Notes—The Imagination in Solitude

What Calvin and Hobbes taught me about being alone

Gabriel Noel

source: imgur

One Calvin and Hobbes strip that, for me, encapsulates the whole of Bill Watterson’s imaginative universe begins like this:

Calvin has just woken up in the middle of the night, rubbing a half-closed eye before wandering out to the bathroom for a glass of water. Hobbes— his pet tiger and best friend— notices, and gleefully stalks Calvin through the dark hallways, his narrow eyes flashing yellow in the shadows. Calvin finishes his drink and shuffles back to his room. Hobbes, lying in wait by a corner, sizes up his prey and pounces, terrifying an unsuspecting Calvin. The noise wakes up his parents, who flip on the hallway light and find their son on the ground, subdued.

“Sleepwalking!” the mother says. 

“Nightmare!” the father guesses.

Calvin corrects them. “Homicidal psycho jungle cat!” 

source: pinterest

You already have the core of the creative premise here: the simple, stark paneling, filling the scene with a suspenseful rhythm; the bold colors and deep shadows, allied with the alternately naturalistic and psychedelic facial expressions; the move between perspectives, as Calvin’s parents discover their son sprawled on the floor with the ‘toy’ Hobbes over him; and the final panel, where Hobbes sees his attack as a simple spar between buddies, while Calvin wonders why his parents treat a tiger mauling so cavalierly. Put another way: this short story evokes the terror, excitement, and sheer imaginative kinetics of a childhood nighttime trip to the bathroom faucet. I’ve taken these perilous trips myself. I suspect we all have.

This yoking of the mundane private life with the surreal and expansive is a staple of Bill Watterson, whose creation has been hailed by some as the last great newspaper comic. It’s also an illuminating parallel to his frequent defense of solitude and the sanctity of the imagination. Watterson is, by the media’s standards, a recluse: there is but one official photograph, and he has only once allowed his voice to be taped for an interview. He hasn’t published a comic under his own name since the last day of 1995, when he retired Calvin and Hobbes. He engaged in a protracted war with Universal Press Syndicate over his refusal to license his characters, and even called his syndicate bosses “money-grubbing bloodsuckers”in a speech about the importance of artistic dignity.

source: Platypus Comics

Clearly, Watterson wanted to be left alone to work his magic, and I think those desires found expression in his art. Although the characters and the creator are very different, after about 17 years of reading the strip, I have come to see Calvin and Hobbes as the long story of a young boy attempting to come to terms with – and hold off – solitude through the profusion and flourishing of the imagination.

You can most easily see this in how the comic deals with the day-to-day exploits of six-year-old Calvin and his partner-in-crime Hobbes. Calvin’s suburban, middle-American world is comprised mainly of home, school, and the seemingly endless backyard forest the two escape into (along with those vacation scenes where Calvin’s father futilely tries to instill ‘character’ in him by fishing in the pouring rain and eating cold tuna out of a can). Calvin’s range of material experience is limited, and in each of these environments he is forced to negotiate a set of contexts that he finds inhospitable, confusing, and at times hostile. At school he is tormented by Mrs. Wormwood, overworked and irritable, who, rumor has it, is “up to two packs of cigarettes a day, unfiltered.” Moe, the hulking bully, knocks him off the swing set and steals Hobbes, laughing as he does. His classmates, after seeing Calvin act out and get sent to the principal so many times, end up shunning him. In fact, it seems like Susie Derkins, the smartest child in the strip, is the only human being outside of his family who even attempts to talk to him. He returns her attention by saying that his thermos is full of phlegm at lunch, or plotting to pummel her with snowballs. 

At home he feels put upon by his parents, both of whom seem unable to understand or handle the imaginative energy their son exudes all day. When he’s kicked out of the house for breaking the lamps with a baseball bat or (literally) walking on the walls, he and Hobbes head for nature, which ends up retaliating in various ways, too. The duo are regularly tossed from their wagon into ravines and huge piles of mud. Those excursions often get them into philosophical discussions about the inherent indifference of the world. When it’s November and it still hasn’t snowed, Calvin yells at the sky to hurry up, afterward grumbling to Hobbes, “No efficiency. No accountability. I tell you, Hobbes, it’s a lousy way to run a universe.” Seen from a realist lens, the strip invokes a world that continually baffles a child attempting to find a place in it. 

