convaoi? \hy Cae ana Heese Get ters Lary WHY CALVIN AND HOBBES IS GREAT LITERATURE ONTHE ONTOLOGY OF A STUFFED TIGER AND FINDING THE WHOLE WORD INA COMIC 51,201 By Cobra al b/s con/oshr/ gaa bela) hae El reps cebeoeomihaeptehitninaataaeihukcombahahyzlinarsonken re Ei urearacunynoacaorszanatasionerezeetasezetetr) aa eprom Fetracccunpnisinsvitiehidanrene2rarcearg BAP ont Goel gooh camber ntgNAMPconMafahycabinardbbee gee euch Smee “To an editon” Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, wrote in 2001, “space may be money, but to a cartoonist, space is time. Space provides the tempo and rhythm of | the strip.” Watterson was right, peshaps in more ways than he knew. Newspaper comics, hhe wrote, provide a unique space for many readers before they start their day; we get to pass, briefly, through a door into a calmer, simpler world, where the characters often semain largely the same, even down to thet clothing. Not all newspaper comics ate like this, of course, particularly the more complex narrative comics ofthe past lke Little Nemo in Slumberland or Tery and the Pirates, and the worst comics—of which there are many— retin that sense of sameness by being formulaic and uninspired. But this, too, is related, 1 space. Space, broadly speaking, is what defines Calvin and Hobbes. ‘The strip follows Calvin, a blonde six-year-old American that Watterson named after the founder of Calvinism, Calvin’ first appearance was actually i a rejected stip from before Calvin and Hobbes called Crizturs, in which he isthe younger brother ofthe main character, the syndicate suggested he focus on ths sibling instead, and that led to the creation of his Dagship comic. Often, Calvin's imagination represents a more exciting, ‘more marvelous vision of the world around him; instead of listening in class to Miss patna contycalianseatboniegessiaatre! satconvaoi? \hy Cae ana Heese Get ters Lary Wormwood (herself named for C. 8. Lewiss apprentice devi in The Serewtape Letters), be may be dreaming of feeing from aliens in other galaxies. An only child, Calvin's best fiend isa tiger named Hobbes, himself named for the author of Leviathan. "To everyone bat Calvin, Hobbes appears tobe a stuffed tiger, while Hobbes is a rel, talking tiger to Calvin, Ip Watterson’s words, Hobbes's true nature is never fully defined by the strip, Which is one ofits beauties; Hobbes is a kind of ontological marvel, and yet utterly mundane all te same, for he is whatever he needs to be for whomever is perceiving him. Calvin and Hobbes fels so inventive because iti the strips take us to new planets, 0 parodies of lm nor, tothe Cretaceous period, to encounters with aliens in American suburbs and bicycles coming to life and reality itself being revised into Cubist art. Calvin and Hobbes ponder whether or not life and art have any mesning—often while careening off the edge of a cif on a wagon or sled. Ae times, the stip simply abandons panels or ialogue altogether, using black and white space and wordless nazrative in fascinating ‘ways, Like Alice, Calvin shrinks in one sequence, becoming tiny enough to transport hrimself on a passing house fy; in another, he grows larger than the planet itself. In “Nauseous Nocturne,” a poem in The Essential Calvin and Hobbes that reads faintly like a parody of Poe, Watterson treats us to lovely art and to absurd yet brillant lines ike “Ob, blood-red eyes and tentacles! / Throbbing, pulsing ventricles! Mucus-ooing pores and ‘ighefil claws! / Worse, in terms of outeightscariness, / Ate the suckers multifarious / “That grab and force you in its mighty jaws" the “disgusting aberration” “demonstrates efenestration” at the sight of Hobbes. In one gloriously profane strip, becomes an ancient, vengeful god who attempts to sacrifice humanity. Nothing, except perhaps the beauty of imagination, is sacred here, Watterson distolves the houndaries of highbrow and lowbrow art. The comic’ freedom is confined—it's not totally random — yet the depths it can go to feel fathomless all the same. Few other strips allow themselves such vastness patna contycalianseatboniegessiaatre! aaconvaoi? \hy Cae ana Heese Get ters Lary [ve always loved the way that the hest books—inchuding comics—change as we do. The narrator of Borges's “The Book of Sand!” receives an inscrutable book from a bible-seller that literally changes every time he opens i, for it is impossible to find the same page ‘vice; conversely, another of Borges’ protagonists, Funes the Memorious from the story of the same name, cannot forget anything he reads or perceives at all, Reality is somewhere in the middle ofthese extremes. Some books are palaces or grand multilayered structures lke the etchings of Piranesi; we may only find secret doors and halls and rooms in them on our second or fourth reads, and there are some doors one reader may stumble upon that no one else ever will, including the writer of sid text. “The ays are just packed,” Calvin tells Hobbes in one of Watterson’s strips in a line that ‘wold serve asthe title fora collection. And so isthe comie itself, which I've reread in its entirety many times, and yet I keep finding new litte hidden rooms init Ay THE BLIND Va 1) ae Te gotten more into comics as Ive grown older, but Calvin and Hobbes is the one tht has stayed with me fom childhood to adulthood. Though focused on suburban American characters, it crossed cultural borders for me in Dominica because so much of it seemed universal, ived at the edge of a mountain village, and on the days when the wind had stopped blowing and everything fk sill and stricken with the melancholy ofa too-short [enjoyed retreating into a