38 Years Later, Calvin and Hobbes' Lost Character Remains Bill Watterson's Biggest Failure

The author Lois McMaster Bujold has said that “the writer should always reserve the right to come up with a better idea.” That's a useful guideline for any reader to keep in mind. As any long-form story evolves, it usually picks up a few dead plot branches or abandoned characters, because the author can exercise their option to drop what they're doing for any (or no) reason. Sometimes it's not a continuity error; it's a deliberate change in direction.

Sometimes that decision is due to unexpected popularity, like how Opus and Bill the Cat quickly stole the spotlight in Bloom County. At other times, it might be due to shifting creative teams, real life concerns (i.e. Stephen King's near-death experience in 1999 became a major plot element of the last two books of his Dark Tower series), or that the author simply pivoted away from a plan that wasn't going to work out.

Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes has surprisingly few of those abandoned plot threads. It starts in close to the same place as it ends, as a joke-a-day strip with occasional deviations into high weirdness, art criticism, and accessible philosophy. There's a little more focus on Calvin's parents in the first couple of years of C&H and the art's a little looser, but the comic stays close to its original vision through its 10-year run.

The only real exception is in a two-week arc from 1988, where Calvin's uncle Max comes to visit his household. On a blind read through the comic, it's nothing that unusual, but the behind-the-scenes story of Uncle Max is a little more interesting.

Remember the new guy

The "Uncle Max" arc ran from Jan. 11 to 22 in 1988, taking up the weekday strip for just under two weeks. The comics are collected in Calvin and Hobbes' third print collection, Yukon Ho!

Uncle Max's visit takes Calvin by surprise, as Max hasn't been around since Calvin was a baby, so Calvin doesn't remember him at all. While Calvin is initially suspicious of this new adult presence in his house, he eventually warms up to Max, if only because Max is the only other person in the strip who's willing to at least pretend he's scared of Hobbes.

Watterson doesn't give Max much in the way of a backstory. He's drawn like Calvin's dad with no glasses and a mustache. He also vaguely seems like he spent some time on the wrong side of the law. (When Calvin asks why Max hasn’t been around, Calvin’s dad says that the idea Max was in jail for a while “isn’t a bad guess.”) We don't learn what Max does for a living, why he's in town, or where he lives. Instead, he's simply there to bounce off of Calvin and his parents for a couple of weeks, and then he leaves. Max never appears again.

Watterson didn't publicly comment on Uncle Max until The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book in 1995, which reprinted a selection of C&H strips alongside Watterson's essays and commentary. Since Watterson has been notoriously quiet since C&H ended in 1998, the Anniversary Book is still one of the only sources of behind-the-scenes information on C&H. If you're a fan of the comic, it's worth picking up a copy of the Anniversary Book, which is still in print via original publisher Andrews & McMeel.

According to Watterson in the Anniversary Book, his original plan for Uncle Max was to use him to expand the strip's scope. Max was going to appear again, and he'd potentially offer new stories where Calvin's family would go to visit him.

As Max's introductory arc continued, however, Watterson realized it wasn't going to work. For one thing, Calvin's parents' deliberate lack of names made it difficult to write dialogue between them and Max. More to the point, Max didn't offer as many options for new stories as Watterson had hoped he would. As a result, Watterson simply never used Uncle Max again, writing, "Max is gone."

That relegates Uncle Max to the realm of comic strip trivia, alongside other short-lived supporting characters like Lyman, Frieda, Hodge-Podge, or roughly three-quarters of the cast of Doonesbury. He was simply an idea that didn't work. Sometimes, that's just how things shake out in comics.