolutely. I am eager to learn that apparently there is a Stone Temple Pilots connection to

Calvin and Hobbs. Well, I wish there was a deeper one, but given this is an 80s, 90s show, I couldn't resist. Another kid that grew up in Shagrin Falls about a decade later than Watersend was Scott Weiland, the front person of the Stone Temple Pilots. I don't have any sense that they ran across each other or anything like that, but again, I couldn't resist throwing that in. They weren't in the same treehouse club, the get rid of slimy girls. That would be great if they were engrossed together. Yeah, that would be much, much better. But it is interesting also too.

Like so, you know, Scott Weiland, you know, famously a rock and roller had some, you know, personal issues and demons and things like that. Everything that I've been able to find biographically about Bill Waterson and especially Bill as a young boy is that, he's not Calvin. If Calvin is this, you know, sort of rambunctious out there kid, everything that the biographers have found that I was able to find was that that was not what Bill was. This was, Calvin is not autobiographical. There's a quote from Bill's father that said he was a conservative child, not that he was unimaginative because, of course he was, but in a fantasy way,

it was nothing like Calvin. He didn't have an imaginary friend like Hobbs, and he wasn't a Dennis the Menace. But Waterson's dad did have Peanuts books, some Charles Schultz collections. We should say, again, if you're not familiar, Peanuts is sort of like the Lodestar, the base of, you know, 20th century newspaper comics. There's a quote from the Wall Street Journal where Bill admits that, It was reading those books that from a young age made him want to dream of becoming the next Charles Schultz, which hit me with Rabbit Hole Fact number two. As a child, Waterson apparently wrote Schultz a fan letter and did get a response. Right, and he was so thrilled by this that he writes a second one and got another response back that was identical.

So it was, it was a form letter, which maybe that's, sparky. And also, this might, this might shed some light on what we'll talk about later. Like this maybe was a never meet your heroes moment, you know, sort of, but anyway, by seventh grade, Watterson is, is drawing cartoons and, and pictures for his friends. In middle school and into high school, he's drawing all the time. A lot of it is superhero stuff, drawing his friends as superhero characters, having adventures. And in fact, rabbit hole fact number three. That spaceman Spiff, Calvin's outer space hero alter ego, came before the creation of Calvin.

Kind of. In a more meaningful way, he will come before him in a second. But one of the regular things that Waterson draws was a character called Ramfahar Rolf, which I guess is German for Space Man Rolf. And Spaceman Rolf has adventures that often end with him getting eaten by aliens. Apparently no one has images of this online or anything anywhere. But it's interesting, and you'll see again, like, it was sort of that Spaceman adventure character that was sort of the thing that he always wanted to do, at least at the beginning. In high school, he draws for the school news.

newspaper, the Valley Lantern. He draws a lot of cartoons lampooning high school life, rabbit hole fact number four. That the mascot for his high school was a tiger. So apparently he was drawing very often tigers because, you know, the, the tiger would speak for the school, for various things or whatever. In 1976, he's graduating high school and on a whim, he submits an editorial cartoon to the local paper, which was the son Harold. It got published. He goes to Kenyon College in Ohio, and when he gets there as a freshman, he discovers that Jim Borgman had recently graduated the spring before him, and Borgman had just been hired to be the political cartoonist for the Cincinnati Inquirer. So Watterson decides he wants to be a political cartoonist. He becomes the political cartoonist for the campus newspaper at Kenyon.

He starts a strip just for the paper called Mewks and Fester. and quoting from the Martel book, three mucs and fester strips I was able to dig up in the Kenyan library from 1979. Mewks is spilling a beer, kick-starting a food fight that's reminiscent of the strips in which Calvin literally fights with his food. In another Calvin moment, Fester is daydreaming in Polly side class before creating a ruckus

by coughing out a commentary, a hushit, a bullshit, which I got the sense from the biography this is like the era of like, you know, the movie Animal House or whatever. Like, just from what my dad has told me about, like, college in the 70s, I got a sense that Waterson had a real college in the 70s college experience. It's sounding like it. And it also, I think, is so easy in hindsight to map this on to that spirit of rebellion that ends up being the backbone of Calvin and Hobbs.

that, you know, this is essentially how that character would behave as young adults. Well, also, there's two things that kind of don't track. I saw a lot of quotes that said that Watterson had a sharper sense of humor, like a darker sense of humor than maybe came through in Calvin and Hobbs. Like, there's another picture, apparently, that the biographer found from college where Watterson drew himself sitting at his desk in a room full of empty beer bottles and cans, a poster of the Ayatollah Iatola Comani in the background. He's wearing a wife beater and shorts

decorated with the Playboy logo while a thought bubble floats above him filled with nothing but an asterisk. So that and he's a polysai major. He wants to be a political cartoonist. Like one of the things about Calvin and Hobbes, which is, I'm not saying this makes it better or anything, but it's timeless because it's sort of a completely apolitical and almost, um, a cultural in the sense that you kind of can't pin it down in time. Yeah, the things that it's satirizing are like the crassness of television commercials. Like things that absolutely predate the strip and are, you know, still relevant today. Like it satirizes like political polling with him, you know, the runner where he's occasionally

checking in on his dad's numbers and he's not clear how his dad was elected dad. Like, it definitely, like, it's a world where satire exists, but it's not Dunesbury or something, where if you read it two years later, you're only going to be able to understand maybe a third of them. Or even Bloom County, which I was a huge fan of at the time, too, but, like, if you read old books of Bloom County and they're making jokes about Gary Hart and stuff like that, and it's like, you know, even though that was another strip that involved children and anthropomorphic animals and things like that, Um, uh, yeah, that, that's clearly obviously dated, but with, with a different purpose. Um, you did occasionally need to be there for a lot of these things. And that's, and that's entirely fair because this was a daily thing. This was a daily thing. Right.

This was, this was monoculture as it was delivered at that time that you'd start the day with the comics page and you'd end it with Johnny Carson. And you could talk to virtually anybody you met that day about peanuts and Johnny Carson. And they would know what you were talking about. out. Yeah, it shared references and three channels and yeah, yeah. Um, the, so he graduates, Watterson graduates. He gets a six month trial as the editorial cartoonist for the Cincinnati Post, which was the paper my grandparents got. Um, so he's actually going up against his, his original idol Borgman at the Cincinnati Inquirer. Um, it doesn't go well. His contract is not continued.

Um, again, I just don't feel like water. He, he, Watterson even says, like, I guess I just didn't have the killer instinct that makes a great political cartoonist, which I think he made the right choice, even if it wasn't his choice. So by the time he gets let go from that paper, he's just taking jobs doing layout work for anybody, basically, mostly a weekly publication, very much like the Penny Saver. Here's another, Watterson quote. It was a real job, and a real job is a job. you hate. I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the four and a half million minutes. I worked there. My fellow prisoners at work were basically concerned about how to punch the time clock at the

perfect second where they would earn another 20 cents without having to do any extra work for it. Which sounds a little Calvin-esque. It sounds very Calvin. It sounds like the life that Calvin is trying to avoid. Around this time, he marries his high school sweetheart, Melissa Richmond. And I believe they are still married to this day. He obviously needs to pay the bills, starting a family and a household. So again, he's doing a lot of freelance work. But the whole time, he's trying to dream up strips that he can sell to a syndicate.

