The Sea He Built
Stephen Hillenburg was a marine biologist first. He studied natural resource planning at Humboldt State, focused on marine resources, graduated in 1984, then spent years working at the Ocean Institute in California teaching people about tide pools and the creatures that cling to rocks at the edge of the water. In his spare time he drew a comic called "The Intertidal Zone"—sea creatures anthropomorphized into human types, rendered with the precision of someone who actually knew what lived down there.
He showed it to Martin Olson, a writer on Rocko’s Modern Life, who told him to turn it into a show. So Hillenburg enrolled at CalArts—the experimental animation program Walt Disney founded—and came out in 1992 with a different kind of degree and a fully formed idea. He pitched it to Nickelodeon. The pilot, "Help Wanted," aired May 1, 1999. By July the series was running. When Hillenburg tried to end the show after the first feature film in 2004, Nickelodeon refused to let it die, and it kept going in one form or another, largely without his direct involvement, for years afterward.
He was diagnosed with ALS in March 2017. Today Nickelodeon confirmed his death. He was 57.
I keep returning to the marine biology. Most cartoon characters are built by people who love cartoons. SpongeBob SquarePants was built by someone who loved the ocean—who had spent real time studying what life looks like under pressure and in darkness, how ecosystems sustain themselves through interdependence and occasional violence. That knowledge is somewhere in the show, beneath the absurdism and the slapstick. The ocean floor as suburban nightmare. The optimist whose optimism is quietly devastating. Squidward as the educated failure we’re all a little afraid of becoming.
There’s something genuinely melancholic baked into SpongeBob that I don’t think was accidental. Hillenburg understood that the sea is beautiful and completely indifferent, full of things that eat each other and die. He made a cartoon about it. The cartoon became one of the most recognized images in the world—a yellow rectangle, a face, a laugh, a theme song everyone knows. That started with a scientist drawing comic strips at his kitchen table because he thought it would be fun. Fifty-seven. The show is only nineteen years old and he’s already gone.