Once upon a time there was a comic strip that was ingenious, imaginative, original and changed the face of the comic strip forever, that comic was Calvin and Hobbes. In just a little over a decade the comic became one of the biggest culture icons and took over the imaginations of generations of young and old. And at the height of its success the creator forever robbed the public of what they had so fanatically help build and made famous and denying them Calvin and Hobbes forever. Does the creator of a comic or anything that is in the public domain owe that public something? Was Calvin and Hobbes ours as much as it was Bill Watterson’s. Watterson lamented about how the format of the comics forced upon him by the syndicates robbed him of his creativity and his want to color outside boundaries. And in the end Watterson won the battle, and the Sunday Calvin and Hobbes strips became art, free from the boundaries that had once so constrained Watterson. But Watterson could not have won the battle on his own, it was his fans and the public that won the battle for him. The syndicates could not have denied him his want to stretch his creative legs as the public would have turned on the syndicates had they not carried Calvin and Hobbes. It was the fans that made the change in the Sunday format possible, it was us who battled in the trenches and at the height of our victory Watterson snatched away the very thing we had fought so hard for and supported with such zeal. Watterson kidnapped Calvin and he killed Hobbes, forever robbing the public of the imaginative little boy and his highly intelligent friend.

Watterson simply has to be one of the most hypocritical and ignorant man to provide such genius and remarkable characters like Calvin and Hobbes. He had to know to succeed in the comic’s world and to change the rules that everyone else played by he would need the fans and publics support. The syndicates weren’t going to listen to one lone cartoonist if it did not bring them money. Yet once Watterson got the following that allowed him the artistic freedom he so desperately craved, he became camera shy so to speak, he shut down the comic at a time when he could have done whatever he wanted. Watterson praised Shultz as one of his favorite cartoonist but it was Shultz that locked all the cartoonist into the panel style that Watterson so hated. The characters of Peanuts while original and highly creative yet they never changed and never evolved. They were like a time capsule from the 1950’s that so many cartoonists emulated because they could be churned out like an assembly line, with little thought and no new stories. The stories were original to begin with but after fifty years of playing them out they were stale and had lost their magic. I for a one am not a fan of Peanuts but rather comics like Fox Trot that evolve every so slightly to meet the times. Calvin and Hobbes was new, it was fresh like Peanuts once had been. There were so many stories to tell and so many adventures to go on, but because the creator did not feel the desire to pay back the public for supporting him and making it possible for him to change comics forever, Calvin and Hobbes were sadly taken away.

Calvin and Hobbes captured the imaginations of us all, all the while allowing Watterson to stretch his creative and artistic legs not to mention vocalize his feelings on society as a whole. But the fans that made Calvin possible are denied seeing him set free once more. It is as if Watterson has tied Calvin up in his basement refusing to let him out, kidnapping him from us. It is as if Watterson has killed Hobbes, Calvin’s very imagination and forced the little boy to no longer live the life of adventure that he so once enjoyed. I mourn for Calvin and I mourn for Hobbes, my friends who have so seemly departed forever on their ninth anniversary of their disappearance this upcoming New Year’s day.