Now, Daniel, I know that you have worked in comics, like comic books and modern comic books, but are you familiar with how, like, the whole syndicating thing? works for for newspapers and things like that. Not properly. To me, it has always sounded vaguely like the mafia and it in my practical life it boils down to like, okay, this website has Garfield, but this other website has like Nancy. So I do understand that there are warring territories. Right. And so the idea of a syndicate is you, they package materials and not just comics, like you can also syndicate, you know, advice columns like, you know, deer, ad, and Anne Landers and things like that.

And they sell them to all of the newspapers around the country. You know, at the time, we're talking about the early 80s. There's way more newspapers than there are now. And so the idea is if you want to be a cartoonist, want to get on the funny pages, what you do is you, you know, come up with a strip and you shop it around to the syndicates. The syndicates would get thousands. of submissions a year. But here's the thing. The comics pages had a limited real estate in papers,

right? And so maybe one or two new strips get tried out in a year because you have the stalwarts like Peanuts and Garfield. And so what is the turnover, especially if you have things like we said, like Beatle Bailey that has gone on since World War II or the Korean War or something like that? there's not a great chance to break into the industry. Comics is sort of different, right? Because there's so many established characters and things like that. Like, people always need new storylines, right? So it's not quite as hard as one or two a year.

Yeah, I think that superhero comics are different in as far as the characters are these enduring institutions, but they're not necessarily locked to one creator or one creator team. Or in some cases, some of these are literally like family businesses, you know, like I want to say maybe Hagar the horrible or high and Lois or got passed on to the child of the... Right. It always feels like a great nephew or something is now doing family circus. So, yeah, you know, as we're saying, it is very much this routine dominated medium where the comfort and the repetitiveness is all very built. in. So it's not... And that's part of the charm is like you're waking up in the morning, you don't necessarily want to be challenged. You want comfort food with your Cheerios, I guess. Right, right. And it's hard to explain to somebody who maybe didn't grow up doing this,

but it is so the placement of the strips is so consistent from day to day that when there was a new one, it was genuinely disruptive to your routine. It wasn't like Instagram or TikTok or something where variety is expected. It was like somebody broke into your house overnight and moved to the furniture. So if you are someone that aspires to get on these pages as a creator, you know, come up with a strip. You draw some panels. If a syndicate, first of all, you got to jump through the hoop of getting the syndicate to like it, right? And the syndicate will help you develop it.

But even if you get a syndicate to say, hey, this is a good idea for a strip, Daniel, they still have to shop it around. and again, there's no guarantee that papers will buy it. And so, A, it's this sort of threading the eye of a needle thing to just, you know, get considered. And then the economics of it are kind of terrible because, you know, at first, maybe a few papers run your strip, but it could take years for you to build up to 30 or 100 or whatever. The whole time the syndicate is splitting those fees with you 50-50. And so, especially in the early years, if you're only in a few papers, like, if you're making a couple hundred bucks a week, you're doing very well. Like the vast majority of comics creators in the biography, the author said we're making less than $25,000 a year.

If you become a Jim Davis and you create Garfield or a Scott Adams creating Dilbert and you're in thousands of papers, sure, that can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just from the syndicate fees. but, and this is key for what we'll talk about later, the real money is then A, packaging those strips into books, but then B is the licensing, right? Is the calendars, the stuffed animals, the T-shirts, the toys. Again, you can make a decent living, just syndicating, but if you want to make real money, like apparently, whatever the corporation is that Jim Davis has for Garfield has done, Claus Incorporated. Pause. Pause. Pause. Pause. Pause.

Yeah. Has done like a billion dollars in its lifetime in sales and things like that. So, um, anyway, this is still Bill Waterson's dream. Um, he's hacking away at it, uh, which go ahead and hit me up with rabbit hole fact number five. The first strip that he tries to shop around was Space Man Spiff. Uh, literally I believe called Space Man Spiff at this point. Now that makes sense because there's a long tradition of this sort of thing.

The comics pages weren't always comedy. There were things like, you know, going back to John Carter from Mars, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, that sort of stuff. Like even Orphan Annie was more of like an adventure sort of thing, really. Yeah, even Popeye was from, they called it the Thimble Theater because the idea was that it was an ongoing story that was small. hence Thimble Theater. He wasn't like a Bugs Bunny out of the gate. He was a supporting character in what was essentially a long adventurous soap opera. So the other reason this makes sense is this is the early 80s. So what's super hot right now is Star Wars and space stuff. So again, I was not able to uncover any examples of the strips. I don't know if they exist. But it sounds like this space man character was a sort of like a Han Solo rogue-like character. apparently smoked a cigar. And it was like half adventure and half parody.

And nobody really bites on it because they kind of want, you know, anthropomorphic talking dogs and bears and tigers and stuff like that. So he also tries to strip with a groundhog and a frog. Another one called critters that focused on bugs. one was called Doghouse, which followed a 20-year-old sort of like a slacker character. There were two of them. One was named Sam and one was Fester. And they're sort of like young kids that maybe aren't in college and aren't really doing anything with their life.

But Key, one of the characters, Sam had a little brother named Marvin, who had a stuffed tiger who was named Hobbs. Off to the races. A little bit, because what has to happen here is none of the syndicates bite on any of this stuff, right? And so they start to steer them in a way. They're like, strip down the characters and like maybe explore the idea. Again, I guess they're thinking of like the licensing and things like that. Maybe make Hobbs more important, right? And this is where apparently Waterson is starting to investigate the idea of,

is Hobbs a stuffed animal or is he a real character? In a way, like, what is Snoopy? Like, Snoopy interacts with the humans, but does not talk to them, right? So in a way, I think one of the genius things that Waterson hits on is this whole sort of amorphous concept of, is the character that is the obvious stuffed animal, character. To what degree is it part of the reality of the strip or just in the imagination of some of the characters? Yeah, and it's from what I've read, and, you know, one of the recurring themes of this episode is that there's not a huge amount of biographical or autobiographical material

about Bill Watterson. But from the notes that he put in the 10th anniversary, Kelvin and Hobbs' collection, he himself seems to not want there to be a fixed answer to this question. That it really is situational. It depends on the comedy. And I think it's worth mentioning that like nobody doesn't get it. You know, like when you when you read it, your experience is not hindered by wondering about the logistics of Hobbs as, you know, a magical transforming tiger versus just this sort of idea that conforms to the story. Originally, so he's focusing on the tiger character and then the younger kid who originally was named Marvin, and he switches the name to Calvin because apparently there was another

strip that launched around that time with a character named Marvin. Now, Rabbit Hole number six is a little bit controversial, but go ahead and hit me with it. Okay. Yeah, I'm very excited about this one because I've heard conflicting things. it is probably not true that the characters Calvin and Hobbs were named after the religious slash philosophical giants, Calvin and Hobbs. This is quoting from the Martel book. Watterson later told an interviewer in 1987 that the names Calvin and Hobbs were a tip of the hat to the political science department at Kenyon College. I thought it was funny.

Calvin was named after the 16th century Protestant theologian who believed in predestination. Hobbs, after the philosopher a century later, who once observed that light, is nasty, brutish, and short, or that is what Waterson would have you believe. That's not true, Rich West told me, and Rich West was, I believe, a classmate of Waterson's. The linking of the two names wasn't natural. The strip did not come from the idea that both characters would be named after philosophical thinkers. However, Hobbs was definitely a tip of the hat, and maybe perhaps a little bit of a smirk at his political science degree from Kenyon. Calvin was just a coincidence. Now, here's why I tend to believe this. I mean, you know, whatever. He can, he can retcon this and say that, but Calvin, if you understand Calvinism as a philosophy, Calvin would be the exact opposite, you know, Calvinists, at least in the classical sense, are like these very buttoned up straight-laced, like not a Dennis the Menace style, wild child, Bart Simpson-like character like what Calvin represents, right?

