What I Learnt About Money and Fame From a Six-year-old and his Tiger

“Would you do ____ for $1 million?”

The question is posed randomly by a friend on the bus home from school in mid-April, 2022. My friends and I always pose hypotheticals like these, perfect for inspiring some mediocre conversation to pass the time. The hypothetical always involves something extremely demoralising—a personal favourite was performing an interpretive dance in the nude on live TV. I hate these kinds of questions, because, no matter the answer, I always come to regret my decision. 

On the one hand, you say “no”, leaving the imaginary money on the table and your pride intact. Then, for the rest of your life, every time you make a late payment to your landlord, you curse yourself for pretending your morals were more important than a bag of cold, hard cash. On the other hand, you say “yes”, and take the money. The downside here is having to sacrifice your dignity, living with the shame of being the textbook definition of a sell-out. But, at the end of the day, are anyone’s morals really so concrete, so inflexible, that they would pass up a lifetime of financial freedom? “Living by one’s principles” is a useful piece of greeting card philosophy until you are offered $1 million to compromise every principle in the book. 

I don’t remember how I answered the question that mid-April afternoon—chances are our teenage minds got distracted and quickly moved to another topic. All I remember was coming home, laying on my bed, and coming across an interesting video on my TikTok feed. It stood out from the rest of the garbage I was used to. It was a four-panel slideshow of black and white drawings depicting a curious, spirited six-year-old boy and his witty, tiger friend. I had, of course, stumbled across the famous newspaper comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes.

Instantly, I was fascinated and spent hours scrolling through an account which had posted hundreds of the daily cartoons. The comic evoked an atmosphere of those precious childhood years when we are all bursting with questions; only it put these questions into articulate sentences rather than convoluted “ums” and “ahs”. In young Calvin, I saw a version of myself; a curious, anxious boy who, rather selfishly, felt he was the only one worrying about the big things in life: purpose, disease, death, love, fate, the future and the past. In Hobbes, I also saw myself; the conformist, the realist, the boy who trusted the words of his parents and teachers as nothing other than fact.

For the weeks and months following that mid-April afternoon, Calvin and Hobbes would colour my mornings and afternoons with a delightful playfulness. In class, I would replay the comics in my head, relishing in their beauty and their simplicity. I didn’t blather about it to my friends, mainly out of fear that they too had heard of the comic. It felt special to me, like it had been designed for my eyes, and my eyes alone.

But the HSC was looming and, as a class-A worrier, I found my attention turning away from the comics in my head and towards my teacher at the front of the class. As April turned to May, and May to June, Calvin and Hobbes began to drift into the distant corners of my mind.

It was only a few months ago, in the winter of 2024, when the comics, like an old friend, made their way back into my life. Here I was, once again scrolling on my phone in bed, when I rediscovered Calvin and Hobbes. The memories started rushing back and the love resurfaced. I couldn’t help myself, and down the rabbit hole I went.

I quickly learnt how foolish I had been to ever think Calvin and Hobbes was some niche, unknown comic strip. It was, in fact, an immensely famous strip which ran in thousands of newspapers between 1985 and 1995, gaining somewhat of a cult following. I discovered several fandoms dedicated to six-year-old Calvin and his panthera tigris friend. Some super-fans analysed the parallels between the eponymous characters and the 16th/17th century theologians they drew their names from: John Calvin, a notable French Protestant Reformer, and Thomas Hobbes, a (slightly more conformist) English philosopher.

Other fans dove deep into the personal history of the comic’s author, Bill Watterson, a man as interesting as the characters he drew.

Watterson grew up in the small satellite suburb of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in the 1960s. He took an interest in cartooning from age eight, fascinated by the works of his predecessors; Pogo (1948-49), Krazy Kat (1913-44), and Peanuts (1950-2000). In college, Watterson famously spent a semester painting Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’ on the ceiling of his dorm room, only to paint over it at the semester’s end. He said the painting lent an air of “cosmic grandeur” to the room and it felt as though “God was transmitting the spark of life to man” while standing under it.

Watterson struggled to find work as a cartoonist for a long time. He briefly worked for the Cincinnati Post, but felt out of place working amongst a crowd of serious political journalists, eventually being terminated from the position in late 1980. Broke, but undeterred, Watterson was forced to move in with his parents and take odd jobs designing grocery magazines and drawing comics for local newspapers. In his spare time, he would send out ideas for comic strips to cartoon syndicates in hopes of landing a job.

