Pipefitters urinates on Calvin, Hobbes, and Nick's dead grandmother

In 1988 I was 11 and I had my first newspaper route. I worked for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Every day I would come home from school, unbundle the newspapers and put them in my newspaper bag. I'd then remove the copy that was for my parents, open it to the Life section and immediately read the day's adventure from Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin was a precocious 6 year old with an inability to relate to the world around him. Instead, he observed the world and discussed it with his better nature, embodied by his stuffed animal tiger named Hobbes. Where Calvin mocked and bemoaned the hypocrisy of the world around him, Hobbes quietly accepted it. Calvin railed against what he saw as the worse side of human nature and Hobbes hoped that the better part of human nature would somehow rise up to solve the issues of the day. In an exact reversal of their namesakes, Calvin saw the world as nasty and brutish, while Hobbes accepted it all as predetermined and did his best to ensure that Calvin appreciated the everyday beauty of the world around him. The cartoon was funny and sweet and never vulgar and it appealed to everyone who ever had a heart.

It was not rare in my world to visit my grandparents and see a day's Calvin and Hobbes strip held up to the refrigerator with a magnet. What was rare was to see the same strip on the refrigerator on consecutive visits. Calvin, Hobbes, and their creator, Bill Watterson, just hit it on the head far too often. Every single strip was another gem: all killer, no filler.

My grandmother once told me she liked Calvin so much because he reminded her of me. She said when I was 5 and 6 years old I had a hard time relating well to other children and she was often mildly disturbed that I seemed to be talking to her like an adult instead of a child. Calvin and I shared a number of qualities and she sometimes wondered whether I might not have a stuffed tiger somewhere to go on adventures with and to keep me from feeling lonely. At 11, I didn't see much of myself in Calvin, but it was a comparison I was happy to have been a part of. I liked Calvin too. I wished I could be more like him. I actually still do.

1988 was the first year I ever had any money in my pockets around the holidays and I knew what to get my grandmother that year for Christmas. I was going to find her a stuffed Hobbes. A part of me hoped she'd let me have it back. I knew that it would be the absolute perfect gift for her.

I looked all over Green Bay for a stuffed Hobbes that Christmas, but there weren't any to be found. I finally gave up and bought her a stuffed tiger that looked nothing like Hobbes at all. I hoped that, like Calvin, she'd be able to use her imagination to embody that lifeless and fairly nondescript stuffed tiger with the qualities that Hobbes possessed.

It always sort of blew my mind that there was no Hobbes at any toy or department store in the greater Green Bay area during the Christmas season of 1988. I couldn't imagine that there was any lack of demand for a stuffed Hobbes. You couldn't swing a dead cat (all puns always intended) without hitting a Garfield toy. Perhaps I'd started my shopping too late and the stores had sold out of stuffed Hobbes tigers.

I came to find out a few years later that there were no stuffed Hobbeses to be had at all. Period. Bill Watterson owned the rights to his creations and he wasn't going to let Calvin or Hobbes be cheapened by appearing on mugs, toys, calendars, or t-shirts. It was simply out of the question for him. Word was that Steven Spielberg had called Bill Watterson one day about the prospect of producing a Calvin and Hobbes movie and Watterson had refused to take the call, insisting that his wife tell Spielberg that he simply wasn't interested in any way.

This decision cost Watterson an estimated 75 million dollars. Bill Watterson, in effect, was willing to pay $75 million dollars (probably more by now) to ensure that there would be no stuffed Hobbes tiger as a Christmas gift for my grandma. Does that seem staggering to you?

Watterson has not ever really spoken about why, except in this speech. Below is an excerpt that speaks to Watterson's rationale.

Bill Watterson never sold the rights to Calvin and Hobbes because he wanted to disappoint my grandmother. He passed on all that money because his integrity wouldn't allow him to cheapen Calvin and Hobbes.

This is something I've known and respected for years. When I ran up against the clubs and was thinking about just bypassing them altogether I thought a lot about Bill Watterson. I've always admired how he didn't play ball when they tried to force him to. I've always been influenced by his thinking that there is no such thing as high art or low art only art. Watterson, more than anyone else, has allowed me to begin thinking of myself as an artist. Your art is what it is that you uniquely have to give to the world. He gave us Calvin and Hobbes. I give the world my personality and a few subtle yet clever racist jokes. We are both able to make strangers laugh and think. Neither is better than the other. He reached more people, but my day hasn't arrived yet. When my day does come, I hope I'll be able to view things as clearly as Bill Watterson was able to.

I'm writing this because I was in a head shop called Pipefitters in Madison on State Street this weekend and I saw a Calvin and Hobbes T-shirt for sale. I would've loved to have purchased it, but I knew I couldn't. Whoever made these t-shirts didn't license them, so Pipefitters is in violation of copyright law by selling them and I hope this blog helps explain why what they are doing is so awful. I sure hope they get in a lot of trouble, too. They've been making money by doing the wrong thing for an awfully long time.