Right. And he's very questioning. And, you know, Calvin's, like, relationship with faith is complicated and uninformed. Well, well, and certain. There's a certainty, especially to Calvinism, but a lot of Protestantism, which is I am certain because God is speaking to me through the Bible and things like that. And I should say, I don't know anything about this stuff. The closest thing I have to a religion probably is, you know, Calvin and Hobbs and other people. pop culture associations. So this is something that I always took fully for granted because Waterson himself has said it. And listen, if in retrospect, he's like, yeah, that's why I wanted

to do it, fine, whatever. I'm, I'm not going to quibble with that necessarily. But let's talk about the philosophy for a second, because one of the things, and this will bring in the peanuts concept, one of the things that I think is magical about the Calvin and Hobbs strips is the sort of philosophizing the sort of, you know, you had Charlie Brown and the Peanx characters doing things like asking what is the meaning of it all and like being depressed. Yeah. Those characters very much spiritually fought in World War II. Right.

And but also that's the thing about the penis characters is I would argue that even though they're children, you feel that it is the voice of a middle-aged person coming out of a child's mouth, right? Sure. I mean, essentially, yeah. I don't think that it takes anything away from peanuts to sort of admit that. But when you have Calvin, like, asking what the meaning of it all is while sledding down a hill and popping off like these zen cones of like poetic existentialist wisdom, like it's different. And again, it's more timeless in a way. Like, I don't know if, again, I don't want to sound like I'm denigrating what peanuts accomplished. But it seems, it seems, seems more expansive to me, the philosophy and like the beauty of what Watterson does.

I think it's, yeah, I think it's a broader humanist perspective. I think that Peanuts is a little more certain about the awfulness of the world, whereas Kelvin Hobbs is very much defined by that openness. I also think that it is from time to time plausibly how a really smart child would engage with those ideas. I think obviously Calvin talks in a more sophisticated way than a real six-year-old by a lot. But I think that as a consistently written fictional character, Calvin is just a really, really smart person who's kind of reaching beyond his grasp a lot of the time. Some of what he is saying feels like he has heard it somewhere and he's repeating it. Right.

Because he knows it's how smart people talk and that's how he sees himself. and, you know, how he aspires to mastery and understanding of the universe. And then just as often, he's like, why did that bird have to die? You know, he truly is a child at the same time. Which, by the way, anyone with children under the age of 10, like that, that kids are great with that for being so sure of things. Like, here's this fact, because they want to seem grown up. And you're like, yes, your fact is correct, even though it's not correct. but can I ask you a question about Hobbs from so if Calvin is like sort of this sort of seeker and

questioner of things do Hobbs to me always seemed like I mean Hobbs is like the straight man to the comedy sometimes but also Hobbs seems to be unperturbed by the world he it's not to say that he thinks the world is you know all puppies and lollipops but he's not as worried about things. Like a lot of times the jokes at the end of strips will be Hobbs being like, yeah, or we could just go get ice cream or something like that. Right. It's right. Hobbs seems to comfortably exist in the world as it is. He's very much Calvin's sort of, you know, sounding board. Like he is, I think in some ways, you know, Calvin is the kid that we are and Hobbs is the adult that we become. There's a really great strip where Calvin asks Hobbs, if he could wish for anything right now,

what would it be? And Hobbs wishes for a sandwich. And Calvin says, that's a stupid wish. I'd wish for a billion trillion dollars and my own private continent. And then the last panel gag is that Hobbs is eating a sandwich and he says, my wish came true. And I think that he just has this sort of, you know, more measured, more mature and experienced point of view, that Calvin is this big, ambitious striver, and Hobbs is kind of like the happy adult who's waiting for him at the finish line. To figure it out or, yeah. So before we get off of this sort of philosophical bent, what is your take on whether Hobbs is real or not? I'll give you a, I'll give you a,

Waterson quote from one of, one of the collections. He said, I don't think of Hobbs as a doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin's around. Neither do I think of Hobbs as the product of Calvin's imagination. Calvin sees Hobbs one way and everyone else sees Hobbs another way. I show two versions of reality and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. But what does that do for us, the readers? Like, is it, did you ever, did you ever make a,

Did you ever in your head be like, well, here's what's going on. It's just Calvin's imagination. I don't know that I ever made any kind of like formalized, you know, like dogmatic distinction about what was happening. Like I think that quote sums it up perfectly. And it's kind of hard to argue with, you know, obviously we have been debating like authorial intent and like how truthful or consistent he's, he's being about this stuff, given how cagey he is. But I think that's right. You know, it's not totally. story where he comes to life when your back is turned. He's just going to bring that up. Right. There are...

Toy Story, there's... Toy Story, like, to use, like, from sci-fi. Like, it has a firm sense of the system of magic that is involved in Toy Story, and there are rules and boundaries that are set down. Right, right. I mean, all that matters for the stories and the jokes to work is that Hobbs is real to Calvin. And you see Hobbs as a stuffed animal interacting with Calvin's parents all the time. all the time. Like, he'll get lost in the woods or something, and you'll see his mom talking to the stuffed

the stuffed Hobbs doll. And it does not, you know, spring to life and have a private conversation with her. It's just her kid's stuffed animal. All that matters is that Calvin sees him as a friend and that they go on adventures together. And the relationship that Calvin is projecting onto him makes him real so that we can experience these adventures from his point of view. Well, and this is, again, I think the key to the whole art here is this bringing the interior world of a child's imagination into the real world and kind of not, because like putting aside even Hobbs, like all of the Spaceman Spiff or other like fantasy strips where he's going off and fighting dinosaurs and things like that. And then the The gag at the end will be like, you know, he's wrestling under his blankets in bed and his dad is like, what's going on in here or something like that.

But again, like, that's sort of the real magic that Waterson tapped into was this sense that we all intuitively have a memory of maybe, even if it's faint. The idea that there was a time when fantasy didn't necessarily have firm boundaries with reality, it kind of blended together. Yeah, I think that something we keep coming back. to in many facets is that Calvin and Hobbs is really successful in identifying what it feels like to be a child. Not just in the sort of like, oh, I'm smarter and more sophisticated and maybe sadder than adults think I am, but also like I'm more playful. I live in a more pliable reality. Things can change from moments to moments. Peanuts really does feel like kids articulating what it feels like to be adults. And Calvin and Hobbes feels like a kid who is authentically a kid, but sometimes uses the language of adults.

Let me ask you one more philosophical question. And this is a little dangerous because I feel like this could piss people off. Let's do it. Let's burn it all down. Are we sure Calvin is good? No. Morally. Morally good.