After years of perseverance, Watterson landed a contract with Universal Features Syndicate in 1985. Comic strips were known to fail in their first year, but Calvin and Hobbes was an instant success, winning Watterson prestigious cartooning honours within a year of its release. Calvin and Hobbes quickly became a household name across the US.

So, what do you do when you have spent your youth slaving away in an industry which rarely sees any of its workers achieve recognition or success? I know what I would do! Merchandise, merchandise, merchandise! Lunchboxes! T-shirts! Movie offers from Steven Spielberg (yes, this is true!)

Basically, you take the $1 million (see, it wasn’t just a throwaway anecdote at the beginning).

In this case, $1 million is actually a vast (and I mean REALLY vast) underestimation of how much Bill Watterson could have pocketed for licensing his cartoon. Calvin and Hobbes had consumed the cultural zeitgeist—the world was dying to see the quirky six-year-old and his tiger on their hoodies and coffee mugs.

But Bill Watterson, nerd that he was and continues to be, refused to merchandise his cartoon. For one, he worried that if he were to sell Calvin and Hobbes products, the quality of the product would, for the first time in his life, be out of his own hands. Watterson had always been the sole creator of Calvin and Hobbes, and, understandably, he didn’t like the idea of entrusting his artistic duties to anybody else.

However, Watterson’s resistance to selling out was backed by much deeper motivations. Watterson resented the notion that cartoons were a ‘low’ form of art. He advocated for the serious appreciation of cartoons and comic strips as a form of art as meaningful as any other. To Watterson, selling Calvin and Hobbes merchandise, making the ideas which underpinned them tangible, would compromise the integrity of the comic and rid it of its magic. 

Unfortunately, a caveat in Watterson’s contract with the Universal Features Syndicate stipulated they had the rights to licence Watterson’s characters without his permission. Outraged, Watterson engaged in years of legal battles with the company, all the while still creating Calvin and Hobbes comics on a daily basis.

With no end to the legal battles in sight, Watterson threw a hail mary: he threatened to leave the comic altogether if the syndicate licensed his characters. This threat was enough to not only prevent the merchandising of Calvin and Hobbes, but also return ownership rights of the cartoon to Watterson.

So, Watterson owns Calvin and Hobbes outright, he’s achieved international recognition as an

artist, and he has displayed an unwavering artistic integrity by refusing to licence his characters.

What does a person do after achieving so much? Do they continue creating their comic strip for

decades to come? Do they tour the country, lecturing young artists on the importance of ‘living

by their principles’ and never surrendering to the corporate monolith?

Bill Watterson did neither of these. On the 9th of November 1995, Watterson sent a letter out to newspaper editors carrying Calvin and Hobbes, announcing that the strip would be retired at the end of the year. Watterson mentioned in later interviews that if he had continued the strip, people would have been rightfully cursing him for beating a dead horse and stealing editorial space from newer, livelier talents. According to his father, Watterson just wanted “it all to fade away”.

There is, quite understandably, little to be said about Watterson’s life post-Calvin and Hobbes. Following the end of the strip, he withdrew from the public eye. It was reported that he and his wife adopted a daughter, Violet Watterson, in the early 2000s, and moved back to his hometown of Chagrin Falls with his new family. Those close to him say that after Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson poured all of his energy into his family.

In 2008, a Calvin and Hobbes superfan tried to meet with Watterson by staking out his parents’ house, to which Watterson commented:

“Why is he doing this? Who cares?”

I believe those seven, simple words perfectly summarise how Watterson views himself. To the cartoonist, creating Calvin and Hobbes was never about making money. But, what’s perhaps more interesting is that Calvin and Hobbes was also never intended to make a name for Watterson and propel him into greater success. He never cared about creating an artistic legacy for himself.

He drew comics because it brought him joy, a joy he was unwilling to compromise. When making Calvin and Hobbes was no longer a joyful process, he left it all behind, painting over it like he did with his artwork on the ceiling of his college dorm. 

My friends and I still ask each other the fateful “Would you do ___ for $1 million?” question every so often. It really is a great way to pass the time. Nowadays, when the hypothetical is posed, I often find myself drifting away into a Calvin and Hobbes comic, looking at the world around me with a childlike curiosity. Suddenly, I’m in a four panel comic where people are children and tigers. As I look around, everything is black and white, and I start to understand how simple it all really is.

When I am snapped back into reality by my friends urging me to answer, the question seems so silly. Money? Legacy? If Bill Watterson did not care for them, then neither do I.