Calvin is named for a sixteenth-century theologian who believed in predestination. Most
people assume that Calvin is based on
a son of mine, or based on detailed memories of my own childhood. In fact, I don't have
children, and I was a fairly quiet,
obedient kid--almost Calvin's opposite. One of the reasons that Calvin's character is fun to
write is that I often don't agree with
him.

Calvin is autobigraphical in the sense that he thinks about the same issues that I do, but in
this, Calvin reflects my adulthood
more than my childhood. Many of Calvin's struggles are metaphors for my own. I suspect
that most of us get old without
growing up, and that inside every adult (sometimes not very far inside) is a bratty kid who
wants everything his own way. I use
Calvin as an outlet for my immaturity, as a way to keep myself curious about the natural
world, as a way to ridicule my own
obsessions, and as a way to comment on human nature. I wouldn't want Calvin in my
house, but on paper, he helps me sort
through my life and understand it.
 
 

Hobbes:
 

Named after a seventeenth-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature, Hobbes
has the patient dignity and common
sense of most animals I've met. Hobbes was very much inspired by one of our cats, a gray
tabby named Sprite. Sprite not only
provided the long body and facial characteristics for Hobbes, she also was the model for
his personality. She was
good-natured, intelligent, friendly, and enthusiastic in a sneaking-up-and-pouncing sort of
way. Sprite suggested the idea of
Hobbes greeting Calvin at the door in midair at high velocity.

With most cartoon animals, the humor comes from thier humanlike behavior. Hobbes
stands upright and talks of course, but I
try to preserve his feline side, both in his physucal demeanor and his attitude. His reserve
and tact seem very catlike to me,
along with his barely contained pride in not being human. Like Calvin, I often prefer the
company of animals to people, and
Hobbes is my idea of an ideal friend.

The so-called "gimmick" of my strip--the two versions of Hobbes--is sometimes
misunderstood. I don't think of Hobbes as a
doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin's around. Niether do I think of Hobbes as
the product of Calvin's imagination.
The nature of Hobbes reality doesn't interest me, and each story goes out of its way to
avoid resolving the issue. Calvin sees
Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way . I show two versions of
reality, and each makes complete
sense to the participant who sees it. I think that's how life works. None of us sees the
world in exactly the same way, and I just
draw that literally in the strip. Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality that
about dolls coming to life.
 
 

Calvin's parents:
 

I've never given Calvin's parents names, because as far as the strip is concerned, they are
important only as Calvin's mom and
dad. Calvin's dad has been rumored to be a self-portrait. All my characters are half me, so
it's true in some ways, but Calvin's
dad is also partly a satire of my own father. Any strip about how suffering "builds
character" is usually a verbatim transcript of
my dad's explanations for why we were all freezing, exhausted, hungry, and lost on
camping trips. These things are a lot funnier
after twenty-five years have passed.

Calvin's mom is the daily disciplinarian, a job that taxes her sanity, so I don't think we get
to see her at her best. I regret that the
strip mostly shows her impatient side, but I try to hint at other aspect of her interests by
what she's doing when Calvin barges in.

Early on, Calvin's parents were criticized by readers for being unloving and needlessly
sarcastic. (Calvin's dad has remarked
that what he really wanted was a dog.) At the time, I think it was unusual for a comic strip
to concentrate on the exasperating
aspects of kids without a lot of hugs and sentimentality to leaven it. We usually only see
Calvin's parents when they're reacting
to Calvin, so as secondary characters, I've tried to keep them realistic, with a reasonable
sense of humor about having a kid
like Calvin. I think they do a better job than I would.
 
 

Susie Derkins:
 

Susie is earnest, serious, and smart--the kind of girl I was attracted to in school and
eventually married. "Derkins" was the
nickname of my wife's family's beagle. The early strips with Susie were heavy-handed with
the love-hate conflict, and it's taken
me a while to get a bead on Susie's relationship with Calvin. I suspect Calvin has a mild
crush on her that he expresses by trying
to annoy her, but Susie is a bit unnerved and put off by Calvin's weirdness. This
encourages Calvin to be even weirder, so it's a
good dynamic. Neither of them quite understand what's going on, which is probably true
of most relationships. I sometimes
imagine a strip from Susie's point of view would be interesting, and after so many strips
about boys, I think a strip about a little
girl, drawn by a woman, could be great.
 

Miss Wormwood:
 

As a few readers guessed, Miss Wormwood is named after the apprentice devil in C. S.
Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. I
have a lot of sympathy for Miss Wormwood. We see hints that she's waiting to retire, that
she smokes too much, and that she
takes a lot of medication. I think she seriously believes in the value of education, so
needless to say, she's an unhappy person.
 

Moe:
 

Moe is every jerk I've ever known. He's big, dumb, ugly, and cruel. I remember school
being full of idiots like Moe. I think
they spawn on damp locker room floors.
 

Rosalyn:
 

Probably the only person Calvin fears is his baby-sitter. I put her in a Sunday strip early
on, never thinking of her as a regular
character, but her intimidation of Calvin surprised me, so she's made a few apperances
since. Rosalyn even seems to daunt
Calvin's parents, using their desperation to get out of the house to demand advances and
raises. Rosalyn's relationship with
Calvin is pretty one-demensional, so baby-sitter stories get harder and harder to write, but
for a later addition to the strip, she's
worked pretty well.
 