No. I mean, I think that's the tension of the comic. I mean, he's a child. I think it's very much about like, I don't think that, you know, something that, and we'll talk about this, but something I really reject is any kind of like future life for these characters and any kind of fans trying to manifest some sort of like larger canon or something. I find to be pretty repugnant and easily dismissed. But I do think that, because Calvin is a child, like the idea of his like development and future being in question

is kind of like the point of the whole comic. It's like, yeah, he's, he misbehaves constantly. And then there's a voice of reason around to acknowledge it to him. Like, hey, you want to make a better decision? Right. Well, and also, you know, obvious analogs are like Dennis the Menace, but that is an older adult not able to handle just the basic nature of a child. You know, Bart Simpson owes a lot to Calvin.

argue. But the way Bart Simpson evolved, especially in the golden era of that show, he's genuinely has a good heart. Calvin is angry and bitter. He shirk's responsibility. He's lazy. But it's like there's an edge and an anger to, to Calvin that, that I would argue even Bart is, doesn't have a sharp edge like that. Yeah, I definitely agree. I mean, I think Kelvin and Hobbs is a two-hander. You know, that's why Calvin can be genuinely unsettling, because there will always be this other balancing force. I mean, Bart is his own, you know, there's Lisa, obviously, and Lisa is very Hobbsy. But Bart is ultimately, you know, his own Kelvin and his own Hobbs. He has a conscience. Hobbs is the externalization of a lot of Calvin's, you know, more sophisticated reasoning.

Before I come back to the timeline of the strip and sort of Waterson's biography and stuff, can we just hit some things that are amazing, you know, aside from the... Yeah, we're getting real brainy. Let's talk about how... Yeah. Let's talk about how great this thing is. Like Calvin Ball. Again, this is so key to understanding, like, if you have had children or if you've just interacted with small children, like, the concept of making stuff up as you go along. Yeah. And Waterson's refusal to let people assign rules to it, I think is so important and so emblematic of his approach to this entire project. The, the amount of, the things that stuck out to me when I was eight reading these were the things like the transmogrifier or whatever, like there was the one.

where there's several strips where a cardboard box will be a time machine or a Calvin goes into it and creates a second Calvin and then a third Calvin or whatever. You know, again, speaking of like, you know, comic books and multiverses and things like that, the cartoons with the dinosaurs and the space adventures that are drawn in almost German expressionism style, like, like that's sort of that's the fantasy that I feel like no comic had been balzy enough or crazy enough to do before. Yeah, it was it was really ambitious and it was arriving at a time where the the demand of craft had waned quite a bit. And a lot of Waterson's writing that does exist is like complaining about the

shrinking real estate on the comics page and how little respect is being paid towards the art and how much he loved, you know, full-color, Sunday, you know, Windsor McKay, Prince Valiant type, you know, old-time comic strips. And, you know, in the 10th anniversary book, he has landscapes that he's really proud of, you know, Martian landscapes, or he'll print a older version of a dinosaur fantasy comic and kind of lament that he didn't do enough research to make them look like real dinosaurs. You can tell that he cares so much about doing next level work, especially compared to what was coming out at the time. I mean, this is just a pet theory of mine, but there's stuff about Calvin and Hobbs and Waterson's commentary on it that makes it feel like he's trying to save the idea of the comics page by being an undeniable artist.

Like, no, I'm going to bring this back. Yeah, well, we'll get to that actually at a second when we get back to the biography. But just some other nuggets here just to, again, if people aren't familiar with the comics, but actually more if people are. So again, Calvin Ball, if you remember what the rules of Calvin Ball are, first, there are no rules. And then number two, you can never play the game the same way twice. And so, in fact, the point of Calvin Ball is to make up new rules as you go. And specifically, that's how you win, is you're constantly making up new rules to disadvantage your opponent.

Right. Then we mentioned this before, but Gross is his get rid of slimy girls club, which Waterson admitted was based on a club he and his neighbors had growing up. And the character, Susie Durkins, is, I think, a classic character. It's a classic case of he understands that, like, you know, at that age, especially boys, the way that you say, hey, I like you is by annoying the hell out of you and basically being mean to you. Right, right.

Then I made a list of some of the other alter egos aside from Space Man Spiff, because if this isn't clear, Space Man Spiff comes up in a lot of strips as the fantasy character, the fantasy world that Calvin goes into. There was also Safari Al, there was Captain Napalm, there was Tracer Bullet, which I believe that was the one that was sort of like the 40s noir. Yeah, he's a detective. Detective comic. And there was Stupendous Man. So again, these flights of fancy are, are, it's just, if you've never experienced it, like that's, that's the magic of these comics. It's a big deal, you know, to establish, like, lore, too.

Because, like, Peanuts had, like, running gags. You know, Garfield had, like, running gags. But with Calvin and Hobbs, even though it was, like, very serialized and very, like, a daily reset, they would do these week-long stories that had their own kind of internal, almost like science fiction logic where like you're saying like he's making a much of clones this week that's what the box does when it's sideways when you turn the box upside down then it turns you into a tiger right what we're expressing here is that maybe 60 70% of the time you you open up the paper on a

Tuesday and it's a self-contained strip and a gag but then you would you would love it when all of a sudden oh they're going on a there's a narrative happening here and it would last for weeks and like that that was the best. And with, I mean, that, that had existed, right?

Like, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it probably, it used to be, I think, the default was that comic strips would be, you know,

like you were saying about little orphan, orphan annies that like, hey, we're on a steam ship and we're going to Europe or whatever. But yeah, it was not, it was this really interesting blending with the gag strips where I think that like, I don't know how,

because, you know, I only really read and remember the, the big legendary ones at this point. I don't know how common in the 80s and 90s it would be to have, like, a runner. You know, like, I know that, like, Kathy would have, like, an ongoing... Like, she'd go to Paris with her mom, or she'd have an ongoing sexual harassment problem with her boss. Like, Kathy would do storylines with individual daily gags.

But there was something about the tools in Waterson's toolbox where it's like, this is a kid doing an imagination game with his best friend's sidekick, where they're going to Mars this week. And it really was able to tap into this kind of larger adventure comic genre and spirit while still being like a daily punchline. Let me drag us back to the biography here because I want to make a point that's relevant right now. So summer of 1983, Waterson puts together a full sales packet for Calvin and Hobbs, as the strip is by that point called.

and by the way, apparently at that point, the drawings, the appearance of the characters were pretty much what they ended up looking like. But it's not until July of 1985 that he finally sells it to Universal Press Syndicate, which I don't believe was like the bigger syndicate out there. But again, he had shopped around so many things and been rejected so many times. So the point that I want to make is that with... the first like three months of the strip running, I think every character, including the teacher, Miss Wormwood, including the bully Mo. I think that, I don't think that there was a single character that was introduced new beyond that first three months. Obviously, real heads can check me on that. But if true, it's fascinating that from the very beginning, the universe was kind of self-contained.

Yeah, it's pretty fixed. I mean, I know that there are flirtations with introducing new characters. I know at one point the dad had a brother, Uncle Max, and he found that, he found that to be very constraining because Uncle Max, one, could never call the parents by their names. And two, strips that didn't feature Calvin and Hobbs or revolved around them in some way just felt, I don't know, thinner, I guess. I'm projecting a lot onto the very little information that exists about this, again, in the 10th anniversary volume. But basically, he said that giving the parents, like, a larger world was a mistake. And there's also a similar for a down, like, an experiment with, like, a scouting troop that Calvin would, like, not fit in with the scouting troop. And it sort of feels like a, like a symptom of the same problem that, like, adding more kind of formalization

to this doesn't work, that Calvin is, you know, just going to bristle against structures, like, literally, but also as, like, an artistic concept. Well, right, like, Calvin will play baseball, but it's not like there will be lots of interactions with other players on the baseball team. Yeah, you don't see the game,

the way you see, like, Charlie Brown and Peppermint Patty play a baseball game. So, uh, Watterson has hit his dream. He quits his day job in January 1986 by 18 months in. The strip is in 300 papers, and it just snowballs from there. Now, interestingly enough, again in the biography, you get a sense that right away, and this is how we're going to have to go into sort of analyzing the artist here.

