Conventionalities

One of Calvin's genuine saving graces is that while he is perennially desirous of loot - his Santa letters have to be mailed freight - we rarely see him playing with toys. They tend to be a disappointment to him. He claims to resent the toy-makers' assumption that they know what will amuse him, and the poverty of the amusements on offer compared to the riches available - gratis - courtesy of his own imagination. The glory of an empty cardboard box is that he can do with it what he pleases. In The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, Watterson writes that for him authoring Calvin and Hobbes was similarly liberating: "Like Calvin, I just head out into the yard for weirdness, and with the right attitude, I make discoveries" (207).

The box Calvin deploys as a time-machine has seen previous service on two trips back to the Jurassic era, the second yielding important photographic evidence of saurian ecology that, however, fails to impress Calvin's Dad. The box represents the acme of Calvin's scientific genius, and has had numerous other applications. It began life as a "transmogrifier," with Calvin offering to turn Hobbes into a "500-story gastropod," and Hobbes on careful reflection refusing the honour. Calvin, more intrepid than his companion, is transmogrified into a tiger - a two-foot tall tiger - but becomes dissatisfied with the existential simplicity of the lifestyle. Later, Calvin modifies the original technology and manufactures a "duplicator," with which he makes a copy of himself, to share the burden of homework, bath-times etc. Things get out of hand when Calvin's duplicate makes further duplicates, none of which see any reason to do what the original Calvin asks them to do. When their behaviour becomes intolerable Calvin recalibrates the machine and turns them into earthworms.

Recognizing the need for some fine tuning, Calvin adds an "ethicator" to the duplicating program, and produces a duplicate of his "good side," who will go to school, do homework, tidy the bedroom etc., all from the sheer pleasure of acting virtuously. (As Calvin puts it, "He doesn't complain, but his self-righteousness sure gets on my nerves.") After the "good" Calvin is discovered writing love-letters to Susie Derkins, the two Calvins start fighting, whereupon the good Calvin, caught up in a performative contradiction (he is the embodiment of virtue yet he is having evil thoughts about the other Calvin) evaporates. Calvin congratulates himself on building into the ethicator a "moral compromise spectral release phantasmatron" to cover just such eventualities, while Hobbes is left pondering the fate of "another casualty of applied metaphysics."

In the first installment of the ethicator storyline, readers are presented with the 'good' Calvin but without any explanation of who he is or where he has come from. He tells his bemused mother that he believes "in the importance of good grooming"; later he will express a desire to eat prunes for breakfast, and opine that "A good education is invaluable." The initial joke depends on our knowing the "true" Calvin's character, and seeing that the "good" Calvin in no way resembles him (other than physically). Watterson says: "I could only do this sort of thing after the strip was established. Writing is most fun after readers are willing to enter the strip's world on its own terms" (Tenth Anniversary Book 152). In this as in the time-traveling chowderhead stories, however, there is something rather more intricate going on than the reader simply understanding the joke. In order to get to grips with this intricacy we need to take seriously Watterson's stipulation that readers should respond to the world of Calvin and Hobbes "on its own terms," and examine what this suggests about the art of comics generally, and Watterson's contribution to the art-form in particular.

A comic strip is an artifice, and like any artifice presupposes familiarity with the conventions governing its production and use. To get any pleasure out of reading a comic strip we must be aware, on some level, that we are reading a comic strip, and bring to the experience certain conceptual proficiencies, such as that as the panels proceed from left to right we are to infer motion and the passing of time. The cultural/historical distribution of these proficiencies will not be uniform (and neither, of course, will be the art forms that deploy them). Reading left to right is more native to English speakers than to Arabs or the Japanese; conversely, a westerner's first encounter with the alien spatial conventions governing manga is often a disorientating one. Then, there are the conventions specific to the strip we are reading ; these are what Watterson is referring to above. At the start of the ethicator story Watterson expects his readers to know that Calvin is a naughty little boy, and that any good behavior on his part is an aberration, which will need accounting for. Earlier in the strip's history the joke just wouldn't have worked, partly because not enough readers could have been expected to be familiar with the strip's conventions, and partly because the conventions themselves were not yet fully worked out. In a similar fashion, it took Charles Schulz several years to determine the precise contours of the tragedy enacted every time Lucy invites Charlie Brown to kick the football.

