Bill Watterson
My love of Calvin and Hobbes goes back as far as I can remember. I can recall many evenings of sitting on the couch with my dad, each of us alternately reading a strip out of the various collections we had. I still own that copy of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, probably printed around the time Watterson pulled the strip out of publication. Calvin and Hobbes is probably what made me want to be a writer.
As far as it pertains to fantasy, I'm not talking about sword-and-sorcery pulp fiction, or even what tries to be Tolkien. Like I say too often, fantasy's biggest problem is in trying to be a separate thing, and most authors don't succeed in failing to write the genre. I sure don't. That is, I may try, but I can't seem to get my books to escape the fact that they are fantasy, to give the reader a taste of the book's essence without crowding out the flexibility of imagination. The writers who earn the title of "genius" are the ones who can discern essential truths and communicate them with the reader, to allow the real world to speak back to them as they weave literature, which is a conceptual tapestry, something made up, that represents something fundamentally true. Watterson, in my opinion, is a master of this art.
It shouldn't seem strange for me to hold a cartoonist to such a high standard. One thing I've learned from Watterson's essays, as well as from contemporary cartoonists like Ryan North and Aaron Diaz, is that comics are a medium just like any other, and not a genre. This is mostly true. It's also true that people's expectations of literature shape what that literature becomes, like it or not. It's almost certain that Calvin and Hobbes survived its initiation into the world of newsprint because it had a small, goofy family and a talking animal, as newspaper readers expect and want to see. It works because it's trite and it's trite because it works; newspaper comics are "safe" media, rarely doing any sort of thinking outside the box (haw, haw). Calvin and Hobbes amazes me because it accomplished both.
Then there's the question of Hobbes. Some people understand it, and some people don't. One way to explain it is this: my sister, who has been reading The Lord of the Rings, recently asked me who Tom Bombadil is. She read the only chapter in which he appears, but his description there was not enough for her. And so we've run into the problem that comes with reading with so much assistance from classrooms, fan wikis, author interviews, and so on: it's now assumed that there's a right answer to every piece of a plot, some level of tangible objectivism. Guess what: there ain't. As my professor for Criticism told us, fiction isn't real. Tolkien did go farther than any other author in charting his legendarium, but he left the monsters on the map and the gaps in history that don't let us take certainty for granted. Tom Bombadil's origin is never quite explained, only hinted at.
This leaves Hobbes in a powerful place of balance. Overtly, Watterson's technique is simple: when Hobbes is alone or in the company of Calvin and nobody else, he is drawn as a live tiger; when someone other than Calvin is looking at him, he is drawn as a stuffed animal. It's not wrong to say that Hobbes is just a stuffed animal, and it's not wrong to say that he's a tiger. Watterson did not intend him to be a toy that comes to life whenever Calvin is around, but nearly everything else is fair game. This reconciliation of what would be a paradox, this act of balance, is exactly what I mean when I talk about the illustrative fabric of fantasy. As long as Hobbes' existence isn't pinned down logically, he makes Calvin wise. When he can be explained, he stops making sense.
Watterson's style is another thing I've sought to live up to for quite some time. I don't draw comics, but I love his determination to break panel conventions where it helped the strip, and his refusal to force the story into newspaper-proscribed structures. This is less about rebelling and more about knowing how to let your work come forth naturally, without constraint. His other kind of style, the storytelling one, is a compromise I've never been able to hit. I tend to use overblown words too often, which kill the message. Watterson uses overblown words to make his strip hilarious. Vivid, poetic description is a wonderful thing, but it can't seem out of place, and for some reason it always feels right coming out of Calvin's mouth.
As far as it pertains to fantasy, I'm not talking about sword-and-sorcery pulp fiction, or even what tries to be Tolkien. Like I say too often, fantasy's biggest problem is in trying to be a separate thing, and most authors don't succeed in failing to write the genre. I sure don't. That is, I may try, but I can't seem to get my books to escape the fact that they are fantasy, to give the reader a taste of the book's essence without crowding out the flexibility of imagination. The writers who earn the title of "genius" are the ones who can discern essential truths and communicate them with the reader, to allow the real world to speak back to them as they weave literature, which is a conceptual tapestry, something made up, that represents something fundamentally true. Watterson, in my opinion, is a master of this art.
It shouldn't seem strange for me to hold a cartoonist to such a high standard. One thing I've learned from Watterson's essays, as well as from contemporary cartoonists like Ryan North and Aaron Diaz, is that comics are a medium just like any other, and not a genre. This is mostly true. It's also true that people's expectations of literature shape what that literature becomes, like it or not. It's almost certain that Calvin and Hobbes survived its initiation into the world of newsprint because it had a small, goofy family and a talking animal, as newspaper readers expect and want to see. It works because it's trite and it's trite because it works; newspaper comics are "safe" media, rarely doing any sort of thinking outside the box (haw, haw). Calvin and Hobbes amazes me because it accomplished both.Then there's the question of Hobbes. Some people understand it, and some people don't. One way to explain it is this: my sister, who has been reading The Lord of the Rings, recently asked me who Tom Bombadil is. She read the only chapter in which he appears, but his description there was not enough for her. And so we've run into the problem that comes with reading with so much assistance from classrooms, fan wikis, author interviews, and so on: it's now assumed that there's a right answer to every piece of a plot, some level of tangible objectivism. Guess what: there ain't. As my professor for Criticism told us, fiction isn't real. Tolkien did go farther than any other author in charting his legendarium, but he left the monsters on the map and the gaps in history that don't let us take certainty for granted. Tom Bombadil's origin is never quite explained, only hinted at.
This leaves Hobbes in a powerful place of balance. Overtly, Watterson's technique is simple: when Hobbes is alone or in the company of Calvin and nobody else, he is drawn as a live tiger; when someone other than Calvin is looking at him, he is drawn as a stuffed animal. It's not wrong to say that Hobbes is just a stuffed animal, and it's not wrong to say that he's a tiger. Watterson did not intend him to be a toy that comes to life whenever Calvin is around, but nearly everything else is fair game. This reconciliation of what would be a paradox, this act of balance, is exactly what I mean when I talk about the illustrative fabric of fantasy. As long as Hobbes' existence isn't pinned down logically, he makes Calvin wise. When he can be explained, he stops making sense.
I think most people liked Calvin because he was so real. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s a lot of boys were like him. Today?
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