In Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, we as readers only get a few incidental looks at what either of Calvin’s parents do when Calvin isn’t around. Watterson wrote in the Calvin and Hobbes 10th anniversary collection that Calvin’s father is a patent attorney, like Watterson’s own father was, although there’s all of one strip that ever specifically refers to that. Meanwhile, Calvin’s mother stays home in a largely fruitless attempt to keep Calvin under control.
Calvin and Hobbes, naturally, is focused almost exclusively on Calvin and the world around him. While there are a few strips about other characters, particularly early in the comic’s run, its focus rarely wavers for long. As such, any joke about Calvin’s father’s office life or his attitude towards his job tends to be a glancing shot.
Even so, Watterson occasionally found time in the strip’s original 10-year-run to give Calvin’s dad, and his attitude towards work, the spotlight. The strip on the topic that’s still the ’90s equivalent of quietly viral arrived on Jan. 14, 1990. There aren’t many examples of Watterson going for the “your grandmother cut this out so she could post it on her fridge” demographic, but this was one of them.
That strip aside, Calvin’s dad is more commonly depicted as a bit of a workaholic. He often ducks out from the latest home crisis in favor of the office, which probably shouldn’t be that surprising since Calvin is a force of chaos.
He’s more three-dimensional than one might expect, however. Calvin’s dad doesn’t live to work. In fact, he’s about as ambivalent about it as he is about Calvin, which is usefully illustrated by the Aug. 8, 1994 strip.
In retrospect, this is one of several comics in the last year or so of Calvin and Hobbes‘ original run that can be seen as a form of quiet protest.
Calvin and Hobbes got to your newspaper’s comics section via Universal Press Syndicate, which tried repeatedly to get Watterson to further commercialize the strip: cartoons, merchandise, toys, etc. Watterson refused, arguing in both print and interviews that it would’ve had a negative influence on the strip as a whole. As per Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes stands by itself on the page; adapting it to any other medium would only have watered it down.
Watterson subsequently undertook a long legal battle to regain control of the Calvin and Hobbes IP, and was eventually successful. As a result, any Calvin and Hobbes merchandise or tie-in that you’ve ever seen was either a bootleg or a fan production. Up to this day, almost no official merchandise exists.
If you were simply reading the daily Calvin and Hobbes strip at the time, there was almost no sign that any of this was going on, aside from the occasional disdain for the modern world that had always been one of the strip’s hallmarks. Still, if you go back and reread the last two years of Calvin and Hobbes with the knowledge of Watterson’s conflict with Universal, you can find a few subtle jokes at the latter’s expense.
On its own merits, however, the 8/8/94 strip has, like so much of Calvin and Hobbes, aged like wine. It might always be funny, because it’ll always be true: some days, work just isn’t worth it.
