A Half-Baked Analysis of Calvin and Hobbes

hey i'm jake and today i'm talking about calvin hobbs [Music] what i have here are original calvin and hob strips cut out of the newspaper when they were printed back in the 90s these were cut by my own hand as a kid and the reason being i thought they were so cool no one in the newspaper was doing comics like bill waterson and calvin hobbs just ignited my creative brain and i wanted to draw like him i wanted to make things like him and so i cut them out because there was no other way to see these things again if i didn't save them and i talked about that later on in the video but i just wanted to go through these show you why bill waterson um is so good his artistry his voice um just the little details that that get me all fired up when i look at these things i want to share all that with you in this video today so let's get right down to it all right before we get in to the the strips that i cut out from the the newspapers back in the day i want to talk about what the i guess the the state of sunday newspaper strips were at the time before those i think i don't want to say revolutionary but before bill waterson kind of changed the format to to do something more artistic and more expressive what we have here this is from the the author no the complete calvin hobbs these massive books and if you don't have these things they're excellent they collect everything everything that has been in print with calvin hobbs but i wanted to show out what show you what um a typical layout for a sunday strip was it always had this title card thing and it was usually a two uh it was usually a two panel gag so we would see calvin we would see you know something for this in this case hobbs trailing behind him and then it would be usually a small panel thicker panel or longer panels and then a row of a small pattern panel and whether they're long you know long panels or broken into smaller panels it was usually something that took up this full space here and the reason for that is that these had to be designed this way this is like a template for all comic strips that were going to be in sunday papers because these things would be rearranged depending on the space available in the newspaper and so sometimes this would be completely eliminated so this beginning gag didn't need the whole gag didn't need to rest on what was being told in this first this these first two panels usually just to throw away and then the real comic strip would start here because some panels would just do this section or some newspapers would just do these two sections and then some would squish the whole thing and would start with start with these two panels turn these two panels into a a second row and then these two panels would be a third row so it would be thinner and taller and take up three rows and so it's just there's a lot of constraints i think bill watterson did great trying to work within these constraints you can see a few others here let me see if there's a lot of the dailies here but let's see if we can find another sunday so yeah again same thing throwaway gag um this would be you know this would be these three panels here would be the top row these three panels would be the second row and these would be the last two rolls something like that um but watterson was like this um you know aficionado of the history of comics it used to be that sunday comics took up an entire you know one strip would take up an entire page if you look at like the old nemo strips i'm going to grab my little nemo book here if you've seen this thing this would be an entire page of the newspaper you know it's just beautiful and you had gasoline alley that would take up another page and it would be it was just this fantastic you know way to read comics on the sundays and then over the years they would get watered down and watered down and and watterson wanting to come back to you know the glory days i guess wanted to experiment more and try things so so this was his last strip this happened april this was april 28 1991 and not long after that he goes on sabbatical and he left comics doing any sort of comics work publicly until february 1992 so it was almost almost a year and when he came back he started doing these large full like half page comic strips and uh and he was just exploring and doing all kinds of things with the the shapes of the panel because because he could he could he had the space to do it and you know you can read up on the details of it of how he got the that deal i mean if you're the most successful and popular comic strip in newspapers and people are selling newspapers because your comic strip you can kind of you have a little bit of leverage there with the newspapers and so he said i want a half a page and i want to be able to do what i ever i want to be able to do whatever i want in that half page and so this is him now exploring and flexing his muscles and trying things and you see him you know if you look at the old crazy cat comic strips from 100 years ago they have these round panels and these overlapping things and he's doing that there and i think it's cool too you could see here um he's got a one a two a three um a four a five he's numbering the panels so that people don't get lost in these things he's kind of training us on how to how to do it it was about this time that i started to cut these things out of the newspaper you could see here this is the reproduction of it and here this is the original of that one and the reason i love these so much is is you've got all the imperfections in printing on newsprint and the dingy ink that they used and how it bleeds into the paper and things are offset a little bit it just is it just looks nicer i wish reproductions could capture this because it looks a little too crisp in the reproductions but my newspaper the mesa tribune in arizona sort of called his bluff and instead of printing it half a half size of the of the whole paper they shrunk it to almost a quarter of the paper and then ran a strip vertically along next to it so that was a little frustrating but i still thought it was cool and these were the perfect size for like a 13 year old kid to trim out of the newspaper and like keep it in his folder and take the school and study it because you know at that time you wouldn't be able to unless you saved these there's no way to see these again unless you know they there wasn't an internet to go look these strips up a book would come out every christmas i think or summer and i would have to wait until my birthday or christmas to get a new calvin hobbs book so i collected these so i could keep looking at them and study them and draw from them and this is everything i know about almost everything i know about drawing dinosaurs i learned from this comic strip this one right here just blew me away and kind of changed everything for me and showed me how to use blacks and to use hatching and use thick contour lines you know this is just such a great a great style you can see here i think these i don't know if these are in order or not um let's see this would be 1992. here we are in 1993. this is 1993 as well i think they're i think they're close in order i don't know but um again just