Jesse
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Bill Watterson famously hates merchandising. But you may be surprised to learn he has a more nuanced take on those rip-off bumper stickers where Calvin pisses on various things.
Hobbes’ whole deal is that he’s Calvin’s accomplice, adversary and passenger when they’re alone, but he’s an inanimate stuffed tiger the second Suzie, Mom or Dad enter the scene. The human brain, desperate for resolution, will usually leap to one of two conclusions: either he transmogrifies between stuffed and real tiger at will, or he’s simply Calvin’s imaginary friend.
So is the magic on the page the magic that’s happening in Calvin’s world, or just in Calvin’s brain? Watterson has refused to clarify Hobbes’ true nature. He was famously opposed to merchandising his IP — more on that later — and one of his biggest reasons was that selling a plush Hobbes would cement him as a stuffed tiger. It would answer all those questions that hold together the zany, fantastical world he so meticulously built.
Personally, I think that’s short-sighted. A real marketing pro would see the obvious answer: sell a plush toy bundled with a live tiger.
Watterson’s first job out of college was as a newspaper political cartoonist. Unfortunately, he sucked at it, and was fired within a few months. He then landed a job in advertising: “I designed car ads and grocery ads in the windowless basement of a convenience store, and I hated every single minute of the 4-and-a-half million minutes I worked there.” But he spent every spare minute drawing and pitching comic strips, enduring five years of rejection.
Until the right little kid saw his work. A Universal Press Syndicate editor was reviewing Watterson’s latest pitch, waffling over whether it was the right tone: “I thought it was perhaps too ‘adult,’ too literate. When my then-8-year-old son remarked, ‘This is the Doonesbury for kids!’ I suspected we had something unusual on our hands.”
Among those countless ideas Watterson pitched to the syndicates was a comic called The Doghouse. As United Feature Syndicate was reviewing his pitch, they were delighted by a random side character: the protagonist’s little brother, a goofy li’l scamp with a stuffed tiger. That kid, they said, was the best character in the bunch, and that Watterson should make a series about him.
And so he did! He brought his work back to United Feature Syndicate, and they… passed. They said it lacked marketing potential. Thanks, NEXT!
Luckily, he was able to pitch it to their rival, Universal Press Syndicate, where the boss’ son fell in love with it.
Throughout the decade that he made Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson was faced with an onslaught of what he called “ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions.”
He had to fight tooth-and-nail for what would appear to be pretty basic workers’ rights. Apparently, cartoonists aren’t allowed to take vacations; also apparently, a lot of them are cool with that. Watterson took two sabbaticals during that decade, which only Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) and Gary Larson (The Far Side) had the power to negotiate previously. But some of his contemporaries, like Greg Evans (Luann) and Charles Schulz (Peanuts), absolutely dragged Watterson for having the audacity to ask for a break.
There’s also a very specific six-panel format that Sunday comics need to be produced in to fit in the various newspapers that are part of a syndicate. Watterson resented this format more than you’ve hated anything in your entire life. He was finally able to break free from it by threatening to pull the plug on his entire strip. He won the ability to take up a full half-page of a newspaper, but some of his contemporaries like Bil Keane (The Family Circus) and Bruce Beattie (Snafu) called him arrogant and stubborn.
This guy loathed merchandising. Even before his career really took off, he rejected syndication offers that included marketing requirements, or insisted on inserting a Poochie-esque character. It’s been estimated that by not selling toys and trinkets, he gave up around $300 million to $400 million.
Fans have filled that merchandising vacuum, most notably with bumper stickers of Calvin taking a cheeky leak on anything from a president’s head to the ISIS flag. What’s Watterson’s take on this bastardization of his brand? “I clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo. Long after the strip is forgotten, they are my ticket to immortality.”
