Let Your Peg Bore Its Own Hole
EPISODE 043: LET YOUR PEG BORE ITS OWN HOLE
After 10 wonderful years, Calvin and Hobbes, one of the last great newspaper comic strips, ended on January 31, 1985, leaving fans bereft and full of questions. Its creator, Bill Watterson, was silent on the issue. But years later he opened up about his life, his work, and the wonderful world he created with his popular strip, and why he ended it. What's that got to do with your own creative life? Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
On the last day of 1995, cartoonist Bill Watterson published the last strip in what was, and remains, one of the most popular, beloved, and insightfully human comic strips in the history of the art. The story of a friendship between an imaginative and mischievous 6 year old and his best friend Hobbes, a stuffed tiger to the rest of the world but, to Calvin, very real, Calvin and Hobbes had it all as a comic. It had soul, wit, astute social commentary, and–at times–stunning and innovative visuals.
Unless you’re a fan of Calvin and Hobbes it’s probably hard to understand the emotional void that was created when Watterson retired his comic strip after only 10 years. No more sled rides, no more tiger attacks, no more conversations about life and art, they just slid out of our lives with the words, "It’s a magical world, Hobbes, Ol’ buddy, let’s go exploring" 10 years isn’t a particularly long run for a cartoon strip. Charles Schultz drew his Peanuts strip for 50 years. Walt Kelly’s Pogo ran for 25. Garfield has been running since in 1978 and though its creator, Jim Davis has handed off much of the work to others now, he still writes and sketches most of it. That’s 42 years of jokes about a lazy gluttonous cat, and that alone should make you admire the guy. After all, the merchandizing alone for Garfield was worth a billion dollars by 2002. I think if I had made that kind of money I’d have retired my pen and taken that cat to the beach. Which probably says more about me than Jim Davis.
Watterson’s retirement caused a stir among those who loved his strip, not only because he stopped and left us feeling abandoned by characters we deeply loved, but because no reasons were really given. Famously reluctant to give interviews or talk to media, Watterson’s silence left a lot of suspicions that it had to do with conflicts over licensing. Watterson, unlike Davis, had never permitted merchandising, which seems a shame financially as it’s been estimated his willingness to do so would have been worth up to $400 million. On the other hand the internet tells me Watterson is now worth $100 million and at some point he probably figured there was only so much money he could spend in a lifetime.
But there was something bigger at play here for Watterson and he finally broke the silence on it in 2014 in an interview with Jenny Robb who curated his exhibit, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes, at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.
So why did Bill Watterson just walk away from his beloved creation and what does that have to do with you and I as we pursue our day-to-day creative lives? I’m David duChemin, this is episode 043 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let’s talk about it.
Intro/Music
Why we’re talking about cartooning at all, or Bill Watterson, in particular, is because creativity isn’t limited to the so-called high arts like painting and sculpture, literature or dance, and I think it’s probably helpful that we don’t always look to the so-called greats in those fields for lessons about the creative life but also to more down to earth examples. Furthermore, if creativity is in part about feeling more alive, then I have to confess I’ve derived much more pleasure, insight, and even life, from Calvin and Hobbes than I ever have from the Mona Lisa or, God help me for admitting it, Michelangelo’s David which is an astonishing thing but doesn’t resonate with me the way Calvin and Hobbes does. I’ve seen David. And the Mona Lisa. They are marvels. But I could go the rest of my life without seeing them again. Neither of them having made me laugh or cry the way Watterson’s wit and insight have and to which I go back often. It might be so-called low-art, but it’s high-touch.
Most recently I picked up the exhibition catalogue from the 2014 Exploring Calvin and Hobbes exhibit I just mentioned. I got it on Amazon for $40 and spent a couple wonderful evenings reading, then re-reading the interview it contains, as well as the discussions of influences and process and, back to the issue at hand, Watterson’s retirement which, it turns out, came down to listening to his gut.
Bill Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes because he was done. They were done. He had accomplished what he set out to accomplish and felt going any further would be repeating himself: or as Watterson put it, mowing the lawn. Just covering the same territory over and over again. It was as simple as that. Add to that his mounting popularity and the pressure to do interviews and relate to the media in a way that just didn’t jive with his personality, and it’s easy to see why walking away might have been the right choice for him, in the same way that drawing for another 40 years was the right choice for Peanuts creator Charles Schultz. I suspect Watterson quit for the same reason Schultz kept at it: love.
