Breaking: Everybody Loves Calvin and Hobbes.

Nevin Martell, author of Looking for Calvin and Hobbes, has a short essay in The Guardian about how awesome Calvin and Hobbes is:

The strip's authenticity is secured by Watterson's refusal to sell out. He didn't become a cartoonist for the attention, the accolades or the money. He just wanted to create the best comic strip possible. As he once wrote in the introduction to a Krazy Kat collection, "[W]e seem to have forgotten that a comic strip can be something more than a launch pad for a glut of derivative products. When the comic strip is not exploited, the medium can be a vehicle for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression." So, instead of embracing the fame his work afforded him over the years, he gave only a handful of interviews, rarely appeared in public and maintained a very modest lifestyle. He was equally withholding of his creations, whom he never allowed to be merchandised. There were no Hobbes dolls, no Spaceman Spiff action figures and no coffee mugs with Calvin and Hobbes one-liners splashed across them. Considering that all his peers were cashing in on their creations – Charles Schulz (Peanuts) and Jim Davis (Garfield) each earned tens of millions of dollars a year at the height of their fame – it was a tack that was as admirable as it was confounding.

Readers may have never thought about Watterson's personal choices when they read the strip, but that strength of character echoed throughout his work. Calvin and Hobbes is complex, thoughtful and thought provoking. Calvin and Hobbes aren't plastic and one-dimensional, like so many of their contemporaries on the funny pages whose creators strove to make them explicable in a single sentence. Garfield is a fat, lazy cat who loves to eat and give his owner grief. Beetle Bailey is an inept and lazy army private who is forever running afoul of his superiors. That's all you need to know to laugh at either of those characters (and lazy is the operative word here). Now we come to Calvin and Hobbes – a hyper-imaginative kid and his pet tiger who may or may not be real, depending on who's looking at him. But that's just the surface. That doesn't really begin to explain Watterson's unique storytelling device in which readers switch between the world as Calvin sees it – a fantastical place – and as adults see it – a cut 'n' dried conventional reality. You need to immerse yourself in Calvin and Hobbes to truly understand it. Sure, you could read one strip, get the gag and move on with your life, but you'd be missing out.

Not exactly hard hitting stuff, but mostly true. Except maybe for the whole "Isn't Bill Watterson amazing for not licensing his characters!" thing you hear about all the time. I fully respect Watterson for sticking to his principles, but, look, a comic strip--like art in general--is a commercial enterprise. While I'm always up for a little Garfield bashing--and to be sure, this shit here is pretty heinous--Jim Davis "selling out" hasn't actually change the quality of the comic strip. Garfield isn't mediocre because its title character has appeared on lunch boxes. It's mediocre because Davis rarely pushes at the bounds of the thin premise Martell so accurately describes. And Calvin and Hobbes, meanwhile, isn't any less great because of all those dumbass, unlicensed decals you see in the back windows of pickup trucks.

Look, Bill Watterson gave somebody an interview.

Go read it, as it will probably never happen again.

But because we're disagreeable on this blog, I would like to offer a bit of pushback on this:

It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I've never regretted stopping when I did.

Obviously, Watterson probably made the right choice for himself. But the idea that it's "always better to the leave the party early" is one that I've never really been able to get fully behind. For example, Peanuts in the 90s was clearly not as good as Peanuts in the 60s. But I wouldn't actually want to give up those latter-day Peanuts. And I don't complain at all about newspapers rerunning all those old Peanuts. Because Peanuts is awesome.

The comics people curse newspapers for running are the bad ones, many of which you can find running down the sidebar of this fine blog. Just as Peanuts never became tedious or dull or otherwise bad, there's no reason to believe Calvin and Hobbes would have either. It may have become not as good, and if Watterson felt that was likely, than it's entirely his right to walk away from it. But as a fan, I would gladly have taken another fifteen years of not quite as good Calvin and Hobbes. And speaking as someone who occasionally tries his hand at various forms of art, if I every create something of worth, I plan on running it into the ground.

(Via friend of the blog Talcott Starr)

Archie and Garfield: 44usa

These stamps are hilarious because they feature characters from comic strips.

In all seriousness, both Archie and Garfield have made substantial marks on popular culture and deserve whatever enshrinement they get. So congratulations to Jim Davis and all the folks who have been involved with the various Archie series over the years.

All that said, the Internet indicates that the last time the Post Office put out stamps with comic strips on them was 1995, in their Comic Strip Classics collection, which was limited to strips that debuted before 1950. Pogo, which debuted in 1941 and was therefore eligible, was for some reason nevertheless not included. And it has now been displaced by Garfield. Which, again, is not to say that Garfield doesn't deserve to be honored for its immense commercial success and all the fans it has brought to the comics section. But Pogo has a legitimate claim to being the greatest comic strip ever produced. Something's amiss here.

UPDATE: As Jaime Weinman notes in the comments, Calvin and Hobbes, Beetle Bailey and Dennis the Menace are all getting honored with commemorative stamps this year as well.* Still no Pogo, though.

Calvin is obviously very deserving, and though it might not be so obvious now, so is Dennis, both for its cultural impact and for Hank Ketcham's artwork. I concur with Jaime that Beetle Bailey is less deserving, though I don't really think it's any less deserving than Garfield is. Jim Davis has done more with various corporate tie-ins, but Mort Walker probably deserves some sort of recognition for all the popular comics he's created over the years and that, for better or worse, continue to fill up the comics section to this day. There are other comics, even other than Pogo, that I would have chosen in their place, but I can't necessarily complain about either of them receiving an honor.

It's probably also worth mentioning that Bill Mauldin is getting a stamp, too. Beetle Bailey doesn't hold up very well when compared to something like this.

*How I managed to spend half an hour scouring the Internet for prior instances of comic strip stamps without learning this information I have no idea.

Cow and Boy: How could I be so naive?

When Cow and Boy's not being completely batshit insane, it has an awful lot in common with Calvin and Hobbes.*

*I mean every part of that sentence as a compliment.

Frazz: Mostly I just like making the deal.

It's probably not worth pointing out every time Frazz homages Calvin and Hobbes seeing as Frazz's entire existence is basically a Calvin and Hobbes homage. But whatever. I always enjoyed the running gag in which Calvin would invent disgusting stories about his lunch and cause Susie to lose her appetite. Jeff Mallett gives us a decently clever variation on that here.

Candorville, Prickly City and Frazz: Naaaawwww...too dog-ish.

This Candorville is funny, while this Prickly City is not so funny. But the reason I'm highlighting them is that they're both homages to Peanuts. Now, Peanuts is easily one of the best comic strips ever and completely deserves all the homages it receives. But I sometimes wish cartoonists would a pay a bit more attention to other classic comics. I can't even remember ever seeing a Pogo homage, and the last time I saw a Krazy Kat homage was in a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

Speaking of which, Calvin and Hobbes is the other strip that seems to get a lot of love. Frazz, for example, is basically one big Calvin and Hobbes homage.


*Candorville from 8-21-09. Prickly City from 8-22-09.