In a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip last fall, Calvin and his pet tiger Hobbes are seen walking across a blank landscape. “Grandpa says the comics were a lot bigger years ago when the newspapers printed them bigger,” says Calvin. “He says comics now are just a bunch of xeroxed talking heads because there’s no space to tell a decent story or to show any action. He thinks people should write to their newspapers and complain.”
Indeed, Something Under the Bed Is Drooling (1988) is already the second Calvin and Hobbes collection, and like its predecessor, Calvin and Hobbes (1987), it has marched promptly to the head of the paperback best-sellers list. Although C&H remains the new kid on the block, it is hardly fresh-faced. It’s already so well established that, along with Berke Breathed’s Bloom County, C&H must be considered one of the two best strips to be developed in this decade.
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Yet while Hobbes rolls on his back in an open field or curls in front of a fireplace in poses so natural they suggest his very respiration, the other three members of the family are all sketchy and–at least in appearance–two-dimensional. They fit right into the comic strip’s diminishing space–have even less visual impact than the characters in the intensely stylized and contrived-for-this-age Garfield. Watterson is a talented artist, but he knows his limitations–and the current limitations of his chosen craft–and in his human characters he plays safely the middle of the field: there is nothing visually complicated about them. Calvin has been compared, quite rightly, to Pac-Man. He does resemble the video character, only he has a small body and tousled hair. His parents, meanwhile, are drawn almost in caricature, updated versions of Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell from Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace. The father seems meant only to suggest a father, with his glasses and balding head, while the mother is contemporary, working at her typewriter or standing at the stove in her usual outfit: sweater, jeans, and tennis shoes. It’s in dialogue that these characters come to life, in conversation that they establish their personalities.
Remarkable as it is for its vivid fantasy life, C&H is not the progeny of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Walt Kelly’s Pogo, as the misguided political cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, argues in the introduction to Drooling. C&H is in a direct line from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. The humor of C&H is–like the humor of these strips–primarily verbal, because that’s almost all that cartoonists have available anymore.
Anyone wishing to see the Sunday strips in their entirety before such a collection comes out, however, had best write the Tribune and tell them to quit cutting out frames. The perceptive reader will notice that in the book there’s a common pattern to the Sunday strips: some panels are drawn to be “extra.” They can be removed, if the features editor so desires, because they don’t advance the day’s story line. C&H, which in the book runs nine frames or more on a Sunday, including a title frame, runs only six frames in the average Sunday Tribune. The basic idea of the strip–its joke–remains, but at the cost of mutilation, the benefit being that more mutilated strips can fit in the Sunday comics section and thereby maximize circulation. It’s a common practice in the field, a bow to the powers that be, but that doesn’t mean those powers have to be exercised.
Little Nemo first appeared in 1905, when comics were a budding art form; McCay used, and later retained, an awkward, scribbled printing style in his balloons–he never blocked the letters–that was innovative in its time but looks very dated now. It is the one antiquated aspect of the strip, for otherwise it has never been matched, not in draftsmanship, not in story line, and only rarely in characterization. McCay was allotted a space 16 inches wide and 22 and a half inches deep, and he filled it up with the most glorious buildings, the most innovative color, and the most wonderful and terrifying situations.
In the most heartbreaking episodes depicted in the book, Nemo has somehow obtained a magic scepter. Wandering through a place called Shanty Town, where poverty and disease run rampant, he performs various feats of near-messianic magic. These episodes ran several weeks, leading up to a strip that appeared on Easter Sunday 1908: the people of Shanty Town lead him to the home of an ailing girl. She lives in a tenement and is seen passed out on a pallet raised from the floor on soap boxes. With a touch of the scepter, the bed is transformed into a beautiful four-poster, and the girl awakes. In the penultimate frame, the house fades, leaving Nemo and the girl–now sitting up in an ornate bed complete with canopy–alone; they are raised on a platform of a few steps, surrounded by a field of Easter lilies as far as the eye can see. “Oh,” the girl says. “Am I . . . eh . . . dreaming that I am here and well?” “I don’t know whether you are dreaming or I am,” Nemo says. “I hope I’m not.” In the inevitable final frame, Nemo awakes in bed to the calls of: “Get up Nemo! And look for bunny eggs! Come on!”
