Happy birthday Calvin!

Today marks 40 years since Calvin checked his tiger trap.

We are a household crazy about these two. The latest debate at home is whether Bill Watterson was ‘right’ in ending the comic strip when he did - after ten years of running it, having fought and won battles with newspapers that changed the format of comic strips and gave more freedom to cartoonists, one day he decided he was going to stop. The daughter insists you can’t just stop! Once an artist has created something beautiful, don’t they owe it to their audience and to ‘art’ to keep going, she demands. Or does the artisit retain the right to stop whenever they wish, to prioritise themselves over their art, I argue back, weakly though, for I am equally sad for being deprived of more of this magic.

Calvin is many things to many people. I wrote a letter to him a couple of years ago, as part of a wirting exercise, which helped me figure out why he is so dear to me. Here it is…

Dearest Calvin,

I first read you when I was an adult, twenty-something years old. A colleague made a passing reference and was shocked that I hadn’t read you. Shamed and desperate, I gobbled up every strip available on the internet. I made a study out of Bill Watterson, Hobbes, and everything I could find online about you.

I loved that Hobbes was the moral compass. I loved to that you chose to situate the moral compass outside of you, while you went about life being the naughty, evil, difficult child. I loved that you listened to him sometimes, and other times you went about doing exactly what you wanted, getting on the nerves of beleaguered Mom and wry-dry-humoured Dad. It broke my heart when you got bullied in school and it killed me to see you bored out of your mind in Ms Wormwood’s class, escaping into your rich inner world of dinosaurs and scary planets.

No one understood you, except Hobbes.

Seeing both of you sliding down a hill in your toboggan, wind rushing past your hair, was everything.

When the son, about 4 years old, started stomping around like T-rex, with his arms squeezed into his sides, his pinkie and ring fingers sticking out, curved like talons, I smiled. When he started reading about outer space and invented his own planet Housh, my heart was full. I had created my own Spaceman Spiff.

And then the daughter started hoarding cardboard boxes, sitting in them, going for rides in them. She has convinced us all that stuffies are real. Teddy goes everywhere with us. Now that he is old and frail, we have strict instructions on how to carry him, support his neck and never, ever let go of his hand.

The kids have read all the collections we have, at leisure, unlike my frenzied reading. They chuckle at what you say, savour each expression and quote you back to us to win arguments.

A few years ago, a fan-fic strip came up, with a grown up you. Looking a lot like Dad*. Working as an illustrator in advertising, bored stiff by corporate culture, you resign. You become a stay-at-home-dad, while your wife (Suzie after all, huh?!!!) goes to work. You are drawing dinosaurs at home when you are hit smack in the middle of your forehead by… a dart…shot by… your bored daughter. Her evil grin is all too familiar! You think for a minute, close your work, put her and her bunny stuffie in a toboggan and pull her up a hill, ready to slide down. Just like old times. Only this time, she is the child who gets to play, be herself, and you are the wise one. You are at the back. You are her Hobbes.

It makes me tear up every time I read it. I had made similar choices.

Here’s a birthday present for you - from one stuffie lover to another.

Happy 40th, our favourite 6 year old!

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This letter was written in the writing circle of the amazing Ochre Sky Stories of the even more amazing Natasha Badhwar and Raju Tai.

Link to the fan fiction: https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoonists-advice/ The text in the strip is from Watterson’s commencement speech at his alma mater Kenyon College in 1990. The beyond brilliant artwork is by Gavin at https://www.zenpencils.com/author/gavin/

* The daughter (who is currently doing a PhD on Bill Watterson) informs me that the grown-up-Calvin in the fan-fic is in fact, Watterson himself.