Spaceman Spiff
 

Spaceman Spiff predates Calvin and Hobbes by over a decade. I trace Spiff back to a
comic strip I drew for high school
German class, called Raumfahrer Rolf. It was a pretty silly two-page comic in which the
protagonist got eaten by a monster at
the end, but it was written in some sort of German, and that was what counted. I
reworked the character in college, calling him
"Spaceman Mort," but the strip was conceived as a fairly elaborate, continuing project and
that didn't seem like the best use of
my academic time, so I never published it.

A year or so after college, the newly christened Spaceman Spiff was my first strip
submission to newspaper syndicates. Spiff
was a diminutive loudmouth, not like Calvin, albeit with a Chaplin mustache, flying
goggles, and a cigar. He had a dimwitted
assistant named Fargle, and they roamed through space in a dirigible. For obvious reasons,
the syndicates rejected it. Years
later, when I came up with Calvin, I finally had the opportunity to bring Spiff back.

When I was a kid, I followed the Apollo moon program with great interest, so Calvin
shares that fascination with space travel.
Spaceman Spiff is also a bit of a spoof on Flash Gordon. The narration in Flash Gordon is
fairly overwrought, so I have Spiff
describe his own exploits with the similar search for breathless superlatives.

The Spiff strips are limited in narrative potential, but I keep doing them because they're so
much fun to draw. The planets and
monsters offer great visual possibilities, especially in the Sunday strips. Most of the alien
landscapes come from the canyons
and deserts of southern Utah, a place more weird and spactacular than anything I'd
previously been able to make up. The
landscapes have become a significant part of the Spaceman Spiff sequences, and I often
write the strip around the topography I
feel like drawing.

Like all of Calvin's fantasies, Spaceman Spiff provides a way for me to draw some other
comic strip when I want a break from
Calvin and Hobbes. I can draw and write things that wouldn't fit in the strip otherwise, and
this opens up opportunities to
experiment with new interests.
 

Calvin's Wagon
 

Calvin's wagon is a simple device to add some physical comedy to the strip, and I most
often use it when Calvin gets
longwinded or philosophical. I think the action lends a silly counterpoint to the text, and
it's a lot mort interesting to draw than
talking heads. Sometimes the wagon ride even acts as a visual metaphor for Calvin's topic
of discussion.

Calvin rides the wagon through the woods, bouncing off rocks and flying over ravines.
When I was a kid, our backyard
dropped off into a big woods, but it was brambly and swampy, not like Calvin's, which
seems to be more like a national forest.
I was not a real outdoorsy kid, but occasionally I'd tramp out through the bush to map a
pond, or try to see unusual birds and
animals. Calvin's woods is important to the strip, because it's the place where Calvin and
Hobbes can get away from everyone
and be themselves. The solitude of the woods brings out Calvin's small, but redeeming,
contemplative side.
 

Get Rid Of Slimy Girls
 

The Get Rid Of Slimy girlS is based on similar clubs my next-door neighbor and I formed
when we were kids. Our mission was
to harass neighborhood girls, but if they wouldn't come out, we'd often settle for harassing
my brother. We prepared for a lot of
great struggles that never happened. Once we gathered big hickory nuts, loaded them into
a suitcase, locked it so nobody else
could open it, and stashed it up high in a tree. When the Critical Moment came, we
planned to scramble up the tree and unleash
a hail of nuts upon our astonished pursuers. Six months later, when the leaves were down,
we looked up and discovered the
suitcase was still in the tree. The hinges had rusted, the nuts had rotted, and the suitcase
was ruined. Our great plans often had
this kind of boing anticlimax, which is why fiction comes in so handy.
 

Dinosaurs
 

The dinosaurs I put in Calvin and Hobbes have become one of my favorite additions to the
strip. Dinosaurs have appeared in
many strips before mine, but I like to think I've treated them with a little more respect than
they've often recieved at the hands
of cartoonists.

When I was Calvin's age, I had a nicely illustrated dinosaur book and some dinosuar
models, so it was a natural step to have
Calvin share that interest. The first dinosaurs I put in the strip were based on my childhood
memories of them. Back in the 60's,
dinosuars were imagined as lumbering, dim-witted, cold-blooded, oversized lizards. That's
how I drew them in the first strips,
and these drawings are now pretty embarrassing to look at. when I realized that dinosaurs
offered Calvin interesting story
possibilities, I started searching for books to rekindle my interest in them. It was then I
dicovered what I'd missed in
paleontology during the last twenty years.

Dinosaurs, I quickly learned, were wilder than anything I'd ever imagined. Tails up, with
birdlike agility, these were truly the
creatures of nightmares. My drawings began to reflect the new information, and with each
new strip, I've tried to learn more
and to depict dinosaurs more accurately. I do this parlty for my own amusement, and
partly because, for Calvin, dinosaurs are
very, very real.

Dinosaurs have expanded Calvin's world and opened up some exciting graphic
possibilities. The biggest reward for me,
however, has been the fun I've had exploring a new interest. I enjoy dinosaurs more now
than I did as a kid, and much of the
job of being a cartoonist lies in keeping alive a sense of curiosity and wonder. Sometimes
the best way to generate new ideas is
to go out and learn something.