My first meeting with Calvin? Family Guy! Meg has the mumps, and Stewie texts Calvin a picture of her looking hideous, which Calvin laughs at 😂
I don’t think Calvin and Hobbes was widely read in the UK, so I’m pleased to have met him properly now through you, brother.
And you’re spot on about the relationships we develop with characters. Art, at its best, gives us people who aren’t “real,” but are certainly more than imaginary.
As a kid, I read the usual suspects: Tintin, Asterix the Gaul, and the occasional Marvel comic. I read very few comics, but the ones I read went deep into my DNA.
When I got older, “Maus” by Art Spiegelman, “Blankets” by Craig Thompson, and the two “Persepolis” books by Marjane Satrapi got wound tightly into that double helix and I’d recommend them all.
I’m also a sucker for comic-prose hybrids, and a couple years back I read two wonderful books by a guy called John Hendrix: “The Faithful Spy”, which is about how Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology led him to take part in an assassination attempt on Hitler; and “The Mythmakers”, a deeply moving portrait of the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis.
I’m curious, though — do you have any fictional deaths that get the tears going? Or a character who’s more of a friend than fictional?
Yeah, I mean, George Smiley and Atticus Finch are two of my father figures. And there are writers whom I know so well that I imagine talking to them as I would a friend: Gore Vidal, Rose Tremain. Will (Shakespeare) is always with me; and that’s definitely one of the fictional deaths that never fails to move me to tears: Hal’s rejection of Falstaff at the end of Henry IV Part II.
thanks for writing this! i did in fact come to your writing thru your excellent calvin and hobbes piece in the republic of letters, but i'm staying because of sentences like this: "I spent long stretches of slow afternoons copying out Watterson’s drawings, and while it was satisfying to get the proportions of Calvin right and to nail the kinetic lines that constitute Hobbes, what filled me with wonder and awe in these panels were the large ice cubes and tapered straw floating in a glass, or the sock escaping from a dresser drawer left pulled out, or the barest lines, more not-there than actually there, that suggest a whole tree." love your writing
Thank you so much, Elie! It's gratifying to be read closely, and it keeps me motivated when I'm spending so long scratching at the contours of each sentence that it starts to move from obsessive to truly insane...
I love your relationship with this comic. As a kid I always loved the comics sections of newspapers (followed closely by letters to the editor, especially of towns I don't know). I have A very similar connection to Bloom County, a comic that really shapes how I see the world.
I’ve heard from a bunch of people about Bloom County since writing the Watterson essay. I don’t know it, but I think I’m going to have to get to know it soon!
A beautiful piece! (1) I'd never heard that meditation on the "realness" of Hobbes, and it was doubly interesting to be utterly seized by the question, as you brought it up, and then realize just as quickly how pointless it is after you shoot it down (though not before allowing It some consideration); (2) I started reading the newspaper in exactly the way you describe! Comics section, imitating my dad, harrumphing and shaking my head.
Congrats on 1k! You've only refined what I've seen you doing all along: talking in earnest about the stuff you love. Maybe just with a little more biography of late? Very happy for you, dude; you've earned it as much with your tenacity as with the quality of the work!
Man, that's really kind of you to say and just as great for me to hear.
About how my dad used to harrumph (great word) while reading the paper: I used to think he was putting it on, a way of getting somebody around to ask, "What?" so he could read it out to them. And definitely that was part of it, part of the time. But now I'm the age he was back then and I find myself involuntarily scoffing, sometimes even muttering words, in response to what I'm reading, and I know it can be a totally organic thing you can't help.
Also, you're right about the addition of some autobiography to my writing, and that's in big part down to reading your stuff. I've been inspired by the way you pay attention to the texture of life and find the stories woven into it. It made me see I could look up from the page and find stuff worth writing about from beyond the book.
Hopefully it's not taking this love-in too far to tell you that when I was editing this piece, I realised that a paragraph I'd written in praise of Watterson's art applied just as much to what I see in yours:
"What filled me with wonder and awe in these panels were the large ice cubes and tapered straw floating in a glass, or the sock escaping from a dresser drawer left pulled out, or the barest lines, more not-there than actually there, that suggest a whole tree. Sometimes Watterson’s work is like poetry, made out of white space and the subtraction of everything extraneous."
Anyway, keep writing, brother, and I'll keep reading.
