I miss Calvin & Hobbes and it’s sad to think there are people out there who have no idea what I’m referring to. For those who need a refresher, Calvin & Hobbes was a popular comic strip created by Bill Watterson that existed way before Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. The comic went away a decade after it first ran in newspapers when Watterson decided to retire the characters. And in the new documentary Dear Mr. Watterson, director Joel Allen Schroeder examines what the comic meant to its fans.
Dear Mr. Watterson opens in theaters on November 15, 2013.
The Plot:
Calvin & Hobbes took center stage immediately when it appeared in newspaper comics across the country in 1985. The funny pages were a big part of popular culture, and it was hard to find a comics reader who didn’t like Calvin & Hobbes.
A decade later, when Bill Watterson retired his strip, millions of readers felt the void left by the sudden departure of Calvin and his beloved tiger, and many fans would never find a satisfactory replacement. In his retirement, as he did during his career, Mr. Watterson has steadfastly declined to license his beloved Calvin and Hobbes characters for any wider commercial purposes, a principled decision that left perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars on the table.
It has now been 18 years since the end of the Calvin & Hobbes era. Bill Watterson has kept an extremely low profile during this time, living a very private life in Ohio. Despite his quiet lifestyle, he is remembered and appreciated daily by fans who still enjoy his amazing collection of work.
Dear Mr. Watterson is not a quest to find Bill Watterson, or to invade his privacy. It is an exploration to discover why his ‘simple’ comic strip has made such an impact on so many readers, and why it still means so much to us.
