Bill Watterson on what Hobbes really is

WEST: Let's talk about Hobbes a little bit. He seems to be older and wiser than Calvin, but not much. Which of the following more accurately describes him: a pet, a brother, a friend, or the father that Calvin never had?
WATTERSON: Hobbes is really hard to define and, in a way, I'm reluctant to do it. I think there's an aspect of this character that's hard for me to articulate. I suppose if I had to choose from those four, the brother and the friend would be the closest. But there's something a little peculiar about him that's, hopefully, not readily categorized.
WEST: Well, in a way that says more about Calvin than Hobbes because Hobbes is implicitly, explicitly just a product of his imagination.
WATTERSON: But the strip doesn't assert that. That's the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. Some reporter was writing a story on imaginary friends and they asked me for a comment, and I didn't do it because I really have absolutely no knowledge about imaginary friends. It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up.
WEST: Well, at the risk of getting into psycho-babble, a lot of psychologists would say that children create imaginary friends to play out family dramas. So an argument can be just as much a part of an imaginary world as, you know, a sort of sentimental, gooey friendship can.
WATTERSON: Yeah, well, I would hope that the friendship between Calvin and Hobbes is so complex that it would transcend a normal fantasy. The resolution of the question of whether Hobbes is real or not doesn't concern me or interest me, but, hopefully, there's some element of complexity there that will make the relationship interesting on a couple of levels.
WEST: So you've delineated a fine boundary that is pushed out of shape at various points and almost illogical at various points, but it has an internal consistency of sorts.
WATTERSON: Of sorts, yes.
WEST: You must find yourself in situations where you say, "No, I can't do that," and other times when you willingly violate what would seem to be a logical rule just for effect.
WATTERSON: Such as?
WEST: Well, such as when Hobbes tied Calvin up to a chair. If you accept the rest of the fantasy that you've created — that Hobbes is imaginary - that's an impossibility.
WATTERSON: Yeah, and Calvin's dad finds him tied up and the question remains, really, how did he get that way? His dad assumes that Calvin tied himself up somehow, so well that he couldn't get out. Calvin explains that Hobbes did this to him and he tries to place the blame on Hobbes entirely, and it's never resolved in the strip. Again I don't think that's just a cheap way out of the story. 1 like the tension that that creates, where you've got two versions of reality that do not mix. Something odd has happened and neither makes complete sense, so you're left to make out of it what you want.
WEST: I guess that's the rule of some of the best fantasies. Did Alice really go through the looking glass? Was Dorothy really in Oz? What do you choose to believe?
WATTERSON: I should also mention, just in that context, that the fantasy/reality question is a literary device, so the ultimate reality of it doesn't really matter that much anyway. In other words, when Dorothy's in Oz, if you want to make this obviously a dream, it becomes stupid -- you confine yourself.
WEST: It has less purpose.
WATTERSON: And also less potential. There are inner workings in The Wizard of Oz that are too coherent for a dream — at least my dreams are never that coherent- and so it becomes less interesting if it is only a dream. The literary merits, the purpose of writing it that way, are better served by some ambiguity than by making everything very obvious.