Early Comics

Critters, an early strip about the animal kingdom.

Starting on p.49 © Nevin Martell

 "Though this deluge of rejection may have deterred meeker souls, Watterson kept plugging away. After these initial stumbles, he created In The Dog House, which he sent out to syndicates in March 1982. It starred a twentysomething named Sam — the Everyman — and his friend, Fester, who was essentially the slacker- loser from Watterson’s college effort, Mewkis and Fester. Of most interest is Sam’s little brother, named Marvin, who has a stuffed — perhaps live — tiger named Hobbes. Sound semi-familiar? 

This was the first glimpse of the duo that would end up becoming Calvin and Hobbes. Though everyone ended up rejecting the strip, United Features Syndicate said they were interested in looking at future work by the aspiring cartoonist, because of the promise In the Dog House showed. Watterson also received some positive feedback about the strip from some peers. He had been quietly sending his work out to established cartoonists whom he admired, including Berke Breathed, who was making waves with Bloom County. “I remember thinking, “Hey! This isn’t the normal dreck; this looks pretty good,”” Breathed told me good-naturedly when I tracked him down. (More on that later.) “I’m hoping that I wrote him back a rare and very uncharacteristically positive response, because I’m usually very blunt with people. Usually I write, “I don’t know this business — and I don’t know what people want to read — but you can’t even print and the drawing is awful.” But his work caught my eye.” 

Rich West was friends with renowned editorial cartoonist Patrick Oliphant and offered to pass along Watterson’s work to him. Oliphant had won the Pulitzer Prize for his political cartooning and Watterson was suitably in awe of his considerable talent. I found Oliphant, living in Santa Fe, still drawing and full of fond remembrances of Watterson’s In The Dog House. “I thought it was a marvelous thing,” Oliphant told me with a laid-back Australian drawl. “It became a lot more sophisticated as it went along, but it always had all the makings of being a great strip.” He added, “I’ve seen Watterson’s editorial cartoons and I’m glad he went on to do a comic strip instead.” 

One of the main criticisms In The Dog House got from everyone, including Oliphant, was that the strip seemed crowded. Taking this advice for what it was, Watterson began stripping away characters until he was left with only Sam, Fester, Marvin and Hobbes, and an early version of Susie Derkins. Marvin and Hobbes were fine-tuned further, but they were far from fully formed. “Marvin/Calvin was basically a wisecracker and his character wasn’t much more developed than Garfield,” West revealed to me. “There wasn’t humanity in the early Calvin, but there was some magic in Bill’s choice of making Hobbes come alive in that child’s world — whereas he appeared to be a stuffed animal to everyone else. It was in that strip that Bill saw the potential of never- ending debate of whether Hobbes is real or not.” 

Watterson called the latest version Fernbusterville — a reference to his Collegian column Pee Wee Fernbuster — and sent it back to United Features, where it ended up on the desk of Sarah Gillespie, then the vice-president and director of comic art at the syndicate. Now retired, Gillespie lives on the Hudson line, north of New York City. Though she hasn’t worked in the business for several years, she has clear memories of the times when she did. “We used to see 2,000 submissions a year,” she remembered as we talked on the phone. “But Watterson’s work stood out. Obviously, he had great potential.” After corresponding for several months after his submission, Watterson flew out to meet Gillespie, who remembers him as a shy guy. “I don’t think he ever called me Sarah,” Gillespie recalls. “He was young enough that he used honorifi cs. He was incredibly polite, a nice kid. He had this Midwestern, nice-guy vibe.” 

Despite seeing real promise in Watterson’s Fernbusterville, Gillespie still felt it missed the mark. She discerningly noted that the little kid, Marvin, and his tiger, Hobbes, were the true stars of the strip and it should revolve around their adventures. “Fernbusterville was a culmination of his genius, rather a collapse of his genius,” West says in retrospect. “He was trying so hard to listen to all the advice that he just threw everything and the kitchen sink into this danged strip. And it was too much and lacked focus.” 

Though he felt his work kept getting better and he was growing as an artist, Watterson was a working definition of a pessimist during this period, as Rich West remembers. “He was increasingly doubtful that something would happen. Each rejection was a confirmation of his pessimism. The syndicates present a fortress-like façade to young cartoonists. Though they can be courteous, it’s rare that they are encouraging, or enthusiastic. They’re not there to coddle up-and-coming cartoonists, and they certainly didn’t coddle Bill. One of his greatest frustrations, though, was the extraordinary length of time when there was no communication between him and the syndicates. Bill was reluctant to press the matter, because no answer was better than a negative answer at that time in his career. But it wasn’t a fun time.” 

“He got rejected so much it was discouraging,” Bill’s father told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1987. “We’d look at what was coming back and knew it was so much better than what we were seeing in the papers. We kept thinking, Why doesn’t somebody else recognize this?” However, Watterson told the Houston Chronicle that he came to understand these early rejections. “In all of [my early strips], I can see flaws.” 

In the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes many years later, Watterson was equally pragmatic in assessing his rejections: “I’m honestly grateful that all my early strip submissions were flatly rejected,” he declared. “This was not a case of syndicate editors failing to recognize latent genius. My strips had serious flaws, so I’m very lucky I didn’t get stuck trying to make one of them fly.” 

He knew that to create a successful strip, he would have to concoct characters and a premise that could ultimately “write themselves” and not become stale within a few months. Unfortunately, the efforts from this era didn’t fit those criteria. “My early strip proposals were unevenly written,” Watterson admitted in The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. “[They had] an occasional good character surrounded by f l at ones, put into limited or clichéd worlds beyond my experience. These are common mistakes, but the only way to learn how to write and draw is by writing and drawing. The good thing about working with almost no audience was that I felt free to experiment. Nobody cared what I did, so I tried pretty much anything that came into my head, acquired some new skills along the way, and gradually learned a bit about what worked and what didn’t.” 

Watterson talked about the evolution of his strips years later to Honk!: “It was a slow process,” he admitted. He was, at first, very tentative about concentrating just on Calvin and Hobbes. “I was afraid that maybe the key to their wackiness was the contrast between them and the more normal characters in the rest of the strip,” he continued. “I wasn’t sure Calvin and Hobbes would be able to maintain that intensity on their own. But I tried it, and almost immediately it clicked in my mind; it became much easier to write material. Their personalities expanded easily, and that takes a good seventy-five percent of the work out of it. If you have the personalities down, you understand them and identify with them; you can stick them in any situation and have a pretty good idea of how they’re going to respond. Then it’s just a matter of sanding and polishing up the jokes. But if you’ve got more ambiguous characters or stock stereotypes, the plastic comes through and they don’t work as well. These two characters clicked for me almost immediately and I feel very comfortable working with them.” 

“Bill’s never been arrogant about his abilities,” West revealed. “But he had some confidence that if he was given the chance he could create something interesting. He knew what he didn’t like, and he knew what he liked, and he was ready to work hard to try to make something special.” And work he did. Based on United’s feedback, he scaled back the strip yet again and concentrated on the kid Marvin and his tiger. Marvin’s name was changed to Calvin in July 1983, because Tom Armstrong’s strip Marvin had launched the previous year, and Watterson didn’t want there to be any confusion.

© Nevin Martell

“Writer’s block” 

Marvin and Hobbes

Marvin and Hobbes

Marvin and Hobbes

Marvin and Hobbes