In "Peanuts and Poetry of Defeat," David Thompson suggests that the art of the comic strip is a matter of the artist establishing his or her conventions and then playing a set of more or less satisfactory variations upon them. In this, comics are no different from any other kind of popular art, but the material constraints on the form dictate an unusually strict adherence to the conventions. Reading a four-panel strip takes seconds, as opposed to the minutes one might devote to a magazine article or a pop song, and the hours it takes to consume a movie or a book. Because the reader's attention will be so brief, whatever response the artist is hoping to induce must be highly compressed. Compressibility is only possible when the reader brings a great deal of tacit knowledge to the reading experience, a set of skills and expectations that have, over time, become built into the form, and require no explicit acknowledgement from the artist. This being so, the comic strip genre - or industry - is suspicious of novelty; novelty, it could be said, defeats the purpose of the comic strip. (Watterson and Far Side creator Gary Larson have both described, with some bitterness, their struggles to get their strips accepted by conservative commissioning editors.) Successful strips run for decades , Peanuts for fifty years, for example, and Krazy Kat for over thirty. Watterson was rather unusual in wrapping up Calvin and Hobbes after just ten. Once established, a comic strip artist will rarely attempt anything new. The best of them turn this to their advantage, for there can be poignancy in repetition, in a reader being told something he or she already understands about the world - both the mirror-world of the comic strip, and the real world reported in the rest of the newspaper. It only takes a moment to register that the tragedy of Charlie Brown's failure to kick the football lies in his having failed to kick it countless times before, and his trust that this time it will be different. We don't get frustrated with his frustration, because it is the convention, in Peanuts as in life, that people like Charlie Brown just won't allow hope to be defeated by experience. It is a commonplace that hope looms largest for those closest to despair. The more interesting question Schulz poses through Charlie Brown is what, if anything, can be done with these people.

By the early 1990s Watterson had become frustrated with the limitations of his medium. There was not much he could do about the daily strips, although he did experiment with two- and even single-panel layouts. But with the Sunday strip, bigger than the daily and in color, he felt there was scope for innovation. Certain conventions, insisted upon by newspaper editors but not, Watterson argued, formally essential, were stifling the creativity of the artists. "The prevailing [three-row] Sunday format was invented to standardize comic strip layouts so as to give newspapers the utmost flexibility in printing them . . . the panel divisions are specific and unyielding. The strip will fit the different space needs of different newspapers this way, but the cartoonist loses the ability to design his strip effectively" (Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book 4). Watterson pointed out that in the 1940s, the so-called Golden Age of comic strips (and the era, specifically, of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, which Watterson greatly admires) a single strip could take up an entire page of newspaper. "Basically, I wanted to draw panels that fit the writing and drawing instead of cramming everything into little predetermined squares that editors were allowed to delete, reduce, and rearrange . . . . I thought I could create a bolder, better-looking comic that would be more fun for people to read" (Complete Calvin and Hobbes I.15). Such was the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes that Watterson got his way, with only a few papers refusing to carry his new-style Sunday strips. The artistic results were mixed, however, and with Watterson focusing on the Sundays, the daily storylines lost much of their zest.

Watterson admits that during his standoff with his editors he came over as something of a prima donna: "the new Sunday format demands left me open to the indictment of being an outrageously pampered egotist" (Complete Calvin and Hobbes I.15). He remains unapologetic. For him, comics, or at least the best of them, are art, and their creators have as much right to egotism as any other artists. Freedom of artistic expression is important to Watterson, as is the duty to exercise that freedom responsibly.

Nobody, least of all Watterson, would deny the intrinsic conventionality of his chosen form. But this should not be seen as a weakness, although it does make for a great deal of inferior and derivative work. In fact, conventionality is the basis of the genre's imaginative strength, in the hands of its skilled practitioners. Comic strips are not, by and large, realistic; they do not aim to show the world as it really is; for the world as it purports truly to be the reader has all the other sections of the newspaper to turn to. Rather, the task of a well-conceived comic strip is to establish and then prompt reflection upon the conventions that bind its own reality. The best go one stage further; the reflection they prompt (not a comfortable one) is that there is no reality unbounded by convention, albeit of a different kind to those commonly found in comic strips. As has already been suggested, the pleasure of witnessing Charlie Brown again and again failing to kick Lucy's football - or fly his kite, or hit a home run, or talk to the little red-haired girl - is pleasure in the satisfaction of conventional expectations. But the spectacle is no sadder for that. For Charlie Brown failure is a badge of identity in a way that would be intolerable for any 'real' human being (it is very nearly intolerable for Charlie Brown). Still, the idea of failure as a badge of social identity - to be marked as a failure, and for society to treat you accordingly, and to feel that treatment inscribed upon the self - well, lots of people are familiar with this, if only from attending high school.¹

