Calvin and Hobbes – the ideal duo friends we all want
Bill Watterson was looking for something else.
Anyone who has heard Watterson’s speech at Kenyon University in 1990 will quickly recognize the different path he took.
At the same time, as a reference to Chuck Schulz’s “Peanuts” and the victim of many rejections (he also experimented with insect characters), like Davis, he finally found the idea. Imagine creating a feline animal in the form of a tiger-striped Hobbes.
From the early days of his youth, 7th grader Watterson dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. He excelled when he went from a rejected story – “In The Dog House”, then developed into a series of cute tiger stories accompanied by an adventurous and trouble-making teenager.
The story represents Watterson’s own life because at the age of 38, at the peak of his career, with more than 24 million books sold around the world, he retired.
Perhaps because he was a boy raised in a small Ohio town, Calvin was just an interpretation of himself.
Watterson’s creativity is not a vehicle to fame or financial success but a way to document the world he knows and shares it with like-minded people (and, coincidentally, so many others).
For Watterson, he unfolds the story of a childhood friend, Hobbes, with the child’s imagination inside of us. According to Bill, Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes is autobiographical because he thinks about the same issues as him.
However, Calvin reflects a period of adulthood rather than childhood.
Many of Calvin’s difficulties are metaphors for Bill Watterson himself. He argues that most of us age without growing old and that inside, every adult (sometimes not so profoundly) is a sassy boy who wants everything his way.
Bill took Calvin to represent his immaturity and a way to see people’s natural characteristics. Watterson wouldn’t want Calvin in his house, but on paper, Calvin helps him rummage through and understand his life.”
Watterson strives to write authentically and make the world more enjoyable for people to find out for themselves.