room and disappearing into the world of a book collection of Cafvin and Hobbes. (Ihad them all) Then someone would call me through the halls of our house, or I would simply look up, and it was like waking from a trance. Suddenly, it would be evening, the wind up our mountain like the breaking of soft sea ‘waves, the brown moths alzeady crashing madly into the lamps or dying in the wax poo!convaoi? \hy Cae ana Heese Get ters Lary of lit candle, the breadfruit leaves already lke the silhouettes of monstrous bats in the dark, che night already having begun to put on her stary pearls. loved disappearing into beloved books and reappearing into reality, with a shock, some hours later, Later in my life, Calvin and Hobbes took on a new, unexpected shade of meaning. Iwas born two years after Wasterson began the strip. At27, I came out as a transgender woman and left my home in the Caribbean because I did not feel safe being openly trans there. Calvin and Hebbesis certainly nota text about queezness, yet when I retumed to it at this altered point in my life, the step suddenly seemed to describe things that resonated with me now: what it was like to live in a world where expressing your realest selfs so often penalized, and the value of finding a second family a close fiend or fiends, if your blood family Calvin, I seulized, could never filly be himself the worlds he dreamt up were always lovelies and moze marvelous than the dll wold he was supposed to lve in, Ie reminded ‘me of the pressures I had fle ro try to pretend to be what the largely anti-queer sociery Fd grown up in wanted me to be: stright, cis. And yet he, lke me, had found a friend, Hobbes, outside of his blood family who understood him, and who allowed him to live ‘out hie dreams—an analogue for what those of us aze queer and whose comings-out do not go so wel wil probably well understand, These are broad themes, but the stip contains them in abundance, Suddenly, the world of the comic seemed a litle bigger ike to understand or accept the trues version of you. Sts space in my heart. Comics, if we define chem at their broadest as sequential art, have been with us from the beginning, on the walls of caves, on the sides of pottery, and in how we translated the many languages of starry night skies into our own, simplifying the chaos of why-are-we~ here into erations. And when we remove their words altogether, comics suddenly erate ‘new potential for language: a universal form, «language without language that all may be able to understand, a rejection—and resurrection—of the Tower of Babel patna contycalianseatboniegessiaatre!convaoi? \hy Cae ana Heese Get ters Lary In their more modern form, the earliest comic, arguably, is from 1825, in the Glaxgew Looking- Glas, In 1837, Rodolphe Toplfer published The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, whieh some critics consider the earliest comic book, and comes that offered social critiques and comedy became more common throughout the 19th century like the anarchic Punch series oF George Cruikshank political and satirical illustrations. A major milestone comes in 1895 with the publication of Richard Outcaul’s Mogan Alley, which featured one of the first highly recognizable, recurring Sunday comic characters. [Newspaper comics become much more popular in the exrly 20th century, and this was ‘when, Watterson argues in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, they wete at their peak, asthe space allotted to certain comics was fir greater than that alloted to any modern newspaper comic. Without this great space, narrative, pictrially complex comics Winsor McCay's internationally influential Little Nema in Slumberland would have been impossible, and the absurd, Kafka-meets- Surrealist world of comics like Hersimarie Krazy Kat would have been fae more dificult to sell, [An oft-overlooked but critical development in the early 20th century isthe wordless novel a powerful yet short lived gente that i essentially the proto-graphic novel ‘Wordless novels were just that: book-length narratives told without a single word, relayed entirely though images, which were woodblock cuts or wood engravings. They originated primarily with Frans Masereel in Germany and came to prominence in the United States with the landmark publication in 1929 of Lynd Ward's incredible Gad’ Man: A Novel in eodeus.\eis no coincidence they emerged at the same time that newspaper comics were at their peak and that silent cinema was also growing in popularity; the wordless novel, afterall, was « kind of portable silent film. In Japan prior to the Great Kanto Earthquake 01923, comics like McCay’, as well as screenings of Western animated films, influenced the earliest Japanese animators. While not comics per se, i is clear thatthe comics had an influence upon these diferent forms of animation. Later comics like Arzach by the [French artist Moebius continued the tradition of omitting words; draach which wasconvaoi? \hy Cae ana Heese Get ters Lary published in 1975, begins with dialogue, but is primarily composed of extraordinary wordless images, braided together by implied narrative. The graphic novel, the most ccitieally popular form of comics today, stems out ofall of these traditions [Newspaper comics, at their best, are art and literature combined, but the; like cartoons in the Western word, still suffer the stigma of being “ight” entertainment, with the one difference being that comics are “light” entertainment often aimed at adults as wel as at kids, Of course, this view is wrong, both about cartoons and comics, Perhaps one reason, though, that the graphic novel (though