Yeah, this is where the Kremlinology portion of Arch 8. Hellinger-esque creator Pians. Right. Right away So he's, this is the dream, this is what he wanted all along, but right away he sort of bristles against the daily grind of having to come up with a new idea.

At a Kenyan commencement speech he gave in 1990, Waterson says, drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money, it was in the work, but then at the same time he says things like

the best summation I could find from Waterson for his own creative process was he said later he would sit down and quote stare into space for an hour and sometimes not come up with a single decent idea or sometimes no idea at all.

It's very tempting to go do something else and just draw up a strip but I find that if I make myself stick to it for another hour I can come up with several good ideas but even then that was not enough sometimes and in the Calvin and Hobbs' 10th anniversary book he says and I think this is the key

quote, maybe anyone listening out there that wants to be creative or do anything, really. He says, sometimes I just cross the whole thing out. On occasion, I've ripped up entire stories, weeks of material that I didn't think were good. The quality of a strip is determined by the quantity of ideas in the waste basket. So there's your sort of, your quote, your inspirational quote, is sort of like the idea of just doing the reps, just doing the work and even if only 10 or 5% of it is good, you can get to quality by producing volume, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I know that's not true of everybody, but I think it is potentially true of anybody starting out to try that approach. I mean, I think it's also worth mentioning like, obviously this guy's a genius and the idea is that he's throwing away.

I might not be able to look at it and think, like, why is this worse than, you know, the ones that, that you like. The other thing that he's defined by is this incredible level of, you know, aspiring to satisfy his own artistic aspiration above all else. Or perfectionism is another way. Again, we're going to get to his prickliness in a bit. You're someone that has written for a daily TV show. You've worked with Stephen Colbert, as we mentioned I guess that's a topical news

related comedy show but can you speak at all to this idea of even if you love it even if this is your dream at some point going in every day and being like

all right now what we make the funny like speak to me a little bit about I mean I'm someone that's done I do a daily news podcast that's over 1,800 episodes now and the whole reason

we're doing this is I needed to shake things up a little bit. Sure, sure. Speak a little bit about the grind of doing something every day. Sure. Well, I mean, look, it is a grind. You know, your dream job is still a job. That's why you ask them to pay you for it.

I think that doing something daily, even if it's supposed to be funny or even if it's supposed to bring joy, you are still rewiring your brain to work at the joke factory. I think that you kind of through habits and discipline build yourself into like, you know, the talk show joke machine. Like you know how to turn on the machine. After a while, you know how to structure your life in such a way where it's like there were times when I worked there when I stopped reading real books and stopped listening to music because it was so important that I absorb enough news and podcasts in order to fuel. the volume of material that you need to generate for a show, especially during a time when you might write an entire hour of television and throw it away at 4 p.m.

And then the show goes on at 5 p.m. So I'm sure he got to a place where it did feel like this incredibly regimented thing. And I can only speak to my version of it, but then the joy becomes surprising yourself. You know, you are kind of, you're not on autopilot, but you're operating from a place of confidence and consistency. And then you think of the thing or someone else pitches you the thing that catches you off guard and you laugh really hard and really organically. And you remember like, oh, this is why I wanted to do this.

But you said something there that I wonder is also a key insight is you said something about like, what was the phrase you used? Pushing the joke button or having the process to make the jokes actually happen. And like other comedians that I've known, like there's this concept of once you get good at being a comic or coming up with jokes and stuff like that, it sort of takes the magic away from it because you see sort of the strings behind. Like you see the machinery that is required to make a laugh happen. And I wonder if you can extrapolate that almost to any sort of creative endeavor. Once you're good at it or once you do it enough, like you can see the tricks. that maybe if you're not a magician, you wouldn't know are there. Yeah, I think that's fair.

I mean, that's the cliche with, like, comedians at comedy shows, right? Is that they're standing in the back sort of like, you know, the most you get is, like, a nod or something. If you can make your comedian buddies laugh, you know that you've actually broken new ground because you surprised them and, you know, showed them a new way that something could be done. But I think that's fair. I've heard that LA is like a big sports town partially because basketball doesn't have three acts, you know, like that you can go to have this like shared experience and get a kind of narrative that doesn't conform to the thing that you think of as being very rote and predictable and set in stone. So I think there's a lot of truth to that. I also think like I'm personally like a big softie. You know, if it's funny, I'm, I'm going to laugh.

My favorite shows are the ones where I can't predict what's happening. But I'm, you know, I'm also like kind of dumb. And like that means that there's more shows available to me than perhaps, perhaps a more sophisticated creator. So I think it's absolutely true of a lot of people that like, oh, I can't enjoy this anymore because I've seen too much of how like the sausage gets made. I do have trouble watching, like, the political comedy talk shows now, because the, the rhythm of those is so consistent that it does trigger a sort of, like, oh, I would have done this slightly differently, or, like, maybe I see that they've, like, fallen into a pitfall or, or something like that. But, generally speaking, look, I'm, you know, I'm not a big grumpus about it. I can still, I can still get on board for these things, even if I, like, largely know, how they're. made. And then as with being at my own jobs, the joy comes from like, oh, a crazy left turn. Like, I could not, in a million years. Like, I'm so in awe of the brain that made that decision.

I wonder if, like, that's the thing is if, and we're getting ahead of ourselves, if Waterson walks away, because he thought that he had created, like, a perfect snow globe. And then to surprise himself, he would have to break the snow globe and go into left field. and maybe he was too in love with the snow glove to do that. Okay. So we've already alluded to the fact that one of the reasons why Calvin and Hobbs is such a precious sort of thing is that there was just the strip and only 10 years of it. There was no TV show.

There were no movies. No t-shirts, not the legal ones anyway. There was a few calendars. There were the books. But as we said, where the real money is is the licensing. Waterson never does it. When, obviously, anyone listening to this, you've seen Calvin pissing on things.

We're finally getting there. Those are not legal. A quote from Waterson is, I clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo, but later added, long after the strip is forgotten, they are my ticket to immortality. So, listen, again, this is where the money is.

it's also, if it's 50-50 with the syndicate, the syndicate is putting huge pressure on Waterson to license. This was like a multi-year battle. Yeah. And he refuses to do it. Like at one point, like a toy company sends him Hobbs dolls, you know, different prototypes in a box and he takes them out in his backyard and burns them.

And a quote I found was he says, I'm convinced that licensing would sell out the, of Calvin and Hobbs. The world of a comic strip is more fragile than most people realize once you're given up, once you've given up its integrity. That's it. I want to make sure that never happens instead of asking what's wrong with rampant commercialism. We ought to be asking what justifies it. Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste. I'm going to give you this. Would a Hobbs tiger have been that bad? No, of course not. I mean, I don't. Because as a kid, a kid could live the Calvin experience, could do what Calvin's doing.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right. I think that if you asked Waterson, he'd be disgusted because he should say, like, well, a kid shouldn't be pretending to be Calvin. A kid should be getting the stuffed alligator or the stuff to, you know, koala. Or inventing their own, their own Hobbs. Exactly. He has a quote that says, the idea of a Hobbs doll is especially noxious because the intrigue of Hobbs is that he may or may not be real tiger. Yeah, I think that's a completely valid aspect of it, was that it would codify the idea that this is just a toy and you're projecting imagination onto it. Or God forbid, it's like a toy that

talks, you know, and now you're starting to sort of make rules about this thing that don't originate with Waterson or don't, don't originate with the strip. Look, I'm a parent of a young child. I see her imitating things like Bluey and Super Kitty's and kind of modeling feelings that she is authentically having, but using, you know, essentially TV quotes or TV scenes that she's recreating with us to sort of take them for a test drive. I don't think that's like cancerous, you know? Like, I think that that's acceptable. I think that if a Hobbs doll existed, it would sort of live in that space where it's like, I love Calvin so much. I do see myself in Calvin. I think it's okay to be Calvin in a more sort of like direct play sense.

