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The pressures of the battle over merchandising led to Watterson taking an extended break from May 5, 1991, to February 1, 1992, a move that was virtually unprecedented in the world of syndicated cartoonists. Having achieved his objective of creative control, Watterson's desire for privacy subsequently reasserted itself and he ceased all media interviews, relocated to New Mexico, and largely disappeared from public engagements, refusing to attend the ceremonies of any of the cartooning awards he won. By 1991, Watterson had achieved his goal of securing a new contract that granted him legal control over his creation and all future licensing arrangements. This dynamic played out in a long and emotionally draining battle between Watterson and his syndicate editors. Nevertheless, Watterson had leverage by threatening to simply walk away from the comic strip. Watterson's contract with the syndicate allowed the characters to be licensed without the creator's consent, as was standard at the time. Calvin and Hobbes has also won several more awards.Īs his creation grew in popularity, there was strong interest from the syndicate to merchandise the characters and expand into other forms of media. The Society awarded him the Humor Comic Strip Award for 1988. Calvin and Hobbes earned Watterson the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in the Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year category, first in 1986 and again in 1988. Watterson introduced all the major characters within the first three weeks and made no changes to the central cast over the strip's 10-year history.īy April 5, 1987, Watterson was featured in an article in the Los Angeles Times. Īlthough Calvin and Hobbes underwent continual artistic development and creative innovation over the period of syndication, the earliest strips demonstrated a remarkable consistency with the latest. Within a year of syndication, the strip was published in roughly 250 newspapers and proved to have international appeal with translation and wide circulation outside the United States. The first Calvin and Hobbes strip was published on Novem in 35 newspapers. Though United Feature ultimately rejected the new strip as lacking in marketing potential, Universal Press Syndicate took it up. United identified these characters as the strongest and encouraged Watterson to develop them as the center of their own strip.

United Feature Syndicate finally responded positively to one strip called The Doghouse, which featured a side character (the main character's little brother) who had a stuffed tiger. He explored various strip ideas but all were rejected by the syndicates.

Lee Salem, Watterson's editor at Universal, recalling his reaction after seeing Watterson's first submission Ĭalvin and Hobbes was conceived when Bill Watterson, while working in an advertising job he detested, began devoting his spare time to developing a newspaper comic for potential syndication. When my then-8-year-old son remarked, 'This is the Doonesbury for kids!' I suspected we had something unusual on our hands.' 'I thought it was perhaps too 'adult,' too literate. In 2010, reruns of the strip appeared in more than 50 countries, and nearly 45 million copies of the Calvin and Hobbes books had been sold worldwide. Īt the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide.

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Though the series does not frequently mention specific political figures or contemporary events, it does explore broad issues like environmentalism, public education, and philosophical quandaries. Hobbes's dual nature is a defining motif for the strip: to Calvin, Hobbes is a living anthropomorphic tiger, while all the other characters see Hobbes as an inanimate stuffed toy. It also examines Calvin's relationships with his long-suffering parents and with his classmates, especially his neighbor Susie Derkins. Set in the contemporary suburban United States of the 1980s and 1990s, the strip depicts Calvin's frequent flights of fancy and friendship with Hobbes. Commonly cited as 'the last great newspaper comic', Calvin and Hobbes has enjoyed broad and enduring popularity, influence, and academic and philosophical interest.Ĭalvin and Hobbes follows the humorous antics of the title characters: Calvin, a precocious, mischievous, and adventurous six-year-old boy and Hobbes, his sardonic stuffed tiger. The cover of Calvin and Hobbes, the first collection of comic strips, released in April 1987.Ĭalvin and Hobbes is a daily American comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995.

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