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A rival school might focus on the Krazy Kat influence. Its members would tout the little-known introductory essay Watterson wrote for the first volume of The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat. They would observe how the moon in early Calvin and Hobbes strips has the distinct "melon wedge" shape the cartoonist mentions in said essay, and compare the common feline traits of Krazy and Hobbes. Striking, too, is how Watterson follows Herriman's use of scenery as a character in its own right. In the enormous, overstuffed Krazy Kat panels, the backdrop keeps changing even when the figures stay put. Calvin, for his part, moves so fast in his little wagon that the backdrop constantly changes just to keep up with him. The aspiring national forest of white birch and deep green woods giddily chases the mostly indifferent protagonist.
Influence is, of course, the most elusive chalice in the historical quest; one may as well draw attention to the characters' Muppet mouths and Looney Tune dives over the edge of cliffs. Other Calvinists will investigate the artistic development of the strip on its own terms. Already at the 12th daily strip, they will observe, Calvin and Hobbes race along in the wagon to the soundtrack of philosophical speculation about fate, fatefully headed for a splash in the lake. In the first month, a strip addresses the pernicious pull of TV, that opiate of the masses which even Karl Marx couldn't foresee, a frequent theme of the whole decade's output. The third Sunday page makes use of the entire "throwaway" panel across the top of the strip—designed to be dispensable for newspaper editors who wanted to save space—to showcase a long if rather cartoony alien landscape. The fourth Sunday page does the same. Already, this early, the possibilities of the redesigned, post-sabbatical Sunday strips are foreshadowed. There's no denying that the new Sunday page format begat a rambunctious dynamism, up to 20 panels in a single strip, innovative layouts, and sometimes the restraint of a Japanese woodcut. The gain, however, was balanced by a loss: with the new Sunday pages, all the energy went out of the dailies, featuring fewer serial stories and weaker humor.
Theorists and critics of art will seize the opportunity here to insert themselves into the dialogue. Calvin is not only the object of paradigmatic struggles between big evil syndicate and lonely little artist. He is also an artist in his own right, an avant-garde sculptor of suburban postmodern snow sculptures. (He wanted to be a neo-deconstructionist, but Mom wouldn't let him.) He's torn between marketable traditional snowmen and more meaningful works that insult or disturb the viewer: Bourgeois Buffoon; The Torment of Existence Weighed Against the Horror of Nonbeing; and the entire blank landscape, post-commentary and post-symbolism because art is dead, signed with his name at the bargain price of a million dollars. Hobbes demurs. It doesn't match his furniture.
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