In Peanuts Charles Schulz had pioneered what might be termed the art of convention. Snoopy, before he became a vehicle for schmaltz, occupied a reality tangential to that of the strip's other characters, a reality they and the reader would comment on and wonder at. Linus, the strip's other eccentric, sometimes played a similar role, in his adventures with his security blanket, his theology, and his fruitless quest for the Great Pumpkin. So, on occasion, did Schroeder, although the message here tended to be about the danger of allowing an obsession with 'art' to interfere with more pertinent human responses to circumstances, such as humour and compassion. (Charlie Brown has his misery, but it's easy to forget that so does Lucy.)

In Calvin and Hobbes the primary conceit, of course, is the ontological problem of Hobbes; does he, or does he not, exist only in Calvin's imagination? But the wider question is: what precisely is going on in Calvin's head, and what bearing does this have on the reality perceived by Calvin's parents, teachers, classmates, etc. - the reality in which he has obligations to others, and (more often than not) fails to meet them? ²Watterson's genius is to force us to take seriously Calvin's distinctive and contrary take on that reality, but to stop short of requiring us to accede to it. Thus, we do not doubt (though Calvin's parents must) the fact of time travel, of multiple Calvins, of Calvin the tiger and Calvin the owl, of Spaceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man, and all the other manifestations of his vivid imagination. Yet we also know (which Calvin apparently doesn't, or not always) that this whole rich hinterland of his imagination is devoted solely to the avoidance of whatever mundane childhood obligation is currently pressing. One of the great jokes of the strip, which is partially on Calvin, is the magnitude of the machinery he devises to crack the paltriest of metaphorical nuts.

The 'time-traveling chowderheads' escapade is perhaps the most remarkable and ridiculous of Calvin's many manipulations of consensual reality. The storyline is exemplary because, as the strip's adult protagonists often discover with Calvin, certain events (those of [13] and [14]) are inexplicable outside the framework of Calvin's version of them. But in this case Calvin's version makes no (logical) sense of them either. One radical possibility, which we will be considering in detail, is that Calvin literally makes worlds through the play of his imagination. If events in these worlds elude the comprehension and control of Calvin's tormentors, they also tend to elude Calvin himself.

Time-traveling chowderheads redux

The first perplexity involved in Calvin's time-travel maneuver is a paradox of data redundancy. The 7:30 and 8:30 Calvins should already know what the 6:30 Calvin wants of them. In [7] 8:30 Calvin will realize that it is fruitless to travel back to 7:30 because the Calvin back then won't have done the homework either; he knows this because the 7:30 Calvin was him one hour ago. (Hobbes, of course, does make the connection.) In fact, both the 7:30 and the 8:30 Calvins should be able to tell 6:30 Calvin that the homework has already been done (by the Hobbeses). If 8:30 Calvin did tell 6:30 Calvin either that 7:30 Calvin won't have done the homework, or that the Hobbeses have done it, there would be no need for the two of them to return to 7:30. But this would deny the Hobbeses the opportunity to do the homework. In order to avoid this familiar paradox, ³ Watterson has to treat the three Calvins as distinct entities with no access to the others' memories. The broader joke, as so often in the strip, is about Calvin's astonishing lack of self-awareness (see below). In fact, it is essential to both the humour and the logic of the storyline that the three Calvins are not the same Calvin.⁴ Logically, they cannot even be the same Calvin under different temporal aspects. Take 7:30 Calvin in [9]. Why doesn't he have the homework? In [12] we see 6:30 Calvin and Hobbes taking the homework back to 6:30; 7:30 Calvin is 6:30 Calvin one hour after his return from the future at 6:30; therefore, 7:30 Calvin should have the homework. Of course, he doesn't have the homework⁵; therefore he cannot be the 'future' 6:30 Calvin. Or, to present the difficulty a little more formally:

Premise 1:         6:30 Calvin takes the essay back to 6:30       T

Premise 2:         7:30 Calvin is 6:30 Calvin one hour later       T

Conclusion:         7:30 Calvin is in possession of the essay       F

In [9] we see that 7:30 Calvin is not in possession of the essay. We know from [12] that Premise 1 is true; therefore Premise 2 must be false. In other words, 7:30 Calvin is not the same as 6:30 Calvin (unless, for reasons of his own, he is misleading the 6:30 and 8:30 Calvins - after all, they do threaten to thump him - or has simply forgotten about the matter entirely).

