Matthew Morgan explaining why Bill Watterson despised the idea of merchandising Calvin and Hobbes.
It was still early days in the ten-year run of Calvin and Hobbes when the syndicate approached Watterson with its big ideas of Calvin sweatshirts, Spaceman Spiff bumper stickers, an animated Calvin and Hobbes Saturday show, maybe a movie, and — worst of all — a Hobbes doll. Watterson really loathed the Hobbes doll. To make sense of how much it bothered him, we need to talk about the tiger in the room.
When Watterson created Hobbes, his focus was on the character more than the conceit of a teddy that comes to life. Watterson told Rich West for The Comics Journalthat “there’s something a little peculiar about [Hobbes] that’s, hopefully, not readily categorised”. But Watterson’s readers often wanted Hobbes categorised into either “real” or “imaginary”. So Watterson came up with a compelling non-answer to the question:
“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.”
You could say Hobbes is both imaginatively real and really imaginary, depending on your perspective. Hobbes can be either, which also means he’s both. Is Hobbes a tiger or a toy? Yes.
Watterson insisted that if he wasn’t going to settle the question of Hobbes, then he definitely wouldn’t let some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes “into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic”. He’d sound off wherever he could on how “licensing usually cheapens the original creation” by saturating a market with characters until readers are bored of seeing them; how a multi-paneled story with dynamic action cannot be respected by the vagaries of a coffee mug illustration; how subtlety is sacrificed for immediacy; how selling off “everything fun and magical” means “the strip’s world is diminished”.
He has a hundred lines like these, articulations of higher reasoning against merchandising, but just once, in the Tenth Anniversary Book, he drops the high-and-mighty in favour of I-the-mighty: “Calvin and Hobbes was designed to be a comic strip and that’s all I want it to be. It’s the one place where everything works the way I intend it to.”