This right here: it's tasteless, it's tragic, and it's everywhere.
It's Peeing Calvin.
If you don't know, he's a ubiquitous car decal of a little boy
who looks like Calvin from the Calvin and Hobbes
comic strip, peeing on stuff the vehicle owner doesn't like.
He's the Yankees peeing on the Mets, the USA peeing on terrorists.
I polled you on this, and more than 8,000 of you voted and saw Calvin
urinating on politicians and sports teams and car brands and...the Domino's logo?
That is admittedly very niche.
But how did this happen when the comic strip’s creator not only didn't allow it,
he hated it?
I want to set things up a little bit here for Calvin fans,
but more so for people who might be too young to know the story
or who are from another country and don't know anything about Calvin and Hobbes,
because I think it is worth telling.
Calvin and Hobbes was a newspaper comic strip, but it was so much more
than a comic strip.
This is the collected Calvin and Hobbes,
and this is like a precious stone to some people.
It's also
very heavy.
And listen, I am a casual Calvin and Hobbes fan, but there is
a tattoo level of fandom for this comic.
However, I am the expert when it comes to one thing:
Calvin peeing on stuff.
When you Google “peeing Calvin” my 2014
article about it shows up as the number one result.
Go to the image tab and well, it's my article's images.
As a result, people have been emailing me for a decade with peeing Calvin trivia
and they've even interviewed me about its history.
I'm not going to be able to summarize all of Calvin and Hobbes for you,
but I want to sketch out a taste of what the strip is like.
If you imagine Charlie Brown as a depressed old man and Bart Simpson
- vintage Bart Simpson - as a catchphrase sass machine, Calvin is somewhere
in the middle, with three extra teaspoons of incredible imagination.
For example, there's this trope in Calvin and Hobbes of a cardboard box.
Maybe it's a transmogrifier.
It changes you from one thing to another thing.
Early on, Calvin gets inside it to change from a boy into a tiger.
In the final panel ever for the strip, this is a spoiler, but it's not really
a spoiler, Calvin says to Hobbes, “Let's go exploring.”
The point is, Calvin is rambunctious, but he is nothing like this.
This is a disgrace.
And it's not even a real image from the strip.
It is generally accepted that somebody took the June
5th, 1988 strip right here where Calvin is filling up a water balloon
and modified it to show him urinating on something.
You can see it really clearly with the side by side.
In the end of that strip, by the way,
Calvin is too sweet to even throw the water balloon on Hobbes.
So you've got the source of the image.
But how did it grow?
If we go into the archives, it looks like it became a meme as part of a Florida
football rivalry, particularly between the University of Florida and FSU
— Florida State University — with Calvin peeing on FSU.
This 1995 article describes the rivalry as being intense
and with Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes urinating on the letters FSU.
But I recently got an email from a U.
Miami student who remembers seeing peeing Calvin pretty quick
after that 1988 comic.
I'm protecting his identity because he doesn't want to be associated
with peeing Calvin on Google for the rest of his life, like I am.
“Our big rival became FSU, so FSU t shirts started being sold door to door.
And I think the first one was of Calvin standing east of the state of Florida,
peeing up and to the left of Tallahassee, FSU’s home.
For whatever my hazy college memories worth to our in-depth investigation,
in case you ever update it, now you have it.”
So they had the idea in Florida and from there it spread.
It became a meme.
It was also transplanted to Calvin, peeing on lots of different stuff:
Ford; Chevy; Navy; City boys.
He was knocked off to a praying version and there was even a peeing girl Calvin.
A lot of people ended up thinking that Calvin's creator, Bill Watterson,
was the guy behind the peeing Calvin decals.
He was making bank off of it the same way that Garfield cartoonist
Jim Davis made a ton of money off of those Garfield suction cup
dolls that were ubiquitous, if you grew up in the eighties and nineties.
That couldn't be further from the truth.
