- On New Year’s Eve of 1995, Bill Watterson published the 3,150th and last Calvin and Hobbes strip. Since then, we’ve seen a host of good-to-very-bad takes on the comic: cartoons, apps, bizarre live-action reboots—even a search engine.
Now there’s a documentary, Dear Mr. Watterson, which explores the impact the boy and his anthropomorphic tiger had on both readers and Watterson’s colleagues. The film began as a pet project for director Joel Allen Schroeder, who started interviewing fans of the strip in 2007; his Kickstarter project, created in 2009, then raised more than twice his initial $12,000 goal. The movie’s been picked up by a distributor, and the first trailer has just hit the Web:
I've never been one to follow a comic strip but I've enjoyed reading them occasionally. I don't know much about Calvin and Hobbes, they're one of those things I've always known existed but have yet to dive in to. Perhaps this documentary could be a good introduction for me. You a fan? What makes it so influential?
I'm a fan of Calvin and Hobbes. One of the elements I really loved about the strip was the exploration of the childhood imagination. For example, check out these strips about Calvin's Transmogrifier. It's a strip done through the eyes of a child, but the subject matter isn't exactly for kids, but for everyone. There are a lot of layers going on in the strip and though it's mostly fun and sneakily smart, from time to time it also sucker punches the reader with these poignant reflections on what it is to grow up and how the world is the world, though vastly different at different points along the arc of a life.
If I had to boil it down to a simple answer I'd say that it's Watterson's capacity to understand childhood. It makes something like Family Circus look like even more of a joke than it already was. And the art is unmatched by any other comic strip.
I'm a huge Calvin & Hobbes fan. As flagamuffin says, it's his capacity to understand childhood. But it goes beyond that. Watterson is a master of his craft, in my opinion nobody else even comes close to him. To better explain this, I'm going to use the last strip of Calvin & Hobbes. On one hand, a child reading this would relate to playing outside in the snow, and the fact there are endless possibilities during the winter. It's all up to the child's creativity and imagination as to what can be done with a fresh winters snow. But, as I reread this as a late-teenager, I realized that this strip has much more depth to it. This isn't just about winter, it's about Wattersons life. He's closing a huge chapter of it with this single strip, and I would say that he is relishing that opportunity and expressing it in such a simple and elegant way that it is beautiful. Without the stigma and daily work of Calvin & Hobbes, his life would be full of possibilities. At least that's what I got out of it. There's a subtext to a lot of these strips, and yeah, I love them.
I read in another article that the director interviewed neighbors and friends of Watterson, and because he and his family are so reclusive the director didn't know he'd interviewed Watterson's mother until after the fact. I also read that no one actually knows Watterson's address, which seems impossible.