Notable elements of Watterson's artistic style are his characters' diverse and often exaggerated expressions (particularly those of Calvin), elaborate and bizarre backgrounds for Calvin's flights of imagination, well-captured kinetics, and frequent visual jokes and metaphors. In the later years of the strip, with more space available for his use, Watterson experimented more freely with different panel layouts, stories without dialogue, and greater use of whitespace. He also made a point of not showing certain things explicitly: the "Noodle Incident" and the children's book Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie were left to the reader's imagination, where Watterson was sure they would be "more outrageous" than he could portray.

Watterson's technique started with minimal pencil sketches (though the larger Sunday strips often required more elaborate work); he then would use a small sable brush and India ink to complete most of the remaining drawing. He was careful in his use of color, often spending a great deal of time in choosing the right colors to employ for the weekly Sunday strip.

Art and academia

Watterson also directed criticism toward the academic world. Calvin writes a "revisionist autobiography", giving himself a flame thrower. Another time, he carefully crafts an "artist's statement", knowing that such essays convey more messages than artworks themselves ever do ("You misspelled Weltanschauung," Hobbes blandly notes). He indulges in what Watterson calls "pop psychobabble" to justify his destructive rampages and shift blame to his parents, citing "toxic codependency." Once, he pens a book report entitled, "The dynamics of interbeing and monological imperatives in Dick and Jane: a study in psychic transrelational gender modes." Displaying his creation to Hobbes, he remarks, "Academia, here I come!" Watterson explains that he adapted this jargon (and similar examples from several other strips) from an actual book of art criticism.

Overall, Watterson's satirical essays serve to attack both sides, criticizing both the commercial mainstream and the artists who are supposed to be "outside" it. Walking contemplatively through the woods, not long after he began drawing his "Dinosaurs in Rocket Ships Series", Calvin tells Hobbes,

The hard part for us avant-garde post-modern artists is deciding whether or not to embrace commercialism. Do we allow our work to be hyped and exploited by a market that's simply hungry for the next new thing? Do we participate in a system that turns high art into low art so it's better suited for mass consumption?

Of course, when an artist goes commercial, he makes a mockery of his status as an outsider and free thinker. He buys into the crass and shallow values art should transcend. He trades the integrity of his art for riches and fame.

Oh, what the heck. I'll do it.

Distorted reality

In the Tenth Anniversary Book, Watterson acknowledges that most of these strips were metaphors for his own conflicts, typically against his syndicate's desire to produce Calvin and Hobbes merchandise. Accused of only seeing issues in "black and white" (Calvin's reply of "Sometimes that's the way things are!" was directly taken from his response to this accusation)—e.g., crass commercialism versus artistic integrity, with nothing in between—Watterson chose to illustrate the situation literally, dropping Calvin into a world where everything had lost shades of grey. Conversely, the "neo-Cubist" strip emerged from the way Watterson found himself "paralyzed by being able to see all sides of an issue".

Passage of time

Although Watterson depicts several years' worth of holidays, school years, summer vacations, and camping trips, Calvin is never shown to age nor have any birthday celebrations (the only birthday shown was that of Susie Derkins). This is fairly common among comic strips; consider the children in Charles Schulz's Peanuts, most of whom existed without aging for decades. Likewise, the characters in George Herriman's Krazy Kat celebrate the New Year but never grow old, and young characters like Ignatz Mouse's offspring never seem to grow up. Since this is such a common phenomenon, readers are likely to suspend disbelief, as most of them do about Calvin's precocious vocabulary, accepting that he "was never a literal six-year-old".

Social criticisms

Hobbes also speaks on Calvin's unwholesome habits, but from a more cynical perspective; he is more likely to make a wry observation than actually intervene. Sometimes he merely looks on as Calvin inadvertently makes the point himself. In one instance, Calvin tells Hobbes about a story in which machines turn humans into zombie slaves. He then exclaims, "My TV show is on!" and sprints from the room in a panic to watch it.

Contrariwise, at times Calvin is the one doing the criticizing of culture. For example, when Calvin and Hobbes stumble onto a heap of litter, they get angered at the people who pollute the world. Calvin had once said, in response to man's exploitation and destruction of nature, "I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us," and "I wonder if you can refuse to inherit the world."

Calvin is also slightly misanthropic, given how some of the people in the world (particularly at school) cruelly treat him. Calvin admires how Hobbes isn't human, a sentiment which Hobbes shares.

