Of
Calvin & Hobbes, Andy Capp and Van Gogh
By
Lars Trodson
It’s a strange world, inside those little boxes on the comics
page.
This was brought to mind a couple of weeks back when my friend
Don Kerr wrote in his column "The
Culling" about the creator of Calvin and Hobbes
who walked away from it all 10 years ago. I liked what Don
wrote, although I disagreed with it, and it got me to thinking
about this odd three-paneled landscape that causes so much
passion among people. More on what Don wrote later, but first:
As a newspaper editor for many years, there are several things
that can really destroy an editor’s day and they are a) screwing
up the lottery numbers, b) screwing up an obituary (not a
minor thing), c) not running the crossword puzzle answers
and d) making a decision to stop running a particular comic.
Newspaper editors have now more or less opted out of this
last debate. When the time comes to crease out a comic, editors
usually do a reader’s poll to see which comic comes out on
top, and then they can throw up their hands and say: "It
wasn’t my choice!"
I suppose if you lament how fast our world is changing then
one can always look to the comics page for reassurance that
there are some things that never really change. Some newspapers
are still running "Peanuts," which I find both disturbing
and sad. Other comics such as "Beetle Bailey" or
"Family Circus" became family affairs, in which
a child of the creator has taken on the mantle of pushing
what is an anachronism — taking what is essentially a 1930s
radio sitcom, say, such as "Blondie" — and wedging
it into the 21st century. Somehow.
I can remember, in my 20s, laughing out loud to a comic called
"Bloom County" but other than that they never really
made me laugh. In my childhood, when I did read the page both
in the daily paper, which back then was the evening edition
of the Providence Journal, and in the Sunday paper, I found
it a playground full of boozers, misogynists, awkward slapstick,
hedonism, treacly sentimentality and tedious soap operas,
such as Prince Valiant, which gave you the scantiest of plot
developments possible in a few panels of ink.
People
my age will recall the sweet surrealism of "Nancy,"
penned by the estimable Ernie Bushmiller, which chronicled,
even in my day, the hapless exploits of two youngsters trapped
inside the obstacles posed by growing up in the Great Depression.
Sluggo may have been anti-social, but he really didn’t impress
me as much as H. Rap Brown or any of the other firebrands
parading across the news pages in 1968.
At some point, in the early 1970s, came "Doonesbury,"
which was difficult to digest. I didn’t quite get the "Guilty!
Guilty! Guilty!" liberalism of that strip at the time.
I wasn’t drawn to it. Rather, each night at the dinner table
in my house I was exposed to the points of view of my father,
the former Marine, who was a conservative Republican, and
my mother, who was a Connecticut liberal and who had hung
a small poster on the cupboard of the kitchen that said: "War
is not healthy for children or other living things."
You can imagine the conversation.
My dad, in those long-gone days of the middle 1960s and early
1970s, was also a drinker (a very, very bad habit he gave
up in 1972), so the late-night brawls of Andy Capp both fascinated
and repelled me. When Andy walked home in the middle of the
night intoxicated I didn’t necessarily find that funny, I
kind of used it to validate my own landscape.
It
was around this time I noticed that an abnormal amount of
drinking went on in the comics page: Gen. Halftrack of "Beetle
Bailey" was always swilling a martini while ogling Miss
Buxley. Hagar the Horrible always seemed to have a mug of
beer, there were the genial domestic hijinks in "Hi and
Lois," in the "Wizard of Id" there was a court
jester who was constantly smashed and the overstuffed reporters
in "Shoe" had a tree-loft bar where they always
seemed to retire.
I thought, this is a very strange atmosphere for a child.
I imagine things have changed, however. But when I looked
at the comics page the other day there was some offhand swearing
(In one comic some kids are watching TV and one says, "This
program inhales." In the next panel, the mother says
to the father "I told him not to use the S* word in front
of the other children." At first I thought the word was
"shit," but then I realized it was "sucks."
No matter, vices still abound on the comics page.
Given that so much of the behavior on that page is mummified
and unfunny, it is no wonder my friend D. Allan Kerr of "The
Culling" fame writes with admiration about how the artist
behind "Calvin and Hobbes" decided to split the
game at the top of his craft.
Comics artists, much like politicians, don’t know when to
leave the stage. Perhaps they are congenitally unable to,
so it is a relief and an anomaly when one decides to break
from the pack.
But to say, as Don did, that this is a stamp of artistic
integrity is a bit off the mark. Bill Watterson apparently
dropped the insanely popular strip in 1995 and walked away.
I have a vague memory of the child and his stuffed animal,
but since I didn’t read it I never became a fan. I was too
busy emulating my heroes in "Shoe" to notice what
was going on.
Don writes: "The truth is, the artist has to eat and
pay bills to survive. And yeah, it’d be nice to get some appreciation
every once in a while, too. The trick is in doing so without
selling yourself out. That’s why Bill Watterson should be
an inspiration to anyone with any serious artistic inclination."
One has to get rich and famous to walk away from it, and
then of course, once you are rich, it isn’t much of a sacrifice.
Later I learn from Don that Watterson didn’t exactly chuck
it all, he allows, in his artistic purity, his publisher to
issue anthologies of the work, which have sold upwards of
30 million copies. If he really wanted to impress me he’d
stop the machinery altogether and let it live unsullied, as
a little strip once published in your local paper. If you
really were passionate about the strip you could go to your
local library and Xerox that day’s comic out of each daily
edition of the newspaper and collect it that way, I suppose.
Now, Don and I have had a million conversations about the
role of the artist and how much one should commit to the cause.
He and I have always diverged on one simple point, and it
is one that he repeats in his column: "It’s lovely to
romanticize the lonely painter/writer/musician/whatever holed
up in an inner-city apartment or isolated cave, churning out
works of brilliance for the sake of creation, unsullied by
ambition or avarice. We celebrate the concept of the uncompromising
artist, the pure idealist, but who among us is willing to
make the sacrifices such commitment requires?"
Well, a lot of people, including the celebrated Mr. Watterson,
to answer that last question. He was holed up in his garret
drawing strips before he became rich and famous, I would imagine.
But no one, I don’t think, celebrates the artist who works
in obscurity; he’s not really a valid character to emulate
because the end result is unhappy; it means all that work
didn’t pan out. That’s not a good goal.
But what I find, on occasion, is that I marvel at someone
like Van Gogh, whose creativity never wavered despite lacking
that external validation so many of us require — well, that
all of us require in one form or another, no matter what we
do.
To
continue to pursue your singular vision, and end up with a
body of work, despite poverty and despite madness is, to me,
one of those odd miracles of nature. What I, personally, take
away from that is the idea that if Van Gogh can attack an
empty canvas under those circumstances then I certainly can
look at a blank screen and attempt to write despite the fact
I’m feeling a little blue. But I don’t prefer this story.
I wish Van Gogh had gotten known and made a little money in
his own lifetime.
So I’m not rooting for anyone to enter the Posthumously Famous
Hall of Fame. I hate the idea of true brilliance never getting
the proper recognition it deserves. Despite the incredible
opportunities out there for people to work and to write and
to paint, it still happens.
I understand Mr. Watterson walked away from it all, but he
was a millionaire when he did that. Good for him, but I don’t
celebrate and admire that guy so much as I do the guy who
must have taken his idea, this Calvin and Hobbes idea, and
drafted it and refined it and kept at it when no one was looking,
when no one knew if it would ever see the light of day.
Lars Trodson can be reached at larstrodson@comcast.net
Read
more columns by Lars Trodson.
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Doctors
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Dec 05 2005
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