‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Gets ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ Makeover From Disney Artist

Disney story artist Brian Kesinger has managed to win the Internet’s collective heart with a series of illustrations mashing together Bill Watterson’s beloved newspaper strip Calvin and Hobbes and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Subsequent cartoons have included callbacks to iconic Calvin and Hobbes images as the pair balancing on a log and some unhappy, murdered snowmen, complete with disapproving onlookers.

On Twitter, Kesinger has revealed that each of the images was created digitally, despite how close the colors match Watterson’s watercolor original Calvin and Hobbes art. “I have a lot of fun [Photoshop] brushes,” he explained.

Kesinger, whose work has also been seen in Marvel Entertainment’s recent Groot comic book series, told Buzzfeed that the idea for the cartoons came while watching Rey slide down a sand dune on Jakku in the new movie. “It struck me that she probably did that as a child and that’s when the Calvin and Hobbes image flashed in my head,” he said, leading to the first image in the series.

Sadly for many fans, Kesinger will be following in Watterson’s footsteps in another way — the images won’t be sold, or used for merchandise purposes, although in this case, it’s because of what Kesinger calls “respect for the copyrights of the original character creators,” as opposed to Watterson’s famous disinterest in licensed Calvin and Hobbes material.

Of course, judging by the amount of bootleg Calvin merchandise available, perhaps fans should wait and see how many of Kesinger’s images end up for sale at the next comic book convention nonetheless …

Thank you for the amazing response to this series, I hope you had as much fun looking at them as I did drawing them pic.twitter.com/01rD6xqdIN

— brian kesinger (@briankesinger) January 8, 2016

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