There are a lot of ways to love what we do and the things we make. One of them is to persevere until it’s truly done, until you’ve mined it for all the gold to be found within. The other is stop when you’ve found that gold, to sign your name and let it be, without trying to make it something it’s not, or to milk it for more than it’s able to give. Knowing when to call it done requires as much courage and love as knowing when it’s not, especially, I would think, when your work is appearing in over 2400 newspapers around the world. And though he couldn’t know it at the time, by 2010 the books would go on to sell over 45 million copies.
Walking away, knowing when your current work is done and not trying to make it be something it’s not or that you don’t want it to be isn’t the only lesson to be found in the career of Bill Watterson. Reading his interview with Jenny Robb I was struck by how familiar themes kept coming up, and how fundamentally similar the creative process is for all of us.
There’s a misconception that people like Watterson are the exceptions, that they got where they did because of their brilliance and free from the kind of struggles that you and I experience daily. But listen to them speak on their own behalf and we always find that their path was as uncertain as ours usually feels, and as prone to luck, both good and bad, full of rejections and relying as much, if not much more, on instinct and vision as on technique and craft. Reading a more full account of someone who I have revered for years is deeply encouraging to me, because I’m not going to lie, I’ve coveted his gifts, his career, and his impact as much as I’ve envied anyones, and seeing the very human side of his success gives me hope - not hope that I can be like him or achieve his success - but hope at least that I’m not missing something, and neither are you.
Watterson grew up in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a small mill town outside Cleveland which sounds a lot like the small town in which he later placed his fictional character Calvin. His family moved there from Washington DC when he was six years old which is how old Calvin is, and remains, for the length of the strip. It was here he got hooked on comics like Peanuts and Pogo, and where he learned to draw, making comic strips for his family and hoping to get a laugh. He’s one of those people who just seemed to be destined to do what he did, but only in hindsight. He drew comics in elementary school, contributed comics to his high school newspaper and yearbook, and eventually did the same in college where he started making political cartoons, though at no point does it sound like he was particularly successful, or even overly talented. And it’s here I think Watterson’s story gets interesting because political cartoons were a terrible fit for Watterson who by his own admission had no real interest in politics, no strong opinions or beliefs, and therefore no real voice.
His first job after college was for the Cincinnati Post, drawing editorial cartoons, a job he describes as a disaster. He had a 6-month trial contract and was told after 3 months that it wasn’t working out and he could leave now or stick around until his contract was up. Remarkably he stayed, though it didn’t change his editor’s mind about the poor fit. He then spent a year sending submissions to other papers, getting only rejections in reply, eventually going back to Cleveland to do grocery store layouts for a shopper’s newspaper. But when asked about it, Watterson says his failure was probably one of the best things that ever happened to him, though he didn’t recommend the insolvency and the humiliation that came with it. He credits the catastrophic experience at the Post, and that’s his word, not mine, with forcing him to start over, a move that in hind-sight is easy to recognize as the opportunity Watterson needed to finally find his voice.
While it’s easy to look back on our so-called failures and find the gold within them, it doesn’t make those failures easier to endure. In Watterson’s case he credits that failure with honing his craft, and raising the stakes for him and showing him this wasn’t going to be so easy. They made him aware of just how hungry he was. Hungry not only to pay the bills but also to do work that was a fit for him, and I think that’s one of the things that takes the sting out of rejection. When you know that each rejection is a chance to dodge a bullet, to narrow down your audience, to get closer to that thing that will allow your voice to be heard with the fewest compromises, it makes hearing “No” a little less difficult. One of the reasons I get so much out of reading the biographies of others is that I get to experience their rejections vicariously. That is to say I already know I’m reading the story of someone extraordinary, so when I read of early rejections it’s easier to see them in context, to see them as formational or as the pivot on which their eventual success depended. And it helps to feel less alone because EVERYONE has a rejection story, if not many of them.
