A Waste of Time

Prester in a rare post-coital and post-cocaine moment of affection.  In the book, this is supposed to come before the Marching to “The City” storyline, and set up a bit of a mystery about what Rickets’ past was like.  I also wanted to make sure to mention that at the time of his relationship with Prester he was already missing some memories of his past, so when I show him destroying his memory chip it’s clear that that story happens before the present storyline.  On the website here I’m posting things in a different order, but hopefully people could already get the order of things to a degree from what’s been inferred.

So this is a baby step toward actually explaining some of what’s been going on in my head with these comics that hasn’t actually completely yet made it into the comics that have been done and posted. I’ve gone on any number of times about the relationship between the robot and the teddy bear and their Machiavellian backstory, but I think this is the first time in one of these that I’ve actually explained that the bear is an alcoholic, which is important. He discovered Jesus through his attempts at substance abuse recovery, and his deep denial and the fact that he does, of course, still abuse substances will be part of the storyline of what happens to his star-crossed affair with the robot. That, and it’s a little bit funny to have my cartoon teddy bear be an alcoholic and addicted to cocaine.

This is a Calvin and Hobbes homage that I’ve really wanted to do for a long time. Out of newspaper comics, I guess Calvin and Hobbes would probably have to be the biggest for me, both because of the quality and because it was coming along at just the right time for me. When Bill Watterson announced that he was gonna end the strip, I remember being crushed but it also built up a big excitement to see what he would do with the final strips. At the time I was probably wondering if he’d do something really dramatic, but when that final strip came out, with its understated simplicity and perfect message, you knew immediately that he’d done the perfect thing. For a lot of the final year of Calvin and Hobbes I was clipping the strips out of the newspaper every day and making a little scrapbook with them, and I have the Sunday comics section that I saved from a paper the day that last strip was released hanging in a frame near my desk.

I’m not sure how Bill Watterson would feel about the content of this particular homage, but it’s meant with love. Around a year or so before the final Calvin and Hobbes strip was released, they also released the Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, and that was probably as much a seminal event for me as anything. Inside of it was not just a collection of Calvin and Hobbes strips, but also Watterson’s own commentary on many of them, and some pretty detailed writing about his time with the strip in general. As reclusive and against interviews as Watterson is, if you’re interested in comics at all it’s a pretty valuable resource to this day, but at the time it was even more important for me because it was really the first time that I’d seen any cartoonist talk in nearly that depth about what they’d done. One of my first memories of drawing is trying to do a picture of Calvin, and immediately getting frustrated because what I drew didn’t look anything like how the character looked in the comic. I was mystified by how Watterson got the lines that he got. I remember rummaging through the house to get all the markers and pens I could find and see if any of them would make those beautiful thick to thin lines that Watterson made. Of course, nothing I tried on that day really looked like I was trying to get it to. Then, reading the Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, I get to read Watterson explaining that he uses a brush for most of his line work. That probably never would have occurred to me for black and white line work at that age. He explained that he used a crow quill pen for details, and a rapidograph pen for lettering. At the age when I tried to draw Calvin, I probably hadn’t ever tried any of those three inking techniques. So, it was a big deal.

When I started doing these comics that I’m doing now, a lot of elements of Calvin and Hobbes were in my mind. As it’s turned out now, I do a lot of things that aren’t really similar to Calvin and Hobbes at all, and from the little that I’ve discovered about him over the years, the picture that you can put together of Bill Watterson as a person makes you think that maybe he’s kinda a jerk. Then again, maybe he’s just somebody who doesn’t deal with fame well, and maybe he has every right to be a jerk in situations where people are trying to intrude on what he’d consider his private life. And, more importantly, any number of artists whose work I love are kinda jerks. I can listen to a lot of Velvet Underground, but I don’t think I’d want to spend much time hanging out with Lou Reed. So, regardless of how much influence he has over my day to day activities as an artist, it’ll always feel good to do a little nod like this toward someone like Bill Watterson, because the comics he gave the world probably changed a lot of us even more than we will really understand.