Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity
The Republic of Letters
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Commissions<br>Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity<br>How Bill Watterson Stuck to His Guns — and Vanished
The Republic of Letters and Matthew Morgan<br>Jun 11, 2026
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Dear Republic,<br>Maybe you liked Calvin and Hobbes as a kid but you probably have no idea of the scrupulous moral integrity that went into it, as Matthew Morgan demonstrates in this deeply-researched piece.<br>-ROL<br>CALVIN AND HOBBES AND THE PRICE OF INTEGRITY<br>I.<br>1978, Kenyon College, sophomore year. Bill Watterson is lying on his dorm room bed, staring up at the ceiling. He hasn’t yet invented six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes — though his studies have made him familiar with their philosophical namesakes — because the strip that will make Watterson’s name is almost a decade away. Right now, he’s thinking that his dorm room needs an amateur rendition of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”.<br>There’s a number of problems up front. The first is that (as Watterson will tell you himself) he’s not a talented painter. Still, what the work will lack in “colour sense and technical flourish” it’ll make up for with comedy — specifically “the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakeable odour of old beer cans and older laundry”. Besides, Michelangelo wasn’t Michelangelo until he’d painted and kept painting and became Michelangelo the painter. Watterson decides to go ahead and start painting.<br>The next problem is structural: how to reach the ceiling? He can stand on the bed, but that’ll mean hours with his head cocked all the way back, a young man developing an old man’s spine. He needs a way to paint the ceiling without permanently disfiguring his posture. His friends help him with a solution: they stand two chairs on Watterson’s bed, then lie a table across the chairs. By climbing up this tower and lying on the table, he comes two feet away from the ceiling. Watterson gets to work.<br>He’s sunk hours into hours of weeks upon weeks on his back when a third problem occurs to him. He should have thought of this and acted on it before the first brush stroke. He needs permission to paint his dorm room ceiling. But Watterson once admitted, “I never spent as much time or work on any authorised art project or any poli-sci paper as I spent on this one act of vandalism.” He isn’t giving up on it now.<br>The housing director is understandably suspicious of this kid wanting to paint some elaborate picture on his ceiling with only a few weeks left of the academic year. He realises that the idea is being proposed retroactively. Maybe that’s why he plays along and grants permission for something that’s obviously already underway. Watterson is allowed to complete the painting on the condition that he returns the ceiling to normal before he leaves in summer. Watterson goes back to his room, climbs up the makeshift scaffolding, and gets back to work.<br>A few weeks later, the project is finished. Watterson probably takes a moment to stand in the middle of the room and look up, contemplating the months of work, the tins of paint he went through, the things he learned about technique, about the joy of a job done for its own sake, about himself. Then he opens a tin of whitewash, climbs up the bed-chairs-table one last time, and paints over his work. He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh.<br>II.<br>In the years after Kenyon, Watterson has a recurring dream about his old college where he doesn’t know what class he’s taking or where he’s meant to be. He roams the grounds, growing more flustered with each confused step. Right before he wakes, he thinks, “How many more years until I graduate…? Wait, didn’t I graduate already? How old am I?”<br>It’s 1995 and Watterson is thirty-seven. He’s sitting at the desk where he’s worked for the last ten years, drawing the adventures of Calvin and his maybe-real or maybe-stuffed-toy tiger, Hobbes. Calvin and Hobbes runs in over 2,400 newspapers across the world and, by a more meaningful metric, re-enchants life for millions of readers. It’s pop-culture that transcends the ‘pop” part of its nature; it feels like a private piece of each reader’s soul. For a lot of grown-ups, Calvin and Hobbes is a bridge between who we were as wide-eyed, wondering children and who we are now.<br>A few years after he found success with Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson told a graduating class at Kenyon that there’s nothing like the joy of work done for your own creative satisfaction, rather than for fame or a few bucks. Watterson is convinced that an artist should do what he does for love, even if it fails, even if it costs him, even though it and everything else will eventually end. In fact, his editor has just okayed a strip in which Hobbes asks Calvin, “If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?”<br>Which is what brings Watterson to his desk today.<br>There’s a few papers scattered beneath and...