It's really hard to find a picture of Bill Watterson, Calvin's creator.
This one comes from an article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Just a few months later, while Garfield artist Jim Davis was happy to lecture
about Garfield, Watterson was already hiding behind a picture of Calvin.
Despite his private persona, he actually ended up having kind
of a very public debate about licensing the Calvin and Hobbes comic.
Let me explain.
Comic artists at the
time would submit their strips to a syndicate.
These syndicates would then sell the strips to newspapers.
The more newspapers that bought, the higher up the ladder you went.
So the syndicates had a lot of power.
Watterson drew this for an interview that he gave to Comics Journal.
“You give us the whole works,” it says down here,
while the syndicate boss just sees the dollar signs.
Generally the whole works included licensing rights as well.
So Watterson’s Syndicate, Universal Press Syndicate,
could have licensed all this stuff if they wanted to.
Usually artists were happy to do it, or they buckled quite quickly,
like in this illustration.
But Watterson was different.
He said he would quit if they did.
He would never have licensed a peeing Calvin, but he also didn't want
a Hobbes doll or a Calvin video game or anything but calendars and books,
despite the huge amount of money that he would have gotten from it.
So they fought and it was kind of in public.
Watterson gave speeches
and interviews protesting the push to license Calvin and Hobbes.
He said it would make him a brand manager signing another batch of strips
instead of being an artist.
This debate even bubbled on to the comics page.
“I stand firm in my belief of what's right.
I refuse to compromise my principles.” And eventually Watterson won.
He got a new contract with his rights back because Universal knew
that he was the magic.
And this actually started an industry trend.
But here's the twist: because there wasn't licensing cash
to fund lawyers to hunt down all the knockoff Calvin and Hobbes
products, those products could kind of get away with it.
There were some big lawsuits.
One big wholesaler got ordered to pay for his illegal use,
but for the most part, peeing Calvin ran free, in part
because there wasn't enough cash to fund a legal team to put it down.
Today, you can still buy peeing Calvin decals from really big companies
or even Crypto Calvins - equally unlicensed,
if you have enough Etherium.
I want to get up and draw something for you.
So when I wrote that article ten years ago, I kind of thought that
Watterson was being naive, that he should have just licensed Calvin
to keep the decals out of car windows and all the other random crap.
And now I've kind of changed my mind.
Watterson knew what he was doing.
The end of that comic where he says, I will refuse to compromise my principles?
It ends with Calvin saying, “because they don't have the slightest bearing on
what happens to me anyway.” A great Calvin book
that I read for this video, it recounts that the syndicate representatives came
by to Watterson's house.
They spread counterfeit T-shirts out on the table for him and patiently,
kindly said that licensing could help stop the tarnishing of his work.
And he still turned them down.
He didn't just turn down a bunch of money,
he turned down keeping Calvin's brand pristine.
“Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in,”
he told Kenyon graduates at a commencement speech.
All right.
This is what we think it looks like right?
We think that your art can be pure or it can be ruined
and you can be an artist or you can be a sellout.
If you decide to be an artist, you decide to keep your work pure, you end
up up here, or you can be a sellout and get a truckload of money.
But your work is ruined.
But Bill knew that those were not the only two options.
He knew that you could be an artist like he chose to be.
You could turn away those dump trucks of money
and you could still end up
with your work being tainted by it being tarnished.
And he didn't care.
Some people saw his art and it only awakened partisanship
or fandom or consumerism.
They defiled his work in the most straightforward way possible.
Why didn't he just take the money
to save Calvin?
I think because there was more at stake than this boy
and this tiger that millions of people loved.
Bill Watterson was at stake.
Do you remember the transmogrifier?
It changes you from one thing into another.
Here's the thing.
We all get a box.
We set the options, we turn the dial.
You can choose to go inside and come out a partisan,
or a fan, or a consumer,
or you can take another option.
You can choose what you're turned into.
You just have to set the dial.