look at this horizontal layout and how he is guiding your eye where it needs to go so we have this first panel and instead of you reading this and going down to these panels he overlaps this panel and your eyes just directed over here so you read this whole top line first boom boom boom then you read this panel then this panel you come over here and you finish it out really well done okay spaceman spiff i just love the way he draws the environments and the rocks and like these cool little details here it was like retro futurism like these sort of designs you would see in an old buck rogers comic but with this sort of shading happening here combined with like the goofy comicness of it it just my brain was just like well blown away by this stuff um and it's it's influenced me ever since this strip was one of my favorites where calvin i mean i still come back to the simple shape for like a design solution for robots um just just a simple you know round dome thing sort of like an r2d2 thing happening here um i love this background here you know the the fact that we're the pov is looking down on um on a yard you don't you rarely get this in the news in the newspaper comic strips everything's very much told from this perspective and then on sundays he would come in he would show us the world that they're living in very much a jetsons type of thing happening here this is really one of my most favorite calvin hops comic strips it's just a masterpiece i think it's one of his best this is just a nice sequential animated intro here uh darkness then light then floating out the window and then we have this spotlight shining on the house and the way that this tree like both the trees go from light to dark like the shadows cutting into them that's just it's almost like it's it's painted on there like he's painting with ink and then for the design of these things i love this this was just the greatest thing for me to see this engine brain they stick inside the robot of calvin um and and anytime i'm doing robot brains i always think of this i always come back to that same with these like alien head designs too just good stuff it's a funny gag as well so the robot then goes and throws away the math book steals the cookies um you know smashes things in the house and of course the mom doesn't believe his story and he goes back he's grounded and he stares up at the stars you know frustrated [Applause] another good one showing you know an alternate reality of what how things could be again you could see just panels going from normal to now this one's got a bright red border because he's he's trying to emphasize you know the shock of seeing the mom as a puppet um and then we have this like long horizontal purple uh border here to like define that we're really in another world as opposed to like the the typical typical world of the strip this kind of stuff gradients and like the layered levels of of purples to browns was also just great to see in the newspaper because everything was usually like really flat bright colors and to see something so well rendered like this we've got this dark gradient to light here and the gradient coming up that way it's just really really well done i don't know i don't know much about how these things were colored whether he um you know had swatches and and expressed you know expressed i want the gradient to start here and go there or whether it was watercolor i went to the calvin hobbs exhibit at the cartoon library in in ohio and i remember seeing something about the coloring but i didn't it was seven or eight years ago i wish i would have paid better attention to that part i was so you know into looking at all the inking this is just a beautifully rendered panel as well how we've got the head silhouetted heads completely in shadow you'd think you'd want to like add all the detail to the head here but it's in shadow to kind of give this area more light and uh and to really block this thing and it just implies to like this is a this is a predator about to pounce and just have those little red eye throughout the shadow and then we get to see all the detail here of the of the face and you can see his dinosaurs getting you know just 10 times better from the first this isn't the first dinosaur but this is like one of the first really realistic dinosaurs we see in calvin hobbs and this is even you know you could tell this that waterson was was studying um uh you know museum sort of museum renderings or what's it called um zoological illustration things like that again look at this beautiful gradient same with here beautiful wide panel of of this uh almost tropical ocean type of thing i guess it wouldn't be tropical but it's like just this beautiful ocean that's such a great design too like tentacled monsters um to have no border around a panel too with something kind of unique that you didn't see much in the newspaper strips back in the 90s that was really cool to see it's just very artistic um i always love the design of this little alien too such a great great little guy and this is cool too if you want you know if you're doing a comic strip or any sort of comic page to have all the panels be roughly the exact same size it gets your eye into a cadence where you're just boom boom boom boom boom none of them are more important than the other ones so it's like a way to just kind of work your way through and say like these intervals are really close these time intervals are really close to one another um a lot of fun there this one too like pulling an octopus out of a out of a fridge to have some of the tentacles dangling down and some of them like streaming out you just the way that is done there it's like and and have it like folding over her her hand it it just implies that this is a gushy weighted object really well done you know i before i saw this i didn't think a the the fact that he's doing a mom making dinner with octopus and weed killer and paint and such a good gag but but to do he didn't have to go this good with the design of the octopus but he did it anyway and that's why he's the greatest and again another excellent use of color as a part of a gag beautiful rendered um rock formations look at that thick line look how thick that is sometimes afraid to go that thick with my inking but not watterson i learned one of the big things i learned about like inking from him is anything that's not in the foreground you can just put straight and black shadow in the background and it makes everything in the foreground read really better especially on character designs this one was cool i actually come back to this illustration all the time when i'm trying to figure out how to do like crowd scenes and how do you um you know how do you illustrate a city without having to draw the entire city so you just kind of eliminates some of this background stuff which when you're looking at it you know in real life you don't pay attention to all the little details because you're paying attention to things moving in the foreground and he gets away with that because he puts all these like important elements in front another great dinosaur leveling up on his dinosaur drawings to draw a dinosaur head from this angle we hadn't really seen something