But at the same time, he clearly saw it as this all or nothing gambit. Well, maybe this is the time to ask you this question. Like, you know, Chuck Klosterman has written extensively about this. This idea of selling out was a very 80s and 90s and Gen X thing. But also, I mean, going back to like the baby boomers and the time of hippies. But Klosterman wrote about it specifically in the 90s where he said, what was so maddening about selling out was that everyone even at the time knew it was idiotic. There were so many contradictions.

The concept didn't really sustain itself as a thesis. Everyone knew it was crazy, and yet you still had to accept it, and you still couldn't sell out. I don't know that that, I think this is Waterson's own sort of bugaboo, but I guess also it does fit into his concept, as we were alluding to, of, well, comics, the comic pages should be high art, and I want to bring it back to high art, I guess. Yeah, and I can't remember hearing him use the phrase sellout. Like, it didn't seem like what he was doing was informed by any kind of external cultural pressure, as much as just a real, like, understanding and protectiveness over what he created and his relationship with it.

Well, hold on. We're going to, I'm going to give you something in a second. Yeah, let's do this. Well, let's hit, let's hit, give me rabbit hole fact number seven. This blew my mind that there was. one single licensed t-shirt produced. In 1991, the Smithsonian and Ohio State University put together an exhibit called Great American Comics 100 years of cartoon art. This is so dorky.

Of course, this is the only merchandise. Waterson allowed the Sunday strip, the one where Calvin is making faces for the camera. Real heads will have seen this where he's like making faces for the camera. He allowed that to be used on a T-shirt promoting that show specifically, but he never allowed it again. Hit me with number eight. And George Lucas, Jim Henson, and Stephen Spielberg all approached Waterson at various times to develop the characters for the screen. So, apparently the Spielberg people went multiple times, and he would not even take a call, take a meeting. Do you think that how many times, on one hand, Stephen Spielberg can probably take count the times that someone refused to meet with him, right?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you find, like, a list of his, like, of things that were in development at some point and just discarded. Like, I don't imagine anybody said no after what, you know, like, even if you were, 76. Right. Even if you were going to say no, you might just be like, yeah, I'll take a meeting, you know, like, the other thing is, is like, you know, we were alluding to the Calvin peeing on. things. There was a lot of pressure. And rightly so, like the logic from the syndicate is, is like, look, there's all this bootleg stuff out there. We should say, go online. There is to this day a ton of bootleg, uh, Calvin stuff, Calvin and Hobbs stuff. And they're like, well, if you, if you just let us license it, then, um, there's crap out there already. If what you're worried about is crap, uh, help us make it good, you know? Yeah. Um, this is maybe a, a good time to

talk about this idea of like, you know, who owns the art, the artist or or the audience. You turn me on to this idea of nowadays, because there hasn't been new Calvin and Hobbs material for 30 years, there's tons of like fan fiction and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And I don't want to say like strictly because because it's sort of like a, you know, I don't want to like cast any blame in any direction. But the popularity of this thing, and the absence of a way to engage with it in an official capacity the way you would with an ongoing relationship with like Star Wars, right, or Harry Potter, where you're engaging with the corporation every day. Calvin and Hobbs doesn't have that. So if you are, if you have an

appetite, and you know, apparently we do for more Calvin and Hobbs, that is something that most people ignore. They just read the books again. But for some people, it reaches this kind of fever pitch. And with those people, the things that get made end up being really intense. Because they are the ones who need it enough that they've, they've willed it into being. So I think that the Calvin bootleg stuff, there's a lot of casual, you know, Calvin bootleg stuff. It'll usually be like Etsy stickers of, like, art from the comic.

But then there will also be things that are like, really intense, really revealing. And there are comics that imagine Calvin as an adult. He is often married to Susie. He sometimes have children of his own that he has passed Hobbs on to. And it's everything that Waterson purposefully did not include. You know, it's closure, it's canon, it's rules, it's sentimentality that's sort of like,

you know, loves the original but misunderstands the role of sentimentality in the original. And I find it all to be like very distasteful. Yes. So you would come down on the side that Waterson as the artist, if he is disappointed in this stuff, you would come down on that side. Well, I think that it's not just that Waterson himself didn't want it to exist. I think that in other hands, it doesn't, work because I feel the same way about, you know, Facebook images where they'll like swap in the words in a Peanuts comic to be about, you know, being like,

hey, we have to bring back prayer in schools, you know, like I find that, um, there are some works that are so completely tied to the author that you can love it without getting it. And then if you don't get it and try to make your own,

you're going to make something crazy. I'm going to, I'm going to counter this with the George Lucas argument, which is, you know, okay, George Lucas was the creator of Star Wars, and he fucked up Star Wars by putting those crazy CGI redone scenes later on. And it's like, can I just have the original cut back, right? And so, and by the way, speaking of selling out, no offense, George, but I mean, he sold out to the tune of multiple billions of dollars. And now, actually, hold on to that. We'll come back to Star Wars as an example. But the idea of that maybe even the artist is not the best steward of their artistic vision forever?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think that we talk so much about, like, does it belong to the artist? Does it belong to the audience? And I think it's so much more complicated than that. And I think the best succinct version I can give of my philosophy. is that it belongs to the moment. And I think that Star Wars is really emblematic of that because George Lucas left to his own devices was going to make a bad Star Wars. Right.

And that, you know, all of the, all of the biographical information that we know about, you know, the way that that was sort of like saved and the product of this incredible once-in-a-lifetime collaboration and the audience that was ready to receive it. created Star Wars as we know it. That's why George Lucas right now cannot make Star Wars again. And I think that Calvin and Hobbs, to me, feels like something where they knew that, so they stopped trying. We're going to come back to Star Wars again at the end, but let me bang out some other biographical stuff here. And unfortunately, this is where we get into, again, sort of psychoanalyzing. 1991 Waterson was able to negotiate a new contract to give him

full legal control of the strip the IP See, one of the things he says is that the whole time the syndicate could have sold the characters. The reason they didn't was because they wanted to keep him happy and keep him

producing, right? And so as much as they put pressure on him, they never actually pulled the trigger on going over his head. And so by 1991, the new contract that he gets gives him complete control of everything. Nothing will happen to that IP that he or his heirs do not allow to happen. That was a multi-year, apparently acrimonious thing, and it's one of the, again, to psychoanalyze, this is maybe one of the reasons like maybe he

burns out on it, or he sees the sort of how the sausage is made, and there's all of this legal stuff behind, whatever. But I'm going to tell you, and I'm sorry to do this for people, but Waterson seems to be, from the very beginning, a very stubborn and prickly guy. Like, he stopped giving interviews very early on. And by very early on, I mean like 1987. So like two years into the strip. Here's a quote that he gave from, I believe, the last interview.