source: pinterest

Even if it had only focused on the prosaic and frustrating side of childhood, I think Calvin and Hobbes would have been an important strip. But what makes it truly outstanding, and is most likely the cause of its enduring popularity, from third-graders to tenured academics, is its near-revolutionary style. This style covers a range of perceptual and perspectivist modes that stem almost completely from Calvin’s hyperactive imagination. While the strip’s realist world is narrow, its kaleidoscope of fantasies is an incredible expanse, a vista, systems blazing at random in the darkness. Like Whitman’s ‘I’ or Keats’s negative capability – the idea that artistic power comes from being able to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” – Calvin has the ability to dissolve himself and assume any number of identities to enrich or break out of a stifling reality. The genre playfulness of Spaceman Spiff and Stupendous Man, the Cubist breaks of perspective, and the Rabelaisian grotesqueries frequently invoked are almost always in service of an imaginative fight against an aspect of society that Calvin feels is pinning him down. Spaceman Spiff has had water balloon fights against Susie Derkins and fled baths from Calvin’s mother; Stupendous Man has snuck up to Rosalyn, the only babysitter who will watch Calvin, and stolen her study notes, flushing them down the toilet; F-14 pilots and Cretaceous-era monsters have destroyed his school and eaten his classmates. These scenes enthralled me as a kid, spending my endless summer days inside with one of the yearly collections, where the real action was.

source: reddit

Yet none of these include the most famous imaginative transformation of all, which is Hobbes. Watterson has never fully resolved Hobbes’s nature, which is arguably to the benefit of the strip. Since Hobbes is a lifeless plush toy in all social contexts, but exists as a sardonic, haughty, yet empathetic feline when alone with Calvin, Watterson forces the reader to stay within the negative capability, acknowledging that there are many ways of recognizing reality. Just as Calvin’s fantasies of adventure and agency are used to escape restrictive social norms, Hobbes functions as a way for both the characters and readers to gain a perspectivist view of reality, where no one mode or point of view dominates.

With Hobbes along for the ride, the terrible duo go on another set of imaginative transformations that also serve as Calvin’s most important social experiences. Here you have the extended scenes with the wagon, taking off to Mars or the prehistoric era, and the cardboard box, famously known as the Transmogrifier and Duplicator. Then there is the truly crazy, Wattersonian invention of the sport called Calvinball, where the rules are invented as the game goes along and the only advantage is strength of imagination (remember score lines of Q to 12?). Watterson’s sense of pacing, tone, and dialogue gives these episodes both a cinematic and a novelistic flavor. These adventures are emotional outlets, but they also keep Calvin connected to a sort of beneficial social reality. It is vital that in these imaginative adventures, Calvin has a teammate, and isn’t alone. By going at the world with someone he trusts and fights with in equal measure, Calvin is able to momentarily defeat solitude, that condition he also, paradoxically, often craves.

source: pinterest

Although others have written about how Calvin and Hobbes is essentially about loneliness, or about how it has helped them deal with their childhoods, I would offer that it can be useful to see Bill Watterson’s long masterwork as an exercise in the possibilities and limits of the imagination’s power to give meaning to a life, and especially the life of childhood, that gauntlet through which we have all had to run. I had more friends as a kid than Calvin did; still, I identified deeply with his desire to have the imagination replace reality, or at least augment it in a way that gave it a heightened color and form, a salve against the long gray wall of daily life. 

Because I was so enthralled by the products of Bill Watterson’s imagination, I wanted to delve into all the aspects of the artist’s life. I wanted to meet Watterson at a convention and get his autograph; I wanted to have a Hobbes of my own; I wanted to watch the two on T.V and in the theatre. As an eight year old, I couldn’t understand why I was denied these things, especially  when most of my other interests, like Hayao Miyazaki’s work, supplied them. It was only when I became older and (mostly) left the world of childhood that I began to really appreciate Bill’s strenuous fight for solitude. Given the delicate nature of the strip’s world, slapping Calvin on an approved mug or giving Hobbes over to a CGI team would probably have destroyed it. I think Watterson fought against all commercialization of his work for the same reason that he has struggled for his privacy: the world of our imaginations is simultaneously robust and fragile, and in order to keep that balance many tempting or lucrative distractions need to be kept at bay. Calvinball and the Transmogrifier can’t survive in a crowd. 

In the end, my adult self is thankful for Watterson’s wisdom and the creative results of that wisdom. As I see it, Calvin and Hobbes is a work of art, an indelible piece of American culture, and anyone who has had the good fortune of coming across it during their formative years can count their blessings. Those gifts should be enough to earn Bill his continued privacy, painting landscapes somewhere in the forests of Ohio.

Gabriel Noel was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. He is about to finish his undergraduate career with a degree in Political Science from Boston University, but lapses into literature from time to time. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons. He also co-edits 433 Notes: our channel of interviews, reviews and criticism.