The main characters

Calvin

Named after 16th century theologian John Calvin (founder of Calvinism and a strong believer in predestination), Calvin is an impulsive, imaginative, energetic, curious, intelligent, and often selfish six-year-old, whose last name the strip never gives. Despite his low grades, Calvin has a wide vocabulary range that rivals that of an adult as well as an emerging philosophical mind. "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid?" he says. "Well, mine are even worse!" He commonly wears his distinctive striped shirt. Watterson has described Calvin thus:

• "Calvin is pretty easy to do because he is outgoing and rambunctious and there's not much of a filter between his brain and his mouth."
• "I guess he's a little too intelligent for his age. The thing that I really enjoy about him is that he has no sense of restraint, he doesn't have the experience yet to know the things that you shouldn't do."
• "The socialization that we all go through to become adults teaches you not to say certain things because you later suffer the consequences. Calvin doesn't know that rule of thumb yet."

Calvinistic predestination as a philosophical position basically entails the idea that the human action affecting a person's ultimate salvation or damnation is predestined. Calvin's consistent gripe is that the troublesome acts he commits are outside of his control: he is simply a product of his environment, a victim of circumstances. He does frequently escape from his environment into elaborate fantasy worlds of his own creation; one of the strip's recurring devices is the humorous juxtaposition of Calvin's fantastic perception with the quotidian viewpoint of other characters. On many occasions, Calvin sees himself in one of his many alternate guises: as the superhero Stupendous Man, the astronaut and explorer Spaceman Spiff, the private eye Tracer Bullet, and many others (see Calvin's alter egos).

Hobbes

Hobbes is Calvin's stuffed tiger who, from Calvin's perspective, is as alive and real as anyone in the strip. He is named after 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had what Watterson described as "a dim view of human nature." Hobbes is much more rational and aware of consequences than Calvin, but seldom interferes with Calvin's troublemaking beyond a few oblique warnings — after all, Calvin will be the one to get in trouble for it, not Hobbes. Hobbes also has the habit of regularly stalking and pouncing on Calvin, most often when Calvin returns home from school.

From Calvin's point of view, Hobbes is an anthropomorphic tiger, much larger than Calvin and full of his own attitudes and ideas. But when the perspective shifts to any other character, readers see merely a little stuffed tiger. This is, of course, an odd dichotomy, and Watterson explains it thus:

When Hobbes is a stuffed toy in one panel and alive in the next, I'm juxtaposing the "grown-up" version of reality with Calvin's version, and inviting the reader to decide which is truer.

Although the first strips clearly show Calvin capturing Hobbes by means of a snare (with tuna fish as the bait), a later comic (1 August 1989) seems to imply that Hobbes is, in fact, older than Calvin, and has been around his whole life. Watterson eventually decided that it was not important to establish how Calvin and Hobbes had first met.

Supporting characters

Calvin's family

Susie Derkins

Watterson admits that Calvin and Susie have a bit of a nascent crush on each other (Said by Calvin, "It's shameless the way we flirt."), and that Susie is inspired by the type of women Watterson himself finds attractive (which has led to speculation that Susie is based on Watterson's wife). Her relationship with Calvin, though, is frequently conflicted, and never really becomes sorted out, and the closest things are times when Calvin sends dead flowers and hate-mail as Valentine's Day gifts for his own enjoyment. (She feels he likes her enough to send her that gift, and he rejoices in her noticing.)

On occasion, Hobbes takes action to attract Susie's romantic attention, often with success, and much to Calvin's chagrin. Although on the surface these scenarios take the form of Hobbes teasing Calvin and showing off his charms, they may be Calvin's way to disguise his own crush on Susie, by pretending that it is Hobbes' crush instead.

Miss Wormwood

Miss Wormwood is Calvin's world-weary teacher, named after the apprentice devil in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. She perpetually wears polka-dotted dresses, and is another character who serves as a foil to Calvin's mischief. Calvin, when in his Spaceman Spiff persona, sees Miss Wormwood as a slimy, often dictatorial alien. She is waiting to retire, takes a lot of medication, and is apparently a heavy smoker and drinker.

Although there is a definite progression of time in the Calvin and Hobbes universe, mainly exhibited by the changing seasons, Calvin (and Susie) returns to Ms. Wormwood's first-grade class every fall.