from that angle before in his in his artwork and it's just cool to see the dimensions here you know this is the 90s so jurassic park is is a big deal so i'm guessing that somewhat influenced this a little bit there and we got some apollo action this is was called apollo 18 the calvin mission again too like how realistic i love this balance of cartoony and realistic and watterson had a background in um in newspaper like political cartoons which always do that balance great of realistic drawing with with cartoony this is his take on like 90s comics you know i could feel my spine shatter it hurt a lot and we see the spine like busting an amazing amount of violence for a sunday newspaper strip i'm amazing got away with that but i guess when you're bill watterson you can get away with doing something like that i also like to have this printed off just a little bit you wouldn't get this in a reproduction now you know in the book that you would get from uh you know barnes noble now whatever the latest calvin hobbs reprint is i just like seeing this kind of stuff in these original sunday strips it gives it so much character um again i mean they're all just good stuff i don't know what else to say about this other than um it's it's just so fun oh maybe this is the greatest strip he's ever done maybe this is it um first these things are beautifully rendered um we get to see them from all different angles so he's flexing his dinosaur drawing muscles there but the sheer creativity of tyrannosaurs and f-14s like when i saw this as a junior high kid and i looked this and i was like like right then these neurons these neural connections in my brain just went and it was always look for the unexpected and what could you combine that like go well together but you would never think to put together so a t-rex in an f-14 is like you know anytime i sit down to draw something or create something i'm always thinking what can i do that is in the same spirit as this is it you know it what's unexpected what's something no one's thought of but in hindsight just works so beautifully together so thank you bill waterson for this comic strip this is 1995 we're getting to the end of his um you know of his reign as uh as as greatest comic artist in the newspaper he retired this year uh of 1995. um beautiful background kind of got this batman adam west you know vibe from the 60s show just the shadow that's happening in there just this dramatic lighting that you don't expect from this is what comic strips are in the newspaper and then to go to this and see all this shadows and and to to have things obscured by blackness is like really just masterful um is this the last dinosaur he drew i think it might be again beautiful just to stick a dinosaur in a kitchen it's more of that um what's unexpected but but it's just beautifully done this one's good too it's hard to draw like a kid and i think he nails it it's just such a creative thing to like show the the paper you know this is from 1992 so this is an earlier earlier dinosaur drawing dinonicus another beautiful dinosaur one i cut out i didn't cut out all of them i just cut out the ones that i thought were cool that i wanted to like reproduce try to learn from um i think i think we're it this one too just the fact that we have this nice establishing shot that didn't have to be this good but he puts so much detail and thought into this to have the characters so tiny um to kind of show scale and everything really well done um and i love this one too this is another good one i mean they're all good but this this one really does stand out and this is is a typical day for a kid at school they're herded their brains are filled you know maybe they're overflowing with what they think is mush and maybe it is mush depending on who's teaching it um they're on a treadmill of sorts of hamster wheel they feel like they have to work they feel like they have to be a robot you know repeat by the end of the day a kid is just and you know if you have kids going to school and if you remember school it's just it's a lot of this kind of stuff in the very end like a fish out of water gasping for air and then boy i'm glad to see you hobbs another typical school day it's this is like it encapsulates like what calvin hobbs is all about it's a kid trying to make his way through the world as best as he can and then um you know trying to live life on his own terms when he has the freedom to do so and uh i guess if there's anything you can pull from these column hop strips i hope it's i hope it's that all right thanks for watching this video um i know bill waterson isn't some hidden gem that nobody's heard of like it's essentially like talking about michael jordan with basketball i just wanted to share uh calvin and hobbes and bill waterson kind of let you see it through my eyes and and and experience the way i experienced them not as only as a kid but you know in the 90s but as you know a professional artist adult and how i still view it and still learn from it and still think about it yeah so hopefully uh you know you've got some takeaways from this and and if there's anything you want to share about bill watterson i'd love to hear in the comments you guys are always so great about continuing the discussion in the comics and i i love that and i try to respond to things as best i can last video i talked about the antler boy kickstarter the antler boy is an anthology that i i published back in 2012 and it's since gone out of print and i'm reprinting a new edition of it it's all the same stories it's got a new cover there's a few things that are remastered in it and so if you never got a copy earlier on this is your chance to get a copy i'm not kick starting it though i decided i'm just going to do i'm just going to pay for the printing out of pocket and and just do either a pre-order or just put them in my shop and hope that i can recoup those costs and make a little money off of this book and and share something with um with you know share something that i've created with people i think they're great stories i always give feedback at how much people love it they love reading it with their kids and and i'm sad when people say is this you know where can i get a copy of this and i'm not able to give them one so this is really why you know i'm coming back to to print this book um i think that's it lastly too um thanks to the people who signed up to my newsletter uh last video i just want to remind you this is a great way to get a weekly dose of inspiration my newsletter i share you know one thing that i've worked on that week but the rest of it it's five it's usually five cool things um and the first one is usually here's something that i worked on this week but then thing number two three four and five are just cool stuff that i found on the internet um or that i've experienced in real life or a cool book that i've got and it's me just sharing that with you so if you feel like you need some curated inspiration weekly sign up for the newsletter i think you'll like it um and i guess that's it see you later

Channel: Jake Parker

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Length: 28min 1sec (1681 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021