not, to the same degees, manga) has broken more clearly into the realm of literary criticism is formal: the graphic novel is often packaged as a contained series, a single book containing an entie narrative—or, a least, piece of larger, continuing narrative, This, of course, makes graphic novels seem more akin to text- based novels or serialized narratives on the surface, and the fact that graphic novels have become so popular that single issues of comics are often assumed to be texts that wil later be collected in larger volumes—in “novels"—means that the graphic novel generally possesses more space to tell is stores. “The newspaper comic, by contrast, as Watterson wrote in 1989 in the afterword to The Lazy Sunday Book, isin "retrograde evolution”; itis getting smaller and smaller by und lange, with less space to design complex narratives, The new space for invention—outside of graphic novels is largely with webcomics, which can range ftom lazy to enormously Inventive, the latter like Paul Duffield’ Firelighr Ile. Newspaper comics may be collected in books, but, unlike graphic novels, they are rarely assumed to have a larger unifying narrative holding them together. Ths, pethaps, is one eason literary critics have been slower to adopt newspaper comics as items of study rather than graphic novels. Of course, there ae also just many bad newspaper comics out there—and their badness, ‘unsurprisingly, i often exacerbated by being forced into cramped spaces, patna contycalianseatboniegessiaatre!convaoi? \hy Cae ana Heese Get ters Lary Watterson is well remembered now for his refusal to license his characters for merchandise outside ofthe comics (with a few rare exceptions—ealendars, collections in book form, a shiet fora special exhibit at the Museurn of Modern Act, and a USPS stamp in 2010), Indeed, Watterson may be the name that comes to mind first nowadays when wwe bring up the idea of rejecting the merchandising of comic characters, though comic characters had been partnered with merchandising from the earliest days of Sunday strips with Hegant ley, long before Wattersonis time. For Watterson, not licensing his characters to appear on merchandise meant preserving ther integrity, as well as the After he ended the strip in 1995, Watterson largely disappeared from the public eye, only appearing briey to give online interviews, write reviews of books of or about comics, and, very rarely, to contribute new pieces of art. Unexpectedly, in 2011, he painted the protagonist of Cul de Sac, one ofthe few modem strips he has publicly praised, and sent it +0 the comic's creator Ironically, Calvin and Hobbes have appeared all over the place since the strip ended, due to fans creating their own alternate comics, animations, and ‘more; the lack of merchandising, perhaps, has driven fans to want more of the character. Almost 20 years after his own strip stopped, Watterson did three guest pieces for Stephan asti's Pearls Before Swine, The second of these, to me, isthe most telling. In it, a new artist, 2 second. grader girl named Libby, is drawing Pastis’ comic for him. A stand-in for Watterson, she thinks Pastis artis horrendous. She uses only two panels to jump from a standard scene of Pig and Ret talking to a sudden, brilliantly rendered Martian invasion, and Pastis tells her to “stop showing off slyly but accurately, she replies, “T could do better if Thad more space.” This, perhaps, isthe dilemma of newspaper comics in a nutshell patna contycalianseatboniegessiaatre!convaoi? \hy Cae ana Heese Get ters Lary “The art of losing’ not hard to master," Elizabeth Bishop writes in “One Ary” a besutfil, devastating poem from 1979, Ruth Ozeki, in a lovely essay partly built around Bishops poem, notes astutely that what makes Bishop's poem workis its use of the word Joss rather than dating go. The difference between the two, Ozcki writes s conteo: “When Ter go, 'm in control; when ITose, Pm not. Letting go is a willful act; losing, ‘violation of my will.” Sometimes, of course, loss and letting go, violation and volition, coexist; sometimes, we lose when we think we are letting go, or we lose more than we had ‘imagined when we release our hold, Watterson, in his fight over space and licensing and Sntegrty let go without believing he had really lost, and his characters like Ozeki’ in 4 Tale for the Time Being, live on inthe best and worst space ofall: the nebulous space of ‘memory, where borders constantly shift. Cafoin and Hobbes endures as literature and art combined because i is bth: it asks important questions without simpli them, revel in its own absurdities, and is filled with a deep understanding of people, of our swirling contradictions and compleaities and conundrums, [love it as much in 2016 a5 I did two decades ago. aly resolving “Everything familiar has distppeared! The world looks brand-new” Hobbes says in Wattersois final stip, and, certainly, my own world after coming out seemed brand-new, as well, But after the pain and loss, sometimes we find mote beauty in the world than we ever expected. I eally can be a magical world, after all, Featured art courtesy nami6¢ (bttpl/nami6s.deviantart.com). IL Wate ip: /th comatose / erg h/ /Usscom /tng/buge/ Cain nd Haber (hp thang clinendbbey/ tous ip ha om/og/ can ri (bth can/ng/eomcr/ nebo Bop: Hb con/n/alnababhon/ abit Blet (hp: ith camng/ gota iaphe nave hp ut con/la/ pheno Ihc (h/t can ng/high-and owt lneappas Ip lh con/tog/empape/oslogy (hep: ia cannon Yc pthc on o/h Crt bp hong zt uhan ass p/h cag tpn path Advent or bao Ole (hp: tah cam ng/ overeat sbodahldbe Thoma tes hp /hbcom/o/ homers) pt conrycaerannatbonie pea