The Sundays
1 – Bill
One night as I lay my books down carefully, and in the correct order, I was struck by an image: my collection of the Calvin and Hobbes Sundays, sitting in the lamplight.
I stood for a while staring at this old book from childhood. I left it there. Whenever I come into the room now and see it sitting in that pool of light, I feel… not nostalgia, something more piercing. What is it?
The Sundays. I imagine Bill Watterson living in the rhythm of the strips, each Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday living in black and white, waiting for the Sundays, when he could finally peer out in full color.
See, comics are about constraint.
Each medium is made of something, and comics are made of strips of paper. There’s room enough for a little world to bleed through each day, bit by bit – but it’s a battle. The captions in the book constantly reference squeezing by the publishers. It shows the brackets and tape that mark potential cutoffs.
You can hear the years of strain in Bill’s voice as he says,
To an editor, space may be money, but to a cartoonist, space is time.
And a breath of freedom in this:
With the large Sundays, I felt that Calvin and Hobbes kicked into high gear… I felt the strip finally looked the way it did in my head.
This delicate world faced an onslaught in other ways, too. He fought for years to prevent the merchandising of his characters, which he felt would wreck the tension between reality and imagination that he spent so much care developing.
There’s magic here: the constraint makes the strip, but the strip imposes constraints on the outside world. One fights for it.
2 – Tear
Since last August I haven’t had more than a few days’ rest. Writing feels like an expense now. I’m getting used to the new rhythm.
A quote from Bishop Robert Barron rings in my ears: “Find what you’re good at and dedicate it to love.” It’s clear that I’m not doing that. Motivations are difficult to access, but I know at least that the core of it isn’t love, not right now. It’s smaller than that.
Dedicate it to love. It grates.
When I tore my right shoulder last month, I learned to make do with my left arm. I treated it like a game.
The strange thing was that I felt the world opening up to me. I can still feel, from my left hand, an outpouring.
I came into the office this weekend to write this, opened up the blinds like usual.
3 – Calvin
The final strip ever published was on a snowy Sunday. Calvin and Hobbes stand out in full color against the black and white scenery. They trudge excitedly through the new snow with a sled. It ends with that legendary line: “Let’s go exploring!”
They slide off into the white, not out of the frame – deeper into it.
Calvin, Calvin, my brother, myself. My hair, even, stiff and implacable like yours. Precocious and stupid at the same time, living in a world that’s real and not real.
I look at the book again, so tattered. As a kid I was clueless and always absorbed, in books, bugs, construction materials. I can imagine my little hands clumsily turning the pages and detaching them from the spine over time. Back then, when things were both sacred and worthless, and everything opened up into a mystery.
How many times will I be here, writing about how I want to write? Somehow the math leads here.
I’ve been exhausted. It’s Sunday, I’ll bring an old book to the light.