Oprah was once fired as a news reporter because she couldn’t separate her emotions from her stories, the very thing on which she’s since built her empire. Thomas Edison was fired from Western Union because he used to do secret experiments, one of which caused acid to burn through the floor. He became a full-time inventor instead. Einstein was kicked out of school and couldn’t get accepted to Zurich Polytechnic and we know how that ended. Lucille Ball’s acting teachers begged her to try anything as long as it wasn’t acting. Modelling agencies told Marilyn Monroe she should consider being a secretary instead. Steven Spielberg was rejected by the University of Southern California School of Theatre, Film and Television, not once but 3 times. Michael Jordan was cut from his High School basketball team. Reminding myself of these more iconic rejections helps me challenge or reframe my own perceptions of rejections. They are never so much a big No as they are a yes to something else. Something better. Some important next step to getting where I’m going, or a pivot that will lead me closer to whom I am becoming.
Watterson’s rejections continued, though he pivoted away from political cartoons to comic strips, trying his hands at almost everything. He says “as each strip was rejected, instead of going back and revising it, I would try an entirely different tack. You don’t like spacemen? Here’s college kids! You don’t like college kids? Here’s animals! I wasn’t coming at this with a coherent vision or sense of personal mission.”
Eventually he created a strip with a small side character that eventually became a kid named Marvin and that kid became Calvin, and there were various iterations of each, but as non-linear as Watterson’s journey to discover Calvin was, what was clear from the beginning was Calvin's voice. That seems to be the point around which everything pivoted for Watterson, as though he had found his own voice in Calvin, and because six-year olds can say whatever they want, so could Watterson and, finally, his own thoughts began to tumble out. Thoughts and beliefs and opinions he did care about. That doesn’t mean he found instant success. Much of what became Calvin and Hobbes was created under a six-month development grant from the United Features syndicate, but even they passed on it, and to pour salt in the wound, Watterson had to pay back the initial development grant, though on because the Universal syndicate accepted the strip. Calvin and Hobbes finally had a home and Bill Watterson had a voice.
In the 10 years that Calvin and Hobbes ran, Watterson used his strip to talk about art and meaning, friendship and environmentalism, imagination and most of all his insights into the best and worst of the human condition, which is a hell of a tall order for six-year old and his toy tiger. But that’s the kind of thing that happens when you finally find the right fit. In Watterson’s words: “you don’t build the peg to fit a hole; the peg needs to bore its own hole.” Rejection helps that happen.
So does an unwillingness to compromise your vision once you find it and that’s the second big take away I find in Watterson’s story: once he found his voice, and that voice made his vision clearer and clearer, he fought hard to keep it undiluted. He wasn’t making art to make money. He was making money to make his art and everything I’ve read tells me that was really clear for Watterson, though he never put it into those exact words. It would be easy to make a series of compromises, to do whatever it took to make the money. But instead he rocked the boat, not for the sake of rocking the boat, but because he knew what he wanted and what he didn’t. He didn’t want to merchandize his creation, it didn’t feel right and he waked away from millions. An expensive choice, but the right one for Watterson. Defying industry convention, he took sabbaticals when we needed to, because he knew he had to in order to do his best work and probably to remain sane. And when the constraints of the long-established comic strip format no longer worked for him, he fought to change it. And finally, when there was nowhere left to take Calvin and Hobbes, he left it on a high note rather than putting it on life-support and mowing the lawn.
In Episode 042 I talked about listening to our gut and I think Bill Watterson is a good example of that. You can’t look at his life and his decisions and make them fit your own template. To others his decisions probably didn’t make a lot of sense. I’m not sure I would have walked away from the kind of merchandizing money being offered. But what makes one person happy is not what makes another happy. We’re all trying to scratch a different itch. I’m profoundly encouraged by Watterson. I love that his journey wasn’t linear, that it took him some time to create Calvin and find his voice hiding there. I love that he listened to his gut, and that his willingness to do so gave us a simple comic strip that brought his fans such joy. I love that he didn’t feel obligated to be anyone but who he is, or to get a real job, and that he wasn’t put off by his early and numerous rejections. Watterson gives me hope that sometimes the good guys win. He’s an an unlikely outlier that just followed his heart and made his own rules. And he makes me feel a little more OK for trying to do the same and wanting to let my peg bore its own hole.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0