Rosalyn

Rosalyn is a teen-age high-school senior and Calvin's official babysitter whenever Calvin's parents need a night out. She is the only babysitter able to tolerate Calvin's antics, which she uses to demand raises and advances from Calvin's desperate parents. She is also, according to Watterson, the only person Calvin truly fears—certainly she is his equal in cunning, and doesn't hesitate to play as dirty as he does. Despite being Calvin's nemesis, she is surprisingly good at playing Calvinball. Originally created as a nameless, one-shot character with no plans to appear again, Watterson decided he wanted to retain her unique ability to intimidate Calvin, which, ultimately, led to many more appearances.

Moe

Recurring subject matter

Mealtimes

Lunchtime and dinnertime find Calvin eager to share his thoughts about the food he (or anyone else) is eating. Those eating with him are generally repulsed by his colorful descriptions of the cuisine, which is one of the reasons his parents seldom take him to restaurants. During dinnertime at home, Calvin's meals are often depicted as unidentifiable blobs of green goo. Calvin is often repulsed, though his mother (or father) occasionally coaxes him to eat his dinner by informing him that they are in fact serving some outlandish or stomach-turning dish — e.g., toxic waste (which Calvin's father informs him will "turn you into a mutant if you eat it"), stewed monkey heads, spider pie ("You can pick out the legs and give them to your dad if they're too hairy for you" his mom quips), soup with maggots in it — which Calvin then eats with relish, (but rejects some meal which he classifies as "toad stroganoff") though his other parent usually no longer has an appetite. On occasion, once his parents are out of the room, his meals even become animate (sometimes growing a mouth and speaking), usually resulting in an epic fight with said food that leaves a large mess that strains his mother's patience.

One dinnertime, Calvin's meal actually performed Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy in an overly histrionic style (at one point grabbing Calvin's fork and jamming it into itself during the speech about suicide). After the soliloquy, the meal returned to its inanimate blob-like state. After a brief pause (during which Calvin blinks several times), the same meal then suddenly began to sing "Feelings," prompting Calvin to eat it so quickly that his mom thought he liked it.

He also gives interesting commentary on his food during lunchtime at school, infuriating Susie. In one case these descriptions — specifically referring to the contents of Calvin's school lunch as "a thermos full of phlegm" — provoked a newspaper to cancel the strip. One time during lunchtime at school, Calvin sits down next to Susie and said, "Mmm mmm, lunchtime! And today's lunch is extra special! Ever since the weather got warm I've been swatting flies and saving them in a jar. I finally got enough flies to mash them into a gooey paste with a spoon." Calvin then takes out his sandwich and holds it up to Susie, grinning and saying, "I call it 'bug butter.' Care for a taste?" Susie, exasperated, leans her head on one hand and asks, "Tell me, Calvin, do you have any friends at all?"

Bathtime

The Monsters Under the Bed

At night, Calvin is constantly terrorized by Monster/nightmare creatures apparently living under his bed. Only Calvin and Hobbes are aware of them (there are occasions on which they attempt to bribe Hobbes into handing Calvin over, often with food). There appears to be no continuing theme to their appearance except that they are very intimidating, but none too bright ("all teeth and digestive tract, no brains"), and they probably want to "squeeze" Calvin. The monsters are not always frightening: upon occasion, when frightened by something even scarier than monsters, Calvin and Hobbes turns on the lights and kills the monsters.

G.R.O.S.S.

Cardboard boxes

Building a transmogrifier is accomplished by turning a cardboard box upside-down, attaching an arrow to the side and writing a list of choices on the box. Upon turning the arrow to a particular choice and pushing a button, the transmogrifier instantaneously rearranges the subject's "chemical configuration" (accompanied by a loud zap). Calvin makes his first foray into the world of transmogrification when he temporarily turns himself into a tiger, but he finds the experience disappointing. Calvin re-uses some of this technology when he cleverly converts an ordinary water gun into a portable transmogrifier gun, a device which saves his life when he finds himself falling from high altitude. (Although he yells "I'm safe!" and is consequently turned into a safe, he rectifies this mistake by turning himself into a light particle and "zips home instantaneously".)

A Duplicator is crafted by turning the box on its side. Whatever is put in the box will be duplicated with a boink sound (hence the book title, Scientific Progress Goes Boink). Calvin envisions having a small team of duplicate Calvins whom he could send off to school, so he could go about his own business during school days. However, the new Calvins prove to be exact replicas, with the same reluctance to go to school, and thus become difficult to control. Calvin later adds an "Ethicator" switch to his duplicator, allowing a duplicate to be designated "good" or "evil," since he believes that a duplicate of his well-buried "good side" could cause no harm. This experiment is successful at first, with the "good" duplicate willingly doing Calvin's homework and going to school. The "good" duplicate crosses the line when he starts courting Susie, and Calvin eventually destroys it.