And then: who is the 'Calvin' in [13]? Here, he tells his mother that the homework has been done, but that with bedtime looming he hasn't had the chance to read it. This suggests that he is the 8:30 Calvin; but in [12] don't we see 6:30 Calvin taking the homework back into the past? Conversely, if the Calvin in [13] is the 6:30 Calvin two hours later, why hasn't he read the Hobbeses' story, saving him the embarrassment of [14]? I don't see how he could be the 7:30 Calvin, who is at no point in possession of the homework, or aware that the Hobbeses have written it. Thus, not only is it impossible to identify the three Calvins with each other, but the Calvin we are returned to at the end of the storyline cannot be identified with (any one of) them either.

To recap: 6:30 Calvin travels two hours into the future to collect his homework from 8:30 Calvin. 8:30 Calvin, predictably, hasn't done it. 6:30 Calvin & 8:30 Calvin cannot be the same Calvin. This is because: A) 8:30 Calvin doesn't know why 6:30 Calvin (and, lest we forget, 6:30 Hobbes) has turned up, and B) 8:30 Calvin doesn't know that the homework has been done. 6:30 Calvin obviously knows the answer to A): he is the one doing the time travelling. He will also come to know B) because, when the adventure is over and the Hobbeses have finished the homework ("Calvin the Time-Traveling Chowderhead") he returns to 6:30. If the 8:30 Calvin were the 6:30 Calvin's future he would already know how the story ends.

The two Calvins, neither of them having done the homework, decide the fault lies with Calvin at 7:30, and travel back to menace him. Again, 7:30 Calvin cannot be the same as either 6:30 Calvin or 8:30 Calvin. He cannot be the future 6:30 Calvin for reasons A) and B), above; he would know why the other two Calvins have arrived, and he would know the outcome of the story. He cannot be the past 8:30 Calvin because in that case 8:30 Calvin would not be surprised when 6:30 Calvin first turns up.

One answer to all these identity issues is to make the following assumption: that time-travel generates alternative universes (many of them) and alternative time-travellers. This is a variant on what is called the many worlds thesis in quantum mechanics, which argues that every probability (or amplitude) in a quantum system has a separate real existence, and that separate and equally real universes must come into being to accommodate them. As we will see, the main consequence of adopting this perspective is to shift the burden of paradox (from, roughly, identity to ontology); but we will have come closer to understanding the peculiar nature of the universe Watterson has fashioned for us.

On the many worlds model, it could be argued that 7:30 Calvin is closest to the true Calvin, inhabiting the old default universe, that is, the one that existed before Calvin decided to travel into the future to collect the homework. In the default universe there is no time travel and the homework is left undone, while in 7:30 Calvin's universe there is no active time-travel (only an unnerving visit from the 6:30 and 8:30 Calvins), and the homework is left undone. Both the true and the 7:30 Calvin can continue to go about their business, including an inevitable trip to the Principal's office, but we will hear no more of them.

By the act of time travelling, 6:30 Calvin creates an alternative universe, in which the homework has been done, and an alternative self to inhabit it. This alternative self, the Calvin of [13], cannot be 8:30 Calvin, because 8:30 Calvin isn't in possession of the homework. He will also be visiting the Principal's office in the morning, although with a much deeper sense of grievance. After all, he (or rather the Hobbeses) did the homework, it just happens to be in another universe. Neither can the Calvin of [13] be the original 6:30 Calvin, because then he would have had the chance to read the story or, given that he might well have been too lazy to bother, at least question Hobbes about its contents. This Calvin, the one who had the time-travel idea in the first place, is left in a kind of existential limbo, not unlike that inhabited by Calvin's good side in the ethicator storyline. For him, the homework will be done but unread and therefore not done, necessitating travel into the future to collect it . . . .

The many-worlds solution to the identity paradoxes thus creates as many difficulties as it settles. The existence of the homework in the 8:30 universe at [13] is dependent upon prior action (Calvin's time-travelling) in an alternative universe, which is an action that cannot possibly benefit the original agent (if 6:30 Calvin did return with the homework he would read it, realize that Hobbes is making him into a laughing stock, tear it into pieces, and be back at square one). Moreover, if the whole business originates in the 6:30 Calvin's act of time travel (and where else could it come from?), then it is the universe in which the homework is both done and existent that is the alternative; in a sense, then, the decision to travel through time solves a problem that did not exist before a decision was made to find a solution for it.