Digital Culture Project #3: Remix Project
Link to a .pdf file of the remixed comic strip:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PSbH7AcdQ2NkT_Dso4tMM8tE6F-7mfKX/view?usp=sharing
Calvin and Hobbes was a popular comic strip that ran from 1985 to 1995. It was a newspaper comic strip when newspapers were still high in reader consumption. Many people have at least a passing knowledge of Calvin and Hobbes, and the cartoonist Bill Watterson would have been aware of how large his viewer base was.
In the original comic sequence, entitled “Yukon, Ho!”, Calvin attempts to avoid cleaning his room by traveling to the Yukon, a Canadian territory that borders Alaska. After minimal planning, Calvin and Hobbes leave, and travel a short distance before they dispute the true leader. After Hobbes takes Calvin’s helmet and declares himself leader of their two-person group, Calvin returns home, only to realize that he left Hobbes in the woods. Calvin’s dad eventually finds Hobbes that night.
While I enjoy any and all Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, I welcomed the challenge to try and add an altered voice to the original narrative. There were a few things I thought could be changed that would lend a different tone to the original. Calvin is often portrayed in the comics as being intelligent but naive. He has the knowledge to come up with elaborate schemes such as moving to a Canadian territory to escape his chores, but doesn’t actually have enough logical capacity at the age of 6 in order to differentiate good ideas from bad. His parents are more cynical when it comes to his ideas, and have enough foresight to anticipate his mistakes. However, many of Calvin’s antics are left un-examined by his parents, and while this is the root of much of the comedy, it also comes with the somewhat defeatist stance on Calvin’s inability to evolve as a character. So, my first goal for the project was to remove the parents entirely, to allow Calvin to experience the journey by himself, and come to a decision based on his own values. Secondly, I wanted to change the somewhat arbitrary final destination of the Yukon to something more directly related to the narrative. Finally, I wanted to give Calvin a moment of self-evaluation that leads to his decision to return home, in a moment where the Calvin character matures.
There were some edits made to the comic panels themselves. In addition to edits to the text themselves, I had to cut, add, and reorder panels to fit the story I was trying to tell. Panels 11 and 12 were flipped horizontally to allow for the continuity of character positioning. Some things like the helmet that Calvin wears could not be edited, which is an unfortunate side effect of the panel manipulation.
I attempted to keep the story within canon, with a narrative that could feasibly appear within a typical Calvin and Hobbes strip. There was a challenge in retaining the key fixtures of Watterson’s originals while adding my own spin to the story. While there are elements within the text that relate to politics (the original draft of my strip mentions Donald Trump by name), Watterson never mentioned current events by name. Thus, to stay true to the original, I chose not to do so either. My strip can be read within the current events framing of the decreased funding of public schools, or it can be read as a more philosophical (and arguably pretentious) musing on accepting broken systems for the value that the individual gains from them. Whether or not this narrative is conveyed within the text successfully depends on the reader, and it is not my place to tell what the reader is supposed to think. But this was ultimately my intention.
I was happy with how my comic turned out. I think I managed to create a comic that stays true to the original while modernizing the framing as well as fixing some narrative elements in the original story. As a Calvin and Hobbes fan since I was very young, I consider Bill Watterson to have informed a large part of my identity today. While I could never recapture what Calvin and Hobbes nailed, I like to think that I tried my best to.
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