The time machine is built by flipping the transmogrifier back so that the opening faced upwards again. One uses it by donning a pair of goggles (in order to "contend with vortexes and light speeds") and climbing into the vehicle. Facing the front makes the machine go forward in time, and facing backwards makes it travel into the past. Calvin and Hobbes discover these time travel mechanics when they attempt to go into the future in order to bring back a few futuristic inventions and patent them in the present, securing a fortune for themselves. However, they face the wrong way and end up in the Jurassic period, bringing them face-to-face with a very large dinosaur. In another storyline Calvin tries to solve his homework by traveling to the future, planning to pick the finished work up from his future self, "8:30 Calvin". Not surprisingly, Calvin's plan fails to work as he intended.

Briefly, the cardboard box is used for Calvin's costume of "The World's Most Powerful Computer," in which Calvin walks around with the box over his head and a mechanical face sketched onto the surface of the box. This is only used two times throughout the entire strip.

Calvin's last cardboard box invention is the Cerebral Brain Enhance-o-tron, which combined with a colander creates a "thinking cap," a garment which enhances his mental prowess (inadvertently causing his head to swell in addition). Upon activation, this machine goes brzap. Like his other inventions, the Cerebral Enhance-o-tron fails to change his life; even with his "cerebral augmentation," he is unable to write a school report up to Miss Wormwood's standards.

Most of the other characters do not see his inventions as "real." For example, when Calvin transmogrifies himself into an owl or a tiger, his parents do not observe the transformation; only he and Hobbes see the change, and when they traveled back in time to photograph dinosaurs, Calvin's dad told Calvin that the dinosaurs in the photos looked too "plastic". However, they do seem to see Calvin's duplicates as Calvin's mom recalls sending Calvin out of the kitchen, to his room (to which the Calvin she saw replied "I'm not Calvin, I'm his duplicate!") even though Calvin was outside at the time. This is a similar dilemma to that of Hobbes' existence (see the Hobbes article).

Wagon and sled

The wagon temporarily served as a spacecraft when Calvin and Hobbes realized that the human race was laying waste to Earth by polluting it. They decided to go live on Mars, but returned soon after when they realized that the native Martians (or, "weirdos from another planet") were terrified of Earthlings. This may have been a case of rumor preceding them; the prospect of terrestrial life polluting Mars as well as Earth was a bleak one. Although this particular wagon ride did not end in a crash, it once again served as an outlet for a subject matter of importance.

Snowballs and snowmen

Calvin also builds snowmen; but these are usually grotesque, monstrous deformed creatures (e.g., two-headed snowmen, a snow monster with tentacles devouring a bunch of snowmen, a snowman who grabs another snowman's head and uses it as a bowling ball, a snowman who scoops snow cones out of the back of a dead snowman, snowmen getting hanged, a buried giant snow monster destroying other snow men or holding their heads in its hands, and a prostrate snowman seemingly beneath the parked family car, surrounded by a host of worried "snow-onlookers", etc.) In one storyline, Calvin builds a snowman and brings it to life using the power "invested in him by the mighty and awful snow demons". The snowman immediately turns evil (reminiscent of the film Frankenstein) and becomes a "deranged mutant killer monster snow goon" by giving itself two heads and three arms. The snow goon then makes copies of itself which Calvin eventually defeats. However, Calvin was caught by his parents and had to explain why he was outside when he should've been asleep (which wasn't successful).

Calvin, unlike Hobbes, thinks of snowmen as a fine art. Bill Watterson has said that this is to parody art's "pretentious blowhards". Once, out of ideas, Calvin signed the snow-covered landscape with a stick and declared all the world's snow as his own work of art, offering to sell it to Hobbes for a million dollars. Hobbes mellowly responds, "Sorry, it doesn't match my furniture," and walks away, leaving Calvin to contemplate, "The problem with being avant-garde is knowing who's putting on who."

Dinosaurs

Calvinball

The reader first encounters the game after Calvin's horrible experience with school baseball. He registers to play baseball in order to avoid being teased by the other boys. While daydreaming in the outfield, he misses the switch and ends up making an out against his own team. His classmates mock him and, when he decides to walk away, his coach calls him a "quitter." That Saturday, Calvin and Hobbes play Calvinball for apparently the first time, a game far removed from any organized sport. Even Calvin and Hobbes's own attempts to play organized sports between themselves usually deteriorate into Calvinball, as they end up inventing increasingly bizarre rules that cause whatever sport they were initially playing to spiral out of control.

