[LINK] "'Calvin and Hobbes' fans still pine 15 years after its exit"

[rfmcdonald]

Thanks to Michael from Facebook for pointing me to the recent article "'Calvin and Hobbes' fans still pine 15 years after its exit,", written by John Campanelli for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Calvin and Hobbes, for those of you who don't know, is one of the best comic strips ever, "Doonesbury for children" as an interviewee put it, a well-illustrated, intelligent, and touching series centering on the rambunctious Calvin and his pet stuffed tiger Hobbes.

Fans, who had enjoyed 10 years and more than 3,100 installments, were left without a daily face-to-face with the spiky-haired 6-year-old who had become a part of American culture. They couldn't even hug a stuffed Hobbes or watch an animated special or put on a Calvin T-shirt (an authorized one, at least) because of Watterson's stubborn refusal to license away his characters.

It was cold turkey -- and many fans continue to feel withdrawal.

"Still, people come up to me, and they grieve the loss of 'Calvin and Hobbes.' It's genuine," says Lucy Caswell, curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University, the renowned research facility that houses almost half a million original works of cartoon art, including all but about a hundred of Watterson's original strips.

The reason they mourn, she says, is that they had made friends with Calvin and his tiger. When he left, there was true emptiness.

Unlike other popular art of the era -- the films of Kevin Costner, perhaps, or the music of Bryan Adams -- "Calvin and Hobbes" has not been time-stamped and filed away. It has endured, even thrived.

Reruns of the strip, no longer available to newspapers in North America, still appear in more than 50 countries around the world (Miss Wormwood sends Calvin to the corner in Chinese, Vietnamese and Arabic). With little or no marketing, the "Calvin and Hobbes" compilations, now numbering 18 books, still sell half a million copies a year, according to Universal Press Syndicate. Total sales are nearing 45 million.

(Released in 2005, "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes," a three-volume collection of every C&H strip, has sold more than 500,000 copies. Perhaps not all that impressive -- until you realize the set weighs 23 pounds and retails for $150.)

Bootlegged Calvin merchandise is still ubiquitous, from fraternity T-shirts to the back windows of pickups. Fan Web sites abound. Search "Calvin and Hobbes" on YouTube, and you'll find dozens of attempts to animate the characters, some impressive, some embarrassing.

Best of all, there's a brief E-mail interview with Bill Watterson, the strip's sole creator and writer and artist.

Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved -- and are still grieving -- when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?

This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now "grieving" for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason "Calvin and Hobbes" still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I've never regretted stopping when I did.

Go, read them both. The official website for the strip, so far as I can tell, is here.