Calvin and Hobbes was not a comic I grew up with. It was not that it had no impact on my life – when I was young I used to do fun little voice acting jobs at a recording studio, and one of them was voicing Calvin in my best attempt at an American accent – but it was never syndicated in any of the newspapers in the house, and besides, I was more inclined to read ‘The Bash Street Kids’ or ‘Minnie the Minx’ in my copy of rather brainless The Beano.
As I begun to read comics online, though, more and more of my favourite writers professed their debt to Bill Watterson, and making little references to the world of the hyperactive six-year-old and the tiger only he can see. So it finally became convenient to read The Complete Collection – something I must buy for myself – so I worked my way through all the thousands of strips that make up Calvin and Hobbes, at once a daunting task and nothing like enough.
Calvin is a headstrong, selfish and rambunctious six-year-old living in the suburban United States. The comic’s key ingredient is the way that Calvin gets lost in his fantasies and daydreams, believing them utterly until he is jerked back to reality, usually by a parent or teacher. Thus, he might believe himself transformed into a vicious dinosaur, or the brave adventurer Spaceman Spiff, or my particular favourite, a hardboiled pulp-noir detective spouting terrible but ingenious pun after pun. And of course, his favourite toy, a stuffed tiger bigger than he is, comes to life as his reasonable, often sharply sarcastic, and occasionally dangerous foil Hobbes.
What makes Calvin and Hobbes so perfect is the way that it sets its boundaries very definitely with a series of settings that become familiar: the living room, the bed, the bathroom, the garden, the school and the great outdoors. Calvin has the same teacher throughout, interacts properly with only two other kids (the girl from his neighbourhood and the school bully) and has no relatives but an uncle who comes for one visit and never appears again. Themes recur again and again: in winter, Calvin wants to hit little Suzie with a snowball, sled downhill very fast, make disturbing and hilarious snowmen and behave himself for Santa despite his mischievous nature. When the weather is better he sets up stalls selling things nobody wants but him, takes Hobbes to his treehouse for a meeting of his anti-girls club G.R.O.S.S., and torments his father by calling him at work to make him jealous of the freedom a six-year-old gets. At school, he subverts his projects and gets poor grades, longs to escape, torments Suzie with gruesome reports of what is in his lunch and tries to avoid being beaten up by the bully while still getting in smart remarks.
Deviations from these patterns are few, but provide interesting diversions, such as when there is a burglary, or when the family go on holiday. Strips centred on the parents also develop two very interesting and instantly recognisable characters. But it is the range that Watterson gets into the familiar patterns that astonishes, and marks his genius. Calvin himself is complex, constrained in a school that expects him to conform but highly literate and capable of satirising, for example, academia. It was extremely hard to get him just right, a loud, annoying brat who wants the world to revolve around him, likes causing others pain and serves as a representation of the problems of his media-obsessed, demanding and sheltered generation – and yet is extremely likeable. But it works, because we get to know him and how sweet he really is. His plots to get Suzie backfire more often than not, he shows moments of great affection towards Hobbes in particular, he apologises when put in the wrong and some people bring out his more vulnerable side, especially his babysitter. Strips where he almost wrecks his parents’ car, where he’s scared of burglars taking Hobbes and where he simply admires the beauty of nature are amongst the best.
I think my favourite strip, though, is a simple one from a Sunday (Sunday strips being longer and coloured) in which Calvin’s mother chases and tickles him to tire him out, but ends up exhausted herself. With almost no dialogue, using characters who mostly yell at one another, Watterson perfectly captures the love between parent and child.
There’s no substitute for reading the comic strips, though. They really are worth anybody’s time. Superb writing.
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