Why Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson was ahead of his time

Bill Watterson is known for many things — from his world-famous comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, to his disdain for merchandising and his penchant for reclusion.

Now he's returned to the world of publishing with a brand new picture book, but the subject matter marks a significant departure from the family-friendly tales he is known for.

Today on Commotion, author and publisher Michael Hingston tells host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about the legendary cartoonist's mysterious reputation, and what his new picture book, The Mysteries, might say about his return.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: I want to know, why would you pull the plug on something at the height of its popularity?

Michael: The short answer, at least to take him at his word, is that he was done. It's a pretty big grind to make a daily comic. People in that line of work don't really take vacations, so it's really something you've got to get up for every morning — and Watterson did it for ten years, off and on. At the time, he said he was just kind of interested in other things. He mentioned things like landscape painting and something about the history of music. His interest seemed to wander, but the fans didn't take it that well, and I think it's mostly because of the way he left. Watterson seemed kind of indifferent about it almost, like the strip didn't mean as much to him as it did to the people reading it. And so I think it left fans feeling a little hurt, and there's kind of a rift there that's dogged Watterson ever since.

Elamin: Well, I've got to say, if you do something every day for 10 years, it's bound to at a certain point become a job, you know?... But he didn't just end the comic. He has kind of become known for rejecting fame, for receding from the limelight. Let's talk about his reputation.

Michael: If anyone knows him at all, I think the number one thing that comes to mind about him is he's a principled guy — maybe to a fault. He left Calvin and Hobbes when it was at the height of its fame. This was an era [of] huge merchandising dollars to be found in the world of comics — Peanuts, Garfield being the biggest examples. Watterson got these huge merchandising offers and turned them all down.

In my book, I talked to Watterson's former editor, and he estimated that Watterson personally left tens of millions of dollars on the table just because he didn't seem motivated by money. I guess he had enough of it, and he felt that these deals didn't add anything to the strip. In fact, he felt that they took away from it or distracted from it. He didn't seem to be tempted by those big dollar signs, and so kind of walked away from it. In the process, I think that gave him a bit of a reputation of being a little prickly because he wouldn't just go along with what would make everyone money. He didn't really like talking to the media. So, his reputation kind of took hold in those years. Since 1995, he's carried on in the same lane. We haven't heard him talking in public a lot … so it's very hard to figure out where his mind is at any given point. People don't know where he lives or what he looks like. There's an air of intrigue around him, to be sure.

Elamin: He's back with a picture book called The Mysteries. Let's describe this picture book for people who have not read it yet.

Michael: Right away, it's something different for him. I wouldn't say it's necessarily for kids. Calvin and Hobbes was enjoyed by adults, but The Mysteries definitely has a darker tone in ways even than the comic strip did. Maybe it's more like a minimalist graphic novel or something like that. It's basically the story of a medieval-ish society who are terrified of these things called The Mysteries. We never see what they are on the page. And then at one point they go out, they capture one and they realize there was nothing to be scared of. And then they live their lives very confidently, no longer in fear of these things. It's quite a spare, cryptic book, and so there's also a sense that in being a little overconfident that they've gotten rid of these Mysteries, there's maybe sort of an unintended consequence looming just over the horizon.

Elamin: The images are quite striking. They are nothing close to related to Calvin and Hobbes. You're a fan of Calvin and Hobbes. What did you think of it when you saw it?

Michael: I can't say I saw this coming. I don't think anyone did. At first glance, it's a huge departure, in large part because Watterson actually doesn't do the artwork in this. He's just the writer; he's working with a separate illustrator for the first time. So if you think of that daily newspaper grind where Watterson had total control over the strip, this is very different. This is a sort of 50/50 collaboration. It's also a total opposite of the daily grind as well, because by his account, they worked on this book for a decade — and not smoothly. It was a real back-and-forth; it was this exercise in creative collaboration. I don't know if they even thought it was going to be published at certain points, they were disagreeing on it so badly.

And yet, that being said, I think there are some thematic similarities. Calvin and Hobbes is about the gray area between truth and fantasy. The great trick of the strip is you never know if Hobbes is "real" or not. It's about preserving this sense of play and ambiguity. The Mysteries has a similar message, I think, in that when these humans are so sure that they've dispelled The Mysteries, suddenly their imagery flips and now they're in the modern day driving in cars on modern highways. And again, there's this sense that the universe is going to course correct on this, and that maybe we shouldn't be so quick to pursue logic and rational thinking to the nth degree.

Elamin: Michael, before I let you go, we've got to say we are in this real moment of adaptation and merchandising in art. Barbie is one of the biggest movies of the year. Mattel is set to make way more like it. How do you think the story of Bill Watterson and his work fit into where we are culturally right now?

Michael: Even in the '90s, Bill Watterson was kind of an anachronism in terms of those principles we talked about — saying no merchandising, no Hobbes stuffies. That was unusual then, and it feels totally out-of-step now. He was worried about the line between art and commerce, and we live in a place now with sponsored content and viral marketing where that line literally does not exist. So I think fans of the strip love him even more now because he was proven right in hindsight.

He took a stand at a time when very few people were, and seems to have seen where we were headed before we got there — to the point where I think even the premise of Calvin and Hobbes is kind of outdated now. If you had a six-year-old boy in America today walking around with a stuffed animal trying to imagine a life for it, it wouldn't be this non-descript tiger that he could invent a personality for; it would be a Disney plushie. So even the idea of kids having that sort of imaginative space that's free from intellectual property, we're well past that now as well.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Michael Hingston produced by Nikky Manfredi.