My first meeting with Calvin? Family Guy! Meg has the mumps, and Stewie texts Calvin a picture of her looking hideous, which Calvin laughs at 😂
I don’t think Calvin and Hobbes was widely read in the UK, so I’m pleased to have met him properly now through you, brother.
And you’re spot on about the relationships we develop with characters. Art, at its best, gives us people who aren’t “real,” but are certainly more than imaginary.
Did you read a lot of other cartoons?
As a kid, I read the usual suspects: Tintin, Asterix the Gaul, and the occasional Marvel comic. I read very few comics, but the ones I read went deep into my DNA.
When I got older, “Maus” by Art Spiegelman, “Blankets” by Craig Thompson, and the two “Persepolis” books by Marjane Satrapi got wound tightly into that double helix and I’d recommend them all.
I’m also a sucker for comic-prose hybrids, and a couple years back I read two wonderful books by a guy called John Hendrix: “The Faithful Spy”, which is about how Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology led him to take part in an assassination attempt on Hitler; and “The Mythmakers”, a deeply moving portrait of the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis.
I’m curious, though — do you have any fictional deaths that get the tears going? Or a character who’s more of a friend than fictional?
Yeah, I mean, George Smiley and Atticus Finch are two of my father figures. And there are writers whom I know so well that I imagine talking to them as I would a friend: Gore Vidal, Rose Tremain. Will (Shakespeare) is always with me; and that’s definitely one of the fictional deaths that never fails to move me to tears: Hal’s rejection of Falstaff at the end of Henry IV Part II.
thanks for writing this! i did in fact come to your writing thru your excellent calvin and hobbes piece in the republic of letters, but i'm staying because of sentences like this: "I spent long stretches of slow afternoons copying out Watterson’s drawings, and while it was satisfying to get the proportions of Calvin right and to nail the kinetic lines that constitute Hobbes, what filled me with wonder and awe in these panels were the large ice cubes and tapered straw floating in a glass, or the sock escaping from a dresser drawer left pulled out, or the barest lines, more not-there than actually there, that suggest a whole tree." love your writing
Thank you so much, Elie! It's gratifying to be read closely, and it keeps me motivated when I'm spending so long scratching at the contours of each sentence that it starts to move from obsessive to truly insane...
hey i feel like that’s where the good lasting work of writing comes through. definitely does in yours. congrats on 1k!!
I love your relationship with this comic. As a kid I always loved the comics sections of newspapers (followed closely by letters to the editor, especially of towns I don't know). I have A very similar connection to Bloom County, a comic that really shapes how I see the world.
I’ve heard from a bunch of people about Bloom County since writing the Watterson essay. I don’t know it, but I think I’m going to have to get to know it soon!
A beautiful piece! (1) I'd never heard that meditation on the "realness" of Hobbes, and it was doubly interesting to be utterly seized by the question, as you brought it up, and then realize just as quickly how pointless it is after you shoot it down (though not before allowing It some consideration); (2) I started reading the newspaper in exactly the way you describe! Comics section, imitating my dad, harrumphing and shaking my head.
Congrats on 1k! You've only refined what I've seen you doing all along: talking in earnest about the stuff you love. Maybe just with a little more biography of late? Very happy for you, dude; you've earned it as much with your tenacity as with the quality of the work!
Man, that's really kind of you to say and just as great for me to hear.
About how my dad used to harrumph (great word) while reading the paper: I used to think he was putting it on, a way of getting somebody around to ask, "What?" so he could read it out to them. And definitely that was part of it, part of the time. But now I'm the age he was back then and I find myself involuntarily scoffing, sometimes even muttering words, in response to what I'm reading, and I know it can be a totally organic thing you can't help.
Also, you're right about the addition of some autobiography to my writing, and that's in big part down to reading your stuff. I've been inspired by the way you pay attention to the texture of life and find the stories woven into it. It made me see I could look up from the page and find stuff worth writing about from beyond the book.
Hopefully it's not taking this love-in too far to tell you that when I was editing this piece, I realised that a paragraph I'd written in praise of Watterson's art applied just as much to what I see in yours:
"What filled me with wonder and awe in these panels were the large ice cubes and tapered straw floating in a glass, or the sock escaping from a dresser drawer left pulled out, or the barest lines, more not-there than actually there, that suggest a whole tree. Sometimes Watterson’s work is like poetry, made out of white space and the subtraction of everything extraneous."
Anyway, keep writing, brother, and I'll keep reading.