Project Description

Inktober Day #17: Collide. I can’t believe I’ve made it this far into Inktober withtout a Calvin and Hobbes/Bill Watterson homage. This is my twist on one of the classic interactions between Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin comes home from school, Hobbes tackles him because he’s so overjoyed he’s back home and they can go on adventures again. It’s a bit of a recurring “gag” in the strip, and it’s both humorous and heartwarming.

This idea came to me pretty quickly, and the longer I worked on it, the deeper meaning it had for me. Bill Watterson and the Calvin and Hobbes strip have had and continue to have a huge impact on me as an artist and creator. Rereading strips instantly transports me back to my youth and discovering them for the first time. I was devastated when the strip ended, but I love going back and rereading the 10 years worth of brilliant content Watterson created, and I love that I can share it with my kids.

I’ve said Plunger Monkey is my Mickey Mouse, but he’s probably more my Hobbes. I had not yet created him when I was Calvin’s age (about 6 years old), but the ingredients were there. This image is very much a silly dramatization of how I created PMD, he hit me out of the blue, during a time when I was not in the best place mentally, and brought me back to being a kid. He gave me a creative purpose. This is also pretty much what it’s like whenever I have a new idea for PMD: he tackles me out of the blue, interrupting whatever I was doing, and makes me a carefree kid with an overactive imagination again.