In the Tenth Anniversary Book, Watterson states that the greatest number of questions he receives concern Calvinball and how to play it. He then answers the question once and for all: "People have asked how to play Calvinball. It's simple: You make up the rules as you go along."

School and homework

Also on occasion, Calvin's inability to concentrate in class is compromised by inserting the class subject into his daydream, causing him to get the right answer. This includes spelling "disaster" while crash-landing on an alien world and blurting out the right answer at a completely random moment (from his point of view). Calvin also attempts to escape his classroom rather often, these endeavors are sometimes successful, but most often futile.

It should be noted that his dislike of school does not necessarily mean that Calvin is unintelligent; the strip often depicts him as being very smart, in fact, with unusual knowledge of philosophy and odd vocabulary. Rather, Calvin seems to dislike school because of its rules and forced learning of things which he is not necessarily interested in. In one strip, Calvin's father asks why he doesn't try harder at school, considering how much he loves to learn about subjects like dinosaurs; Calvin simply replies that they don't learn about dinosaurs in school. His inability to concentrate is portrayed as more due to his active imagination than to any mental handicap. In one Sunday edition, he is called to the board to do an addition problem, but instead delivers an epic poem in several stanzas that detail his kidnapping by aliens who have "mechanic'ly removed" all his mathematical knowledge via a "brain-draining operation". One stanza:

Even then I tried to fight:

And though my enemies were many

I poked them in their compound eyes

And pulled on their antennae.

The Noodle Incident

In The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Aniversary Book, Watterson said that the Noodle Incident was a theme, much like Calvin's favorite bedtime story Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie, that he preferred to leave to the reader's imagination.

Calvin and Hobbes books

''For the complete list of books, see List of Calvin and Hobbes books.

There are eighteen Calvin and Hobbes books, published from 1987 to 2005. These include eleven collections, which form a complete archive of the newspaper strips, except for a single daily strip from November 28, 1985. (The collections do contain a strip for this date, but it is not the same strip that appeared in some newspapers. The alternate strip, a joke about Hobbes taking a bath in the washing machine, has circulated around the Internet.) "Treasuries" usually combine the two preceding collections with bonus material, and include color reprints of Sunday comics.

A complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes strips, in three hardcover volumes, with a total 1440 pages, was released on October 4, 2005, by Andrews McMeel Publishing. It also includes color prints of the art used on paperback covers, the Treasuries' extra illustrated stories and poems, and a new introduction by Bill Watterson, who is now happily teaching himself to paint. It is notable, however, that the alternate 1985 strip is still omitted, and two other strips (January 7, 1987, and November 25, 1988) have altered dialogue.

To celebrate the release, Calvin and Hobbes reruns were made available to newspapers from Sunday, September 4, 2005, through Saturday, December 31, 2005, and Bill Watterson answered a select dozen questions submitted by readers. Like current contemporary strips, weekday Calvin and Hobbes strips now appear in color print when available, instead of black and white as in their first run.

Early books were printed in smaller format in black and white that were later reproduced in twos in color in the "Treasuries" (Essential, Authoritative, and Indispensable) — except for the contents of Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. Those Sunday strips were never reprinted in color until the Complete collection was finally published in 2005. Every book since Snow Goons has been printed in a larger format with Sundays in color and weekday and Saturday strips larger than they appeared in most newspapers.

Remaining books do contain some additional content; for instance, The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book contains a long watercolor Spaceman Spiff epic not seen elsewhere until Complete, and The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book contains much original commentary from Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 contains 36 Sunday strips in color alongside Watterson's original sketches, prepared for an exhibition at The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library.

An officially licensed children's textbook entitled Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes was published as part of a limited single print-run in 1993. The book includes various Calvin and Hobbes strips together with lessons and questions to follow, such as "What do you think the principal meant when he said they had quite a file on Calvin?" (p108).

References

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External links

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''The following links were last verified 4 June 2006.

Official websites

Fan websites

• Calvin and Hobbes Hideout URL accessed March 31, 2006
• Simply Calvin and Hobbes URL accessed March 18, 2006
• Calvin and Hobbes: Magic on Paper URL accessed March 29, 2006
• The Calvin and Hobbes Album URL accessed June 3, 2006
• Michael's Calvin and Hobbes Site URL accessed June 3, 2006

Articles/Misc.

Calvin and Hobbes | Comic strips | Comics characters | Fictional pairs

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