Robotman

So here they were: Calvin, Hobbes, his parents and Susie. This was the cast Watterson wanted to form the backbone of his latest iteration. When he resubmitted his strip with the re-envisioned cast, now called Calvin and Hobbes, to United Features Syndicate in late summer of 1983, it hit the nail on the head for Sarah Gillespie. She offered him a development deal almost immediately.

“The deal was done so we could hold on to the strip,” she admits now.

“It would keep him submitting material, so we could keep seeing what he was up to. And what he was up to was wonderful and very impressive.” Watterson was given around $1,000 as a retainer and asked to draw up a month of cartoons for Sarah and her United co-workers.

Even then, Gillespie knew that she was dealing with a breakout strip.

“I wouldn’t be so egotistical as to say I knew it was something great,” she says now.

“But I certainly knew it was something special and that someone would pick it up and he would have a good shot at success. It wasn’t the only comic I ever saw where I said, “This is wonderful,” but I certainly thought he had a good shot [at] being the next Schulz.”

Dave Hendin, then senior vice-president and editorial director at United, remembers first reading the strip when Gillespie brought it to the senior group’s attention. Like Gillespie, he is now retired, living outside New York and easy enough to find with a little digging around. When I caught up with him, he was happy to remember his small role in the history of Calvin and Hobbes. Hendin was a part of the editorial group at United who met every few weeks to check out the new submissions and pass around the latest projects.

“Calvin and Hobbes had very favorable feedback,” Hendin remembered.

“It was a damn good strip from the beginning and a number of us liked it very much. I can’t tell you how many comic strips I’ve seen that

looked great for the first two months, but the creator could neither sustain it nor build on it. Bill had the kind of genius where he was able to do both.”

Hendin and Gillespie were under a great deal of pressure from the corporate executives of United’s parent company, the media giant Scripps, to bring in higher profits. At the time, United was representing both Peanuts and Garfield, which were big earners for the company.
“So, the people at the parent company were seeing this big money coming in and were saying

“Why don’t you do make these other strips as popular as Peanuts and Garfield and then we can all make a lot more money?”” Hendin related to me.

“Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. You can’t spend money to make a great comic strip; you have to find the right person to make a great comic strip.”

To determine which strips had the most commercial potential, Scripps insisted United use focus groups for their untested comic strips. Doing as they were told, the United team took several strips to the focus groups, including Calvin and Hobbes. Perhaps Drabble and Rose is Rose were presented, but neither Hendin nor Gillespie can remember for sure. There were between three and five separate tests, during which focus groups rated the strips and debated their pros and cons. Then all the strips were scored and ranked according to the feedback.

Unfortunately, and quite surprisingly, Calvin and Hobbes tested poorly. As Gillespie puts it, with a touch of understandable bitterness, “United didn’t take Calvin and Hobbes because a couple housewives in Connecticut said, “It’s okay, but we don’t get it.””Gillespie got angry with the results and went to her boss to complain. She told him that if United didn’t take Calvin and Hobbes, someone else would.

“Forget it, we can’t take everything,” she was told. Hendin tried his own “Hail Mary” with their boss, but his plea fell on deaf ears.

“It was one of those things,” Hendin says now with pragmatism. “Everybody but United rejected Peanuts. Everybody rejected Garfield. To miss something really good is nothing to be ashamed of in a creative environment. If you recognize that, you have a chance to get the next one.”

Gillespie doesn’t subscribe to that school of thought. “I took our loss of Calvin and Hobbes pretty personally,” she freely admits now. “That may have been why I needed to get out of the business. As an editor you’re not the creative person, but if you’re a good editor and you’ve got a good nose for it, then you can fight for the good stuff. I fought for it, but I’ll never know if I fought hard enough. It was a true professional disappointment.”

Despite the fact that upper management didn’t believe in Calvin and Hobbes, everyone agreed that Watterson was a fine artist whose skills could be put to other uses. The marketing department had obtained the rights to a character named Robotman and they wanted someone to create a comic strip around the character, so they could use the strip as a springboard to merchandising and animating opportunities. Overriding advice from Gillespie and others at United, executives insisted she offer the opportunity to Watterson.

Gillespie was uncomfortable and hesitant about doing it, but she nonetheless flew Watterson to New York City in January 1984 to discuss incorporating the Robotman character into Calvin and Hobbes. “I didn’t like the idea of having a comic forced upon somebody,” she says now.
“I was embarrassed by the entire thing.” Gillespie’s assessment of the situation was astute and Watterson balked. “They thought that maybe I could stick [Robotman] in my strip, working with Calvin’s imagination or something,” Watterson told Honk! in 1987. “They didn’t really care too much how I did it, just so long as the character remained intact and would be a very major character.”

Watterson declined the offer politely, but firmly.  “My impression was that it was never really considered,” Gillespie says now. “I felt badly about bringing him in, because I felt it was disrespectful. It really went against my idea of what a comic strip should be,” Watterson confessed to Honk! years later.

“I’m not interested in slamming United Features here. Keep in mind that, at the time, it was the only syndicate that had expressed any interest in my work. I remain grateful for their early attention... Not knowing if Calvin and Hobbes would ever go anywhere, it was difficult to turn down another chance at syndication. But I really recoiled at the idea of drawing somebody else’s character. It’s cartooning by committee, and I have a moral problem with that. It’s not art then.”

After Watterson turned her down, Gillespie offered Robotman to up-and-comer Jim Meddick. Meddick had won a contest for his own strip Paperback Writer while he was still in college. When he graduated, he started submitting it to a number of syndicates, including United. They expressed an interest, but wanted him to sign a development contract that he felt was too one-sided, so he turned it down. Consequently, he was offered Robotman, which he took on with a pragmatic air.

“It wasn’t my character, so I wasn’t worried about losing it,” he admitted when I caught up with him.

“To be honest, I didn’t think they would even launch it. I thought that since it was designed to be a toy for children it wouldn’t work as a comic strip. However, they were offering me cash to work on it, so I figured I would get some money and learn how to draw a strip at the same time. No matter what, it was win-win for me.”

Though Gillespie didn’t think the strip was the right fit for Watterson, she didn’t necessarily feel the same about Robotman and Meddick, and has since been impressed with Meddick’s work.

“There were times I would look at him and I would feel badly about kind of sticking this on him, but the fact that Meddick made it into something worthwhile is really a testament to his talent.” Robotman launched in 1985 and though it never became the licensing juggernaut the marketing department had hoped, it nonetheless became a hit in its own right. Over the years, Meddick added his own characters to the strip, including a geeky inventor named Monty Montahue, who would go on to become the star and namesake of the strip. Today Monty still runs in papers and online, a surprising outcome to an odd little sidebar story.