paceman Spiff predates Calvin and Hobbes by over a decade. I trace Spiff back to a comic strip I drew for a high school German class, called Raumfahrer Rolf. It was a pretty silly two-page comic in which the protagonist got eaten by a monster at the end, but it was written in some sort of German, and that was what counted. I reworked the character in college, calling him "Spaceman Mort", but the strip was conceived as a fairly elaborate, continuing project and that didn't seem like the best use of my academic time, so I never published it.

A year or so after college, the newly christened Spaceman Spiff was my first strip submission to newspaper syndicates. Spiff was a diminutive loudmouth, not unlike Calvin, albeit with a Chaplin mustache, flying goggles, and a cigar. He had a dimwitted assistant named Fargle, and they roamed through space in a dirigible. For obvious reasons, the syndicates rejected it. Years later, when I came up with Calvin, I finally had the opportunity to bring Spiff back.

When I was a kid, I followed the Apollo moon program with great interest, so Calvin shares that fascination with space travel. Spaceman Spiff is also a bit of a spoof on Flash Gordon. The narration in Flash Gordon is fairly overwrought, so I have Spiff describe his own exploits with a similar search for breathless superlatives.

The Spiff strips are limited in narrative potential, but I keep doing them because they're so much fun to draw. The planets and monsters offer great visual possibilities, especially in the Sunday strips. Most of the alien landscapes come from the canyons and deserts of southern Utah, a place more weird and spectacular than anything I'd previously been able to make up. The landscapes have become a significant part of the Spaceman Spiff sequences, and I often write the strip around the topography I feel like drawing.

Like all of Calvin's fantasies, Spaceman Spiff provides a way for me to draw some other comic strip when I want a break from Calvin and Hobbes. I can draw and write things that wouldn't fit in the strip otherwise, and this opens up opportunities to experiment with new interests.