Well, no, no, no, because there was a, there's been a couple interviews in the last 20 years. But from when the last interview he gave when the strip was extant. Calvin and Hobbs would not exist intact if I did not exist intact myself. And I will not exist intact if I have to put up with all of this stuff. He's referring to publicity, I guess. I enjoy the isolation from people. That's how I work. I read an article on Garrison Keeler where he said that fame has to a certain extent corrupted his work.

He gets some of his inspiration from being an unrecognized observer. But if he can't walk into a hardware store and overhear people and be inconspicuous, he can't get his material. So it sounds like he doesn't like attention. Fine. He's also prickly to his peers. There is, at least in the, apparently, in the comic creators community, an infamous speech he gives in 1989 at the festival of cartoon art where he unloads on the industry itself. Quote, the comics pages are full of dead wood. Strips that had some relevance to the world during the Depression are now being continued by baby boomers.

and the rest, the results are embarrassing. This is very Gen X, by the way. Very Gen X. And also, like, I'm laying the, I'm sort of laying the railroad track for, like, like, he's just like, I don't, it's not as magical to me now that I'm on the inside of it. He also accused fellow cartoonists of being too willing to sell out. Quote, it's not surprising many cartoonists are as eager as the syndicates for easy money and are willing to sacrifice the heart and soul of the strip to get it.

Mort Walker of Beatle Bailey fame apparently gave a speech after him that said and knocked that down in a jovial way but then told the biographer later, Watterson had a tremendous amount of talent. And if you read his work, you'd think he'd be a friendly, nice guy with a lot of fun in him. Frankly, after that speech, I was disappointed. There's a lot of people in the, in the biography that kind of walk on eggshells around him.

Not diva, I wouldn't say. but doesn't again it's the question of is it the artist as the tortured lone creator off alone or whatever yeah well somebody who's aware of their own talents and leverages it you know that's like that's a common figure in pop culture and all of that is really interesting to me because i had you know and i mentioned earlier in this episode i had imagined that this was more of a personal crusade and less of a response to like a broader cultural movement. But the speech you're describing does sound like, you know, it sounds like something Kurt Cobain would say at the MTV Awards.

You know, like it sounds like. Yes. Not to make this all about Gen X stuff, but let me give you two more examples. Because again, these are sort of like, okay, he's sticking up for the art, but he's also throwing elbows, right? So in 1992, Universal Press announced that the Sunday, California, you know, the Sunday, and Hobbes's had to be a full half of a newspaper page. Now, he wants to create these crazy strips of, you know, going around fighting with dinosaurs

and full color and things like that, which, by the way, younger listeners, if you don't know that the week-weekday strips were black and white, the Sunday strips were the ones that were in color and allowed for more creativity and things. Now, but think about this another way. We've already talked about how the real estate in the comics pages is very. very, very limited. And here you have the most popular strip in the country, basically stealing real estate from potentially another up-and-coming strip. So that, again, did not endear him to fellow artists. And then he took multiple almost year-long sabbaticals, which at the time was

unheard of. Like, if you were going to take six months off, you get, you bang out a bunch of strips and you bank them, or you have your intern or your nephew, as you say, or whatever, draw them and stuff like that. But he, towards the end, and I'm looking at the dates right now, this would have been 91 into 92, he takes almost a year-long one, and then a second one. I feel like I remember these. I don't know if they were absent from the page or if they were running reruns. I remember the feeling of there being a new one.

Right. They were running reruns. Now, so again, okay, respect for the artist and his, like, he needs a break, you know, whatever, recharge your batteries. But also, that is sort of disrespecting the audience, dare I say. There was another, I don't think I have it in my notes, but I saw another comics creator say that if you're lucky enough to become part of somebody's daily routine, on some level you owe. it to them to be stand up and to be there. And so I'm not, again, I don't want to, I don't want anyone to think I'm coming up, coming off as anti Bill Watterson, but there is a bit of a sense of like, it's my way or the

highway, even to the audience. Yeah, I am so talented that the rules that have been established thus far don't really apply to me. I mean, in both directions, because I'm also turning down like the fire hose of money, you know, and in turning down the fire hose of money, and this is like a very like, you know, sell out connected idea, I now have even more leverage because my integrity is very visible. So if I need to take a year off, remember, I'm the guy who turned down the fire hose of licensing money. I must know something. Right. Well, look, I even remember having a sense of this feeling like, you know, when he takes those sabbaticals, feeling like, hey, maybe this isn't going to last forever.

Well, guess what? He's taking those almost year-long sabbaticals. And in the last few years of the strip, like, he's telegraphing it because I'll give you one example. This is from a strip Monday, July 17th, 1995. So six months before the strip. I can't remember what is happening in the strip, but Calvin says nothing is permanent, everything changes. That's the one thing we know for sure in this world. He's saying that to Hobbs. And the final strip, I don't remember if it was, it must have been telegraphed ahead

of time, like there was a press release or like there was probably an article in the paper. But the final strip airs New Year's Eve, 1995. I can remember this because it is New Year's Eve. That was my senior year of high school. There's a lot of things changing in life. And also, that year was a, we lost Calvin and Hobbs, Farside, and Burke Bredthead's Outland, which was the follow-up to Bloom County all that same year. Yeah, it was sort of the day the music died.

Yeah, of the comics pages. Yeah. So, okay. the man did a total of 3,160 strips. We've gone through all the permutations of this burnout, losing the magic to it. But let me posit one more theory here, which is, what if you're called to a vocation, and we'll use artistic vocations as the best example? So a singer, an actor, or whatever, where you're drawn to the craft.

but that craft requires you to be in public. And being in public or giving of yourself, maybe you're just an introvert. Maybe it's just against a very basic part of your nature. You know, Greta Garbo has the line from, it's in a movie where she says, I just want to be alone. But I mean, like, maybe that's just the thing

where there are certain people that have a skill for something. And because I don't think that this is a, Bobby Fisher situation where there was something maybe broken in Bobby Fisher's brain, right? Yeah, I mean, he's a very specific person, but they all are. You know, we're talking about geniuses. What if, what if sometimes people get called to do something that then doesn't fit with their overall personality? Right. Like, I think of, I think Andy Partridge, uh, in NXT who had a panic attack on stage and they just didn't tour anymore. And he was a rock star sort of like at the peak of, you know, or, or, or, or, you know, or. on the upswing, certainly.

Yeah, this is something I think about a lot. Like, I have done live comedy, and one of the reasons that I largely stopped was stage fright or a version of sort of day before apprehension that would kind of, like, consume my life. I see my friends who, you know, go up on stage 350 times a year, and I see that's a stand-up, you know, that's a person who's who's wired for this.

Or I'll give you another example. Like Bob Dylan's still on tour, at least I think he still is. He's been Bob Dylan for 50, 60 years now. Like, there's no reason that Bob Dylan still has to do 100 dates a year. But he has, he's said in interviews, the phrase he always uses is, I'm just a song and dance man. So, like, some people have success and all the money and all the fame in the world. they've achieved everything they want. And what they realize is is that like, yeah, but I'm still going to die.

