Bill Watterson on Calvin's Parents

WEST: The parents are really an interesting part of the strip. In a way they're foils, but the thing that interests me is that it's extremely rare for them to express any love for Calvin. Is that simply because it doesn't have any comic potential, or is it something inherent in their characters?
WATTERSON: Again, I feel like I'm falling into the trap of psychoanalyzing the characters and I don't want to say, "Well, this character acts this way," because that's confining. I think the way they relate to Calvin is more a reflection of my misanthropic tendencies than any literary concern. Many strips have, you know, the funny character, the straight man, the foil - those characters are stereotypes and fairly flat. The role of these characters in the strip is entirely defined by their function as a member of a social group or age group, or whatever, and I'm trying to avoid that as much as I possibly can. I try to make each character, even the ones that aren't that important, a unique personality that, over time, will develop. Some of the minor characters appear less often than Calvin and Hobbes, but, hopefully, over years, each one will become a unique personality that will be every bit as complex and interesting as Calvin and Hobbes. In other words, I don't want the parents to simply function as parents. I want them to be unique individuals as well. They are parents, of course, and, as sane people, they have to react to Calvin's personality. What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position, to the extent that I can, and I know that if I was Calvin's dad or Calvin's mom that I would not react to him with the gooey sentimentality that sometimes appears in other strips. Given Calvin's usual behavior, I think his parents show admirable restraint in theirs.