'Dear Mr. Watterson'

I’ll never forget the moment I discovered Philip Glass at a Pennsylvania Ballet performance of Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room.” Glass was about twelve when Strauss died, and if you ask Pandora for a Philip Glass station, you’ll get Bach and Debussy plus Rachel Portman, Howard Shore, John Williams, and Hans Zimmer.

But a recent documentary about the legacy of 20th-century comic strip artist Bill Watterson, which premiered late last year and is now available to stream on Netflix, made a statement quite similar to the one from that oh-so-conservative violinist, and I found myself nodding.

A legacy on film

In Dear Mr. Watterson: An Exploration of Calvin & Hobbes, director Joel Allen Schroeder doesn’t set out to interview the famously reclusive creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Instead, in a film funded via Kickstarter, Schroeder travels the country to visit the contemporary cartoonists, publishers, archivists, and fans who love the irrepressible philosophies of a spiky-haired kid and his sometimes stuffed, sometimes real tiger.

In the film, one artist opines that Calvin and Hobbes are the world’s last great household names in cartoon strip characters: the last universally known and universally loved ink, paper, and watercolor world we’ll ever fall into.

There are still lots of popular comic strips out there, even as the medium is squeezed relentlessly out of ever-shrinking newspapers. As a kid, I’d immerse myself for hours in the crude and zany universes Gary Larson could evoke with a single panel.

But my mom never “got” The Far Side and never knew why I insisted on borrowing it from the library again and again. For my part, I find Peanuts and Dilbert dry and depressing. Garfield is a world of tabletops where the same jokes about Monday and lasagna and dumb dogs spin on repeat. Today, the papers are still full of nationally-syndicated comics like Pearls Before Swine and Non Sequitur, but none of them have the wholly devoted audience that Calvin and Hobbes had in its heyday in the '80s and '90s and keeps to this day with the next generation.

I discovered Watterson as a teenager, and while I appreciated his art (so different from the bulky denizens of Larson’s world, where a pair of horn-rimmed glasses denoted the gender of cows, people, and amoebas), it was his storytelling, dialogue, and vocabulary that grabbed me the most.

Even before I could fathom all the words, I loved Watterson’s occasional poetic orations, with their unexpected rhyme schemes and operatic visuals. The Raven-like “A Nauseous Nocturne,” featured in The Essential Calvin and Hobbes collection, is a heinous story in which a monster emerges drooling from the dark to devour Calvin in his bed, leaving his parents to discover a pile of bones in the morning.

If you don’t know what words like “multifarious” and “defenestration” mean before you read that strip, you will afterward.

Alas, poor Calvin

Returning to Calvin and Hobbes in adulthood is always rewarding. Now I savor Calvin’s lines: “Dripping sweat and now quite certain / That tonight the final curtain / Drops upon my short life’s precious play,” which give way to Calvin’s bereaved dad a few pages later, picking up Calvin’s skull to stare, shocked, into its empty eyes. “Dad will look at Mom and say, / 'Too bad he had to go that way.'”

“Where be your gibes now?” Hamlet demands of Yorick. “Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?”

Millions of fans who loved Calvin’s dinnertime antics, when faced with his mom’s amorphous casseroles, now say the same.

And Schroeder’s documentary will help them recapture the joy for awhile, even though the artist himself is notably and predictably absent (as Roz Warren notes, the introverted Watterson likes publicity about as much as the staff at Hogwarts likes You-Know-Who).

The film’s predictable arc takes us to Watterson’s hometown and doesn’t fail to comment on how the artist eschewed untold millions when he refused to license, animate, or commercialize his characters.

To this day, the only place you can find the authentic family he drew are the pages of Calvin and Hobbes collections (Watterson ceased publishing new strips in 1995).

Welcome back, Watterson

But fans recently got a major surprise. As Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis revealed on his blog on June 7, a recent three-strip series of his own comic actually features art from Watterson himself (who insisted that his participation be made known only after the strips were published).

Why did Watterson choose Pastis’s strip as a way to touch readers again almost 20 years after Calvin and Hobbes went sledding for the last time?

Pearls Before Swine follows a gaggle of beer- and coffee-swilling animals, including a terminally clueless pig and a misanthropic rat. The cartoonist’s own version of himself sometimes walks into the characters’ world to argue with them and bemoan his divorce. And as Pastis’s site explains, he is most definitely a great speaker you can book for your next corporate event.

Watterson he ain’t. But Pastis is smart and funny.

He charms with his blog post (including links to Watterson’s new work) about his unexpected collaboration with the “Bigfoot” of living cartoonists, in which he calls dealing with Watterson’s abhorrence of digital technology “the highlight of my career,” instead of the headache it would have been with anyone else on the planet.

So the pen of Calvin and Hobbes is still out there. And his decision to collaborate with a self-referential cartoonist like Pastis after determinedly hiding for decades is fascinating. Now, Watterson himself has already granted an exclusive interview to the Washington Post about the project.

Is it a new era for one of our greatest living cartoonists?

For another appreciation of Bill Watterson by Roz Warren, click here.