So what do I do before death is I just keep doing the thing that I'm good at. And like, like, like Daniel Day Lewis going off and making furniture or something. Like Bob Dylan is just like, fuck it, I'm just going to be on a never-ending tour until I literally can't do it anymore. You know, so there's the inverse of that. Yeah, like this is just how I'm wired. This is how I feel like myself is being out there. So here's a Waterson quote. I'll read real quick. I know most people dream of being famous or being a celebrity. The attention is thought to be gratifying or ego building or something. I found it to be a nuisance all the way around. There's very little of it that I enjoy. You become a cartoonist all your life all day. It's no longer a job. You are defined by your work. You suddenly have no private life. I'm sorry, you suddenly have no private time. You cannot be a husband to your wife. You are still a celebrity cartoonist. I find that aggravating. If you can't have a personal life, you're it really seems to me to be a sacrifice.

So, the man walks away. Yeah, that's pretty clear. Yeah. If we knew more about him, I would maybe understand that point of view in a clearer way, because it's like, all I know that he likes to cycle.

You know what I mean? He likes to paint. He paints. By the way, he has... They don't feel like hobbies that are incompatible with being a celebrity cartoonist is, I guess, my reflexive pushback against that. I don't really know what you're giving up, but okay. People have asked why, why don't you

exhibit your artwork and he's like, he's given reasons for that or whatever. So the point is, is a strip ends in 95. Not only does he do no other published creative work, except for the one I'm going to tell you about, but he doesn't give interviews. Very rarely, he did one with mental floss a few years ago. Last year, a book came out called The Mysteries with him and John cashed, who I believe is some sort of a famous character caricaturist or something. I've read it. It's not very Calvin and Hobbs like. It's more sort of what would it be like Jumangi? Who's that? I don't remember who the artist is. Oh, sure, but those sort of like storybook with like large, lush single page illustrations. I will tell you, I don't want to spoil it too much because it's a very short almost children's book.

the lesson I'm taking away from this book, it's about the mysteries, is the mysteries get revealed and found, and society is disappointed. And then eventually society forgets about the mysteries, but the mysteries go on forever. So it's almost a parable of you don't want to know the magic trick. Yeah. Stop digging. Yeah. Stop knocking on my door. Basically. Let's bring this to a landing a little bit.

You and I were talking about this offline. I think, you know, one of, bring it back to Gen X. One of the original sins of Gen X was the Star Wars thing, was this was, if you were of a certain age and a certain background, all you wanted was this. You wanted more. You wanted, and you had the toys, and so that, like, fueled it because it fueled your creativity. And so definitely, again, George Lucas had no compunction about it. selling it. In fact, that was the genius selling the toys when no one else had thought to do that yet. Yeah, he was kind of the the, the Charles Schultz of the movies, you know, the first guy to be like,

no, this could be, this could be a whole ecosystem. So it's the original sin because we wanted it so bad, we didn't get it, and then it was given to us. And it's like, you know, I could have, again, I take the original trilogy unedited right now. I'm glad that there's more stuff like I like some of the TV shows and whatever. And I know this is a different era at this point. You know, corporations have figured out that IP is the one thing that is essentially eternal. But as we said offline, I'm going to make the strong argument. We don't need more Calvin and hops.

Yeah, I would fully agree with that. I think one of the reasons that we keep gravitating towards Star Wars as a comp is that if I believe there's any kind of like, you know, almost physical ingredients to all this. The best I could describe it as is potency. And Star Wars is something where we've decided to, you know, water down the potency enough that we can just keep that faucet running all year round. And it will always generate money and it will always generate satisfaction. And I think that the other way that that potency can manifest is to really keep it bottled up and keep it pure and intense and experience it the way. You also said, you said something at one point about the time in your life.

Like, maybe it's not possible. Like, we want the nostalgia. Oh, I want to feel like I did when I was eight. Well, but you're not eight. And you're not going to be able to feel that way anymore. And so it's a fool's errand to try to chase that sort of high. Yeah, I think it can be. And I think what's something like Star Wars, like obviously,

there's a joy in sharing it with, you know, your children in a new generation. But the trade-off is that they are making more of it. And the more of it they make, the more you change the circumstances and the, you know, the cultural moment in which it is being made. So in order to share it with your kids, you are sharing kind of like a photocopy of it. Because they can't be you in 1981. They just can't. Well, or, and I think. of like bands and like, you know, bands that we love that continue to produce. You grow out of it. They grow out of it. You say to yourself, well, the later albums aren't as good as the first albums. Maybe the artist thinks the same thing. Or maybe the artist doesn't. Maybe

the artist is like, I'm doing the exact same shit. I don't understand. But like, that's sort of like that natural process of you aging out. Like, think in a way, God only knows what Kurt Cobain would, what music he'd be producing. Maybe we'd be so over him, maybe, you know. People don't like it when I say that John Lennon would probably be a Trump guy, but I just have this weird, it's weird, yeah, right. But also, you don't control that stuff. But also think of the art and like, like, there's only those albums and those songs that Kirk Cobain wrote and those books that J.D. Sanger wrote, and there will never be any more. And let me, let me close by saying, one more thing that we also talked about offline. I think that the spiritual successor to Calvin

and Hobbs is Bluey. It has the same sort of sense of wonder and magic. And the addition that Bluey has to Calvin and Hobbs is it's not just the wonder of being the child, it's also the wonder and magic of being a parent to children at the exact same time. Yeah, I don't. I don't know if I fully agree with this comparison, but I do very much see it. I think that Bluey's dad, and like I said, I have a three-year-old daughter. I've seen all of Bluey multiple times. I think that Bluey's dad feels more like a grown-up Calvin than when fans try to draw comics about grown-up Calvin, because it is very much about this commitment to a shared imagination that gets you away from the television and bonding with each other.

and forming your identity. I think that Bluey is missing the edge that makes Calvin and Hobbs work for me. But I also think it's really interesting that the creator of Bluey keeps kind of signaling that there is a finish line for this thing and that there's a really personal reason behind it. And in that way, it's very Calvin and Hobbs.

Yeah. Maybe we'll be doing, someone will be doing a, psychoanalysis podcast episode about about Bluey someday. Last thing, Daniel, do you, are there favorite strips that you want to mention? I can give you a couple. Any last thoughts on Calvin and Hobbs

that maybe you haven't had a chance to bring up yet? I mean, anything that I'm going to say is something that the audience already has in their heads. I think that the reason Calvin and Hobbs was so important to me was because like so many other kids, I was too smart for my own good. I did have a problem with authority. And it gave me the vocabulary to express those feelings and to feel like I was seen,

especially feel like I was seen by an adult. I think that Garfield and Peanuts taught me the language of comics, and Calvin and Hobbs spoke to me in my own language. That's beautiful. Daniel, how about plugs, anything? How can we find you, find more of what you're working on these days? Sure. You know what?

I have a bunch of unannounced stuff right now, but I work in mainstream comics and television and animation. So I would say just go to kibblesmith.com. It's an old-fashioned homepage that I actually do update. and I'm very easy to find on social media, Kibblesmith at Twitter and Daniel Kibblesmith on Instagram. And I will plug, which I didn't do last time. I, Brian McCullough, have a daily tech news podcast called The Tech Meme Ride Home.

As I mentioned, 100, or I'm sorry, 1,860 episodes. As of the time of this recording, it's a 15-minute daily tech news roundup every day. search the tech meme right home and give that a try. But for this show, thank you for joining us for this episode of Rad, the 80s-90s history podcast. If you're watching this on YouTube, as mentioned, first of all, subscribe and follow the podcast on YouTube, but also it's a podcast. So go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, your favorite podcast app, search for 80s-90s history.

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As always, yo, Holmes, smell you later.