Dear Mr. Watterson
Cartoonist Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes may seem to comics readers to have ran for decades, but its trajectory was both bright and short. Calvin and Hobbes ran in newspapers from only 1985 to 1995. It was considered by comics fans and historians, then and now, to be one of the greatest comic strips, on a par with Krazy Kat, Pogo, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Peanuts. Since the end of the strip’s run, Watterson has become ever more reclusive, the J.D. Salinger of comic strip artists.
Joel Allen Schroeder’s informative documentary has the dignity to not try to track down Watterson (now living in a suburb of Cleveland); that would have been crass. I don’t believe a single photograph of Watterson is used in the film. Schroeder does interview many fellow cartoonists, fans and historians, some of whom give insight into Watterson and his work (others just gush).
Calvin and Hobbes was exceptional in its artistry, utilizing several art styles and a wide variety of tones and emotions to convey the inner life of young Calvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. Drawn with great flair and an organic inking style honed over many years, the strip had the ability to entertain and provoke readers of any age, eventually being printed in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide.
Though Watterson was given creative freedom by Universal Press Syndicate, he soon ran up against exhausting and time-consuming roadblocks. The syndicate wanted to license the characters of the strip (a potential generation of $300 – $400 million), while Watterson remained adamant that licensing products cheapened the strip. While Universal Press had the legal right to license anyway and even boot Watterson off the strip, they didn’t. Watterson’s next fight was for more space to draw better work (Sunday comic strips in the early 20th century had up to a full page for dazzling, wonderful adventures). When Calvin and Hobbes debuted, it was relegated to a three-tier panel format, designed for various newspapers to pick and choose which panels could be placed where. Five years into Calvin and Hobbes‘ run, Watterson maintained that the Sunday strip should be one cohesive graphic, printed as drawn, indivisible. This allowed him much more ability to design and pace the strip, resulting in strips of uncommon beauty. Though fifteen newspapers canceled the strip in response to the layout changes and some strip artists publicly accused Watterson of arrogance and elitism, the resulting, extraordinary strips tell their own story and will entertain for centuries.
Schroeder’s film interviews Jenny Robb, a curator at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at OSU, where most of Watterson’s original strips are being preserved, Peanuts creator Charles Schulz’ widow, Jean, and Andrew Farago of the Cartoon Art Museum. Especially engaging are interviews with strip cartoonists who had correspondence or interactions with Watterson, like Bloom County’s Berkeley Breathed, who received letters from Watterson festooned with scathingly funny cartoons deriding Breathed for merchandising his work and Stephan Pastis, who enticed Watterson in 2014 to make a surprise contribution to Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine.
Schroeder takes a visit to Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where Calvin was created; the strip took much of its visual look from the area’s surrounding landscape, and the golden leaves of Chagrin Falls in Autumn does indeed give the impression of walking into a live Calvin and Hobbes strip.
Dear Mr Watterson could have been shorter – the praise for the strips gets repetitive and you may begin thinking your time would be better spent reading the actual comics. The film shines a light on a worthy subject, though. As it makes clear, the strip is beloved by young, new readers everywhere, insuring that the love for the series will continue.
—Michael R. Neno, 2018 Oct 21