INSPIRATION / A PERSONAL APPRECIATION
Bill
Watterson
A little space.
A bigger world.
On friendship, imagination
and the care a reader can feel.
Bill Watterson is one of my two biggest creative inspirations. Dave Barry is the other. They work in different forms, but both matter to the way I think about making ordinary life feel newly observable.
With Watterson, the place to begin is Calvin and Hobbes. A boy and a tiger make room for imagination, argument, affection, irritation and the kind of question that can become more interesting the longer you sit with it.
A small comic strip does not have to think small. A ridiculous situation does not prevent an honest emotion. A familiar character does not have to become a machine that repeats one predictable response forever.
I admire how much life he allowed into that little space. There is room to laugh at Calvin and care about him, sometimes in the same moment. You can recognize the extravagance of his thinking while remembering the pleasure of finding an ordinary world insufficient.
Someone
to return to.
In Richard Samuel West’s 1989 interview for The Comics Journal, Watterson discusses both the visual pleasure of fantasy and the emotional depth of Calvin’s friendship with Hobbes. He wanted the strip to move among different experiences, including slapstick and sadness.
That range is part of its kindness. The characters get to have more than one sort of day.
What matters to me about the friendship is the resistance inside the affection. A friend can accompany you without agreeing with you. Being loved does not mean having every theory endorsed, which is fortunate for everyone who has ever met a child with a theory.
Hobbes gives Calvin someone to address, argue with and return to. A world becomes more alive when someone else has a perspective on it. The companionship allows the story to keep changing even when the cast stays small.
And affection gives the humor somewhere to land. The joke can be sharp because the relationship has a life beyond that one exchange. Tomorrow offers another chance to be together.
The question
can stay open.
Watterson was also quite clear with West that settling whether Hobbes is real did not interest him. The strip could sustain different ways of seeing the tiger.
I love the confidence of leaving that door open. A complete explanation might be tidy, but tidiness is a modest reward for giving up a mystery that continues to work.
The reader has a place in this arrangement. We bring our own understanding to the gap between what different characters see. Something happens in that space that a definitive answer could make smaller.
One of the great temptations in writing is to finish every thought on the reader’s behalf. Explain the motive. Identify the lesson. Make sure the joke has been properly received. Watterson reminds me how much pleasure there can be in discovering a connection for yourself.
His trust feels generous. The work is carefully made, and some of its possibilities remain ours to explore.
THE SECOND LOOK
Even a conversation
gets a place to live.
There is equal care in the drawing. Watterson told West that even a conversation could gain interest through a setting, a changed perspective or a different degree of visual detail. Sunday space offered further possibilities.
That is the part of craft I find especially inspiring: the attention given to something that might already be functioning. The dialogue could carry an exchange. The drawing can give the exchange a place to live.
A small format deserves deliberate choices. A funny subject deserves attention. A reader deserves more than the minimum needed to recognize the premise.
The more I think about Watterson’s influence, the more I return to this generosity of effort. A person can enjoy the joke immediately and still have something to notice on a second look. The work welcomes different depths of attention.
That is a beautiful ambition for anything made for a reader. Give the passing glance a pleasure. Give the person who stays a little longer another one.
Enough
can be
wonderful.
Watterson’s determination to protect Calvin and Hobbes becomes more moving when he describes the uncertainty behind it. In his 2013 interview with Jake Rossen for Mental Floss, he explains that he had signed away most of his rights to secure syndication. His resistance to licensing came before he had the autonomy people later associated with him.
That changes the emotional picture. A boundary can look wonderfully simple from a safe distance. Inside the decision, there may be a great deal to lose.
I admire that he could name what he was trying to protect. The relationship between the reader and the strip mattered to him. So did the form in which that relationship had developed.
In the same interview, he explained his lack of interest in an animated adaptation: the comic already worked as he intended, and a different medium would have different needs.
There is satisfaction in hearing an artist say that a work can be complete in the form it has. The newspaper page offered a particular experience. Keeping that experience intact was a creative choice with a positive purpose.
It leaves me thinking about the value of enough. A work can reach people deeply without following every available path away from itself.
Another imagination
in the room.
Then there is the pleasure of an artist choosing a different kind of project. In 2023, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht published The Mysteries, a fable for adults. Their publisher describes several years of close collaboration on the illustrations, with both artists departing from their usual methods.
I find that combination appealing: firm convictions about an existing work, alongside the willingness to enter unfamiliar territory with another person.
The distinction makes room for growth. Protecting something you have made can coexist with wanting to make something you do not yet know how to make. The next project gets to ask for a different process.
Kascht belongs fully in that story. Collaboration introduces another imagination, with its own instincts and discoveries. An artist who already has an unmistakable place in readers’ lives can still make room for that encounter.
To me, that is a hopeful picture of a creative life. A great achievement can remain itself while the person who made it stays curious.
WHAT I CARRY INTO MY OWN WORK
When I think about influence, this is the kind I mean. The work changes the questions I bring to my own writing. How much can an ordinary moment hold? What can remain unstated? Where would a pause or a more precise detail do a better job than another explanation?
I want humor to have room for affection. I want a specific detail to carry more than an announcement of cleverness. I want the reader to feel that the world has become a little larger because somebody looked closely at a small part of it.
Those ambitions belong in writing whether the subject is family, Florida, work or an ordinary day that refused to proceed as planned.
That is why Bill Watterson remains on my shortest list. He made a limited space feel expansive. The inspiration I take from it is to protect enough space in my own work for surprise, complexity and the pleasure of looking again.
About the work
Who created Calvin and Hobbes?
Bill Watterson created the newspaper comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, about a boy and his tiger companion.
What is The Mysteries?
The Mysteries is a 2023 fable for adults by Bill Watterson, with illustrations made in collaboration with caricaturist John Kascht.
Why does Rob Urban admire Bill Watterson?
Rob identifies Watterson and Dave Barry as his two biggest creative inspirations. He admires Watterson’s emotional range, visual care and trust in the reader’s imagination.
Sources: Richard Samuel West’s 1989 Comics Journal interview; Jake Rossen’s interview for the December 2013 issue of Mental Floss; Andrews McMeel’s publication details for The Mysteries. The discussion of that collaboration draws on the publisher’s account.
Written by Rob Urban. Meet Rob and explore his writing and consulting.