CHARLES M. SCHULTZ "PEANUTS"
Bill Watterson draws beautiful bedside tables. I admire that. He also draws great water splashes and living room couches and chairs and lamps and yawns and screams, and all things that make a comic strip fun to look at. I like the thin little arms on Calvin and his shoes, that look like dinner rolls.

Drawing a comic strip is infinitely more important than we may think, for our medium must compete with other entertainments, and if a cartoonist does nothing more than illustrate a joke, he or she is going to lose. Calvin and Hobbes, however, contain hilarious pictures that can not be duplicated in any other medium.


GARRY TRUDEAU "DOONESBURY"
There are few wellsprings of humor more consistently reliable than the mind of a child. most cartoonists, being childlike, recognize this, but when they set out to capture the hurly-burly of the very young, they almost always cheat, shamelessly creating not recognizable children, but highly annoying, wisecracking, miniature adults. Chalk it up to either indolence or defective recall, but most people who write comic dialogue for minors (up to and including the perpetrators of the Cosby "kids") demonstrate surprisingly little feel- or faith in- the original source material, that is, childhood, in all its unfettered and winsome glory.

It is in this respect that Bill Watterson has proved as unusual as his reckless creations, Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson is the reporter who's gotten it right; childhood as it actually is, with its constantly shifting frames of reference. Anyone who's done time with a small child knows that reality can be highly situational. the utterance which an adult knows to be a "lie" may well reflect the child's deepest conviction, at least at the moment it pops out. Fantasy is so accessible, and it is joined with such force and frequency, that resentful parents like Calvin's assume they are being manipulated, when the truth is far more: they don't even exist. The child is both king and keeper of this realm, and he can be very choosey about the company he keeps.

Of course, this exclusivity only provokes many grown-ups into trying to regain the serendipity of youth for themselves, to, in effect, retrieve the irretrievable. A desperate few do things that later land them in the Betty Ford Center.
The rest of us, more sensibly, read Calvin and Hobbes.


JOSE LUIS MARTIN "¡DIOS MIO! and "QUICO EL PROGRE"
I take a long time drawing comic strips, jokes, everything. Well, the day I discovered Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes books, I realized my waste of time: I would never be able to draw that good.

Any way, once the feeling of this new reality finishes sinking in, I smile in hopes of finding behind all these wonderful drawings, nothing else, no good jokes, repetitive gags, the stereotypical American boy, and similarities with Garfield ( who has the biggest cretin in the world a an owner).. well, I didn't find that either. It became clear to me then, that Bill Watterson who draws like no other cartoonist I have seen (though, I believe we've said that) has great characters who aren't mindless beings, doing stupid gags and puns, but intelligent conversations and jokes, probably the best that have existed to date. What envy!


R.C. HARVEY
What a refreshing change! A comic strip that is well drawn instead of just a photocopied image in every panel. Without sequences of boring compositions, or repetitive drawings. Every panel is different.

What is most surprising and gratifying is that he really know how to draw. He can draw his characters in more than one position and more than one expression on their face. Also, he can draw many more things...animals, scenery, scenes from streets, anything. What will happen? Will there be others to follow this new way of drawing cartoons? Why not? Success always causes this type of adulation.


BERKE BREATHED "BLOOM COUNTY" and "OUTLAND"
The typical person that is hired for drawing comic strips in a news paper,is the unsatisfied stockbroker, of some 30 years, who in that moment is sitting in his study thinking how funny it is, and who knows how to draw a little. A little. He has the jokes in his head, because he has lived them. He has decided to draw comic strips. They can be badly drawn, but that doesn't matter, nowadays, news papers reduce them to macroscopic size.

I have seen many like that in the last 5 years, and some have even been published. They never last long. They start strong, because they have a concept that people like. It's a comic that sells quickly, but isn't made by the authors, but unsatisfied stockbrokers. They can write a few good jokes and their drawings are passable. Enough to get hired at least, and they don't look for much now anyways. They have no talent. The only interesting thing that has shown up in the papers was Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Everything that is not looked for nowadays in syndicates; it so good, that it is a shock to see that they had let it appear in papers. His success is completely deserved.BACK TO TOP

[ also ]

autobiography

christie interview

west interview

comments on calvin and hobbes by cartoonists

question and answer with 'calvin and hobbes' creator

[ and ]

the cheapening of comics

thoughts on comics and calvin and hobbes

thoughts on licensing and calvin and hobbes

thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled