That is just two years after I burst onto the page.
Calvin and Hobbes was a major part of my childhood - I loved it. For something casually consumed on the daily at the breakfast table, it was so earnestly, so obviously, smarter than the median cultural offering. Smarter also then the local nightly news broadcasts. Smarter also than the median educational intervention I experienced through elementary and middle school. It had finished by the time I was in high school.
I still love it, but my feelings now are mixed as well.
Calvin wasn't exactly a pro-social role model for me. He was the hero of the smartest media I was acquainted with - the sharpest mouthpiece for what was going on around me and how to be alive. It was vitally important for me to live up to his disdain for schooling, his aloofness, his contrarianism. Nothing horrified eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-two year old me so much as conforming (gross) to a Susie Perkins mode of existence - smart, but seemingly oblivious or indifferent to life's contradictions and hypocrisies.
Some thirty years later I understand that a person can move pragmatically, without self-harm or self-righteousness, through life's contradictions and hypocrisies without being oblivious or indifferent. Who knew?
Reading some of the compendiums with Watersons commentary are a really interesting look into how things changed over the years and an insight into comic publishing
I think Calvin was of a common archetype of that era. The sarcastic, mildly anti-heroic protagonist. And I think that archetype did all of us who grew up in that era and imbibed the culture were done a disservice. I, too, have found my way to respecting and admiring the pragmatic, the persistent, and even the earnest among us over the smart alecs and the sarcastic wits.
Cartman typically had the most and funniest jokes and almost always got his way. He exercised power over others and only extremely rarely did the way he acted have negative consequences for him. That's a pretty attractive role model for the type of kid who's going to watch South Park. Role models don't have to be consciously selected, that's kind of the point, you see success and you imitate it. South Park is an especially stupid show but you'll see this in plenty of TV - it's basically the sitcom model: some character will be an asshole to everyone around them, but the show will frame it as a joke and consequence-free. The writers want you to think that character is funny and you probably do if you continue watching, so if you want to be a funny person you probably start acting like an asshole. Most adults can't see that for what it is - kids are screwed.
And South Park was (is?) on TV during daytime hours, of course kids watched it.
The bottom line is, Cartman got the biggest laughs. He modeled that a certain type of behavior resulted in certain outcomes. Kids aren’t stupid. They see right through the overt morality (“he’s a jerk and he got his comeuppance “) to the revealed truths: being an asshole, in some contexts, can be very funny.
With regard to Cartman, that critique is valid. With regard to Calvin, he is there to be the foil to Hobbes, who dispenses the wisdom. Calvin and Hobbes is a transmission of wisdom. Moreso in the later years, admittedly, but even early on. There is such a thing as the fool archetype. Frodo in LOTR, Emmet in the LEGO movie, and so on. These characters who know nothing, and are demonstrably unfit for the tasks that life demands of them, are not meant to be admired for their ignorance, rather it is their ignorance that allows the writer to send them on a journey to learn a lesson that is valuable to the audience. This is a bit harder to pinpoint in Calvin and Hobbes due to the episodic nature of a weekly strip, where the plot resets each time and the punchline almost invariably involves Calvin reverting to some stubborn point of view or refusing to learn a lesson. Yet if you read the works from beginning to end in the anthology, you can see a progression in both Calvin's attitude and the subject matter on Watterson's mind. The theme is maturation. To critique Calvin for being all that you said is to miss the point. Which, if you were a child reading them at the time (as I was!) nobody can blame you for. It might have been recieved better if your parents had been party to the reading of the strips, so they could bring forward the subtext. But anyway, it is not accurate to say that Calvin and Hobbes glorifies the anti-hero, sarcastic, childishness. Calvin is constantly lampooned and presented as being the cause of his own suffering for refusing to learn.
I was going to comment something similar. I think I'm about the same age as the commenter grew up reading C&H, and also had a disaffected attitude. I don't think it was Calvin that made me that way, but the broader media at the time. Heck, most kids at my school did not read it but the general way to be cool was to be aloof.
I think it was a hangover from Gen-X and the 80's. Ferris Bueller was pretty aloof and angst'd to the gills wasn't he?
Huh, I'm basically the same age as you but only started reading it as a teenager. It was pretty obvious to me that Calvin thought too highly of himself and that Hobbes was the sensible one. Like, the punchline of many of these comics is him being wrong about something but too stubborn to admit it in a funny way.
I’m the same age and also read C&H voraciously. Looking back I was (to a point) blueprinted on the kid, but mostly by virtue of being a single child, smart and alienated from most of my peers at school. I wish Susie gave me the time of day. Calvin wasn’t a role model, he was an accurate portrayal. (To a point)
I see what you're getting at, and your sentiment is thoughtfully expressed, but come on... it's Calvin and Hobbes! It's part of that rarefied echelon of media that taps into something true about the human condition. Calvin doesn't need to be a manual for how to live your life - it's enough to be an island you can sometimes visit when you're in a Calvin mood.
Well said. In fact Calvin shouldn’t be a manual for life, I think. What makes it so funny is we know that Calvin is way off base all the time, but he’s got a great imagination and we’ve all struggled in the same ways, with the same things, and wish we could just wander off with our imaginary tiger and leave the world’s problems behind, too.
They’re not supposed to be pro-social. The characters are supposed to represent the philosophers, John Calvin (predestination) and Thomas Hobbes (man is an animal). Watterson is probably making fun of them.
Watterson explicitly stated that the names have no relation to the characters' personalities or philosophical views. As someone familiar with John Calvin's views and writings, I can say safely that Calvin is not much in any way similar in personality or spirit to anything John Calvin ever taught or expressed. At best, Watterson is projecting the typical libertine caricature of John Calvin as a cantankerous and disagreeable curmudgeon onto the character. John Calvin was in reality quite progressive for his time, and by all impressions did all that he did out of love for those around them in line with a plain reading of scripture. But to see him that way requires nuance that seems to be lost on the anti-religious.
Disagreeing with the idea that your fate has already been sealed no matter what, and that you have no real agency in the end has nothing to do with being anti-religious. Furthermore, I am not anti-religious
You know, your comment reminds me of something my wife and I were talking about. We have been starting to let our child have a little more screen time and choose what he wants to watch (within the parameters we set).
Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Then we wonder why kids adopt those attitudes. It's simply because mimic what they see. And worse yet, when they see it in movie/show form, they think those attitudes are cool and relatable.
Try the PBS Kids app. The shows are consistently cast with good role-model children and adults, without being preachy. Many episodes show how to resolve mistakes, frustration, and conflict in beneficial ways.
In comparison, the behavior in the kids shows from other producers (Disney, Nickelodeon, etc.) sometimes presents nasty behavior and name-calling as either inevitable, or something that's "someone else's problem": the instigator, if they're punished at all, might suffer the wrath of an authority figure, or simply bad karma.
My intent when choosing shows is not to hide the existence of bad behavior from children, but to teach them how to deal with it.
(My children also read Calvin and Hobbes. And watch those less-wholesome shows. And binge-watch MrBeast when I'm not around...)
I watched Home Alone last year and the characters call each other names constantly. It's funny for sure, but no wonder me and my friends had such filthy mouths as kids. You grow up on that and sitcoms where the characters just rip on each other. It's so strange to watch as an adult.
I grew up in the seventies, we didn’t have the “filthy mouthed kids” media examples until Bad News Bears…however, prior to that, even without examples we still managed to be pretty filthy mouthed kids organically.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Although there are definitely a ton of kids shows that I find 100% garbage and would never let my kids watch under any circumstances, none of the 'name-brand' kids movies I've seen in the past 10 years struck me as unacceptably negative in the way you describe.
On the contrary, I get the impression that at least some of these movies are attempting to depict feelings and situations that some kids are feeling in a way that helps them understand 1) they're not alone and 2) their feelings or situations aren't wrong or abnormal.
Like, I took my kids to see Elio when it came out. BAM, right off the bat, dead parents. Anger. Frustration. Fear. Power struggles with parental figures.
This is all intentional—to the point that it's formulaic. A 2021 study found that slightly over 61% of the 155 animated kids features of the last ~80 years had no mention of the child protagonist's biological parents. There are a lot of reasons for this. The simplest are that it's way easier to come up with challenges and conflict for the protag(s) when their parents aren't around.
A more charitable reason is that there are all too many kids who, well, do have absent or fucked up parents. But it doesn't have to be that specific case either—any kid eventually has feelings of anger, fear and frustration, and seeing depictions of this in stories is important (for everyone, of any age, at any time).
I overall doubt that watching those stories causes kids to act angry and frustrated even when they're not angry and frustrated. I'm well aware of how profoundly mimetic human children are (and why that's important), but it doesn't happen with everything 100% of the time.
But this is also age-dependent in various ways. An 8-year-old can absorb a movie depiction of a fight between child and parent in a way that a 3-year-old can't. Are some toddlers going to act out because they watched that? Maybe? Probably?
Anyway, it's tricky to have these discussions because every child is different, even though there are broad anthropological patterns to humanity. But I've been more impressed than annoyed with lots of animated kids movies that I expected to loathe.
My mother used to call it the "Disney story," due to it's utter prevalence in their media. Be it death or divorce, seems like you cant throw a rock at the Disney catalog without hitting it
This is interesting; I always assumed that the Grimm's tales and all kinds of folklore throughout cultures and history were responding to anxieties about, say, super-high rates of infant death.
It would be, in a way, hilarious if it was all just lazy writing the entire time.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up.
I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
The TL;DW is that Bluey is a kids show that not only recognizes that the parents will likely be in the room while the show is on and therefore will occasionally have lines that are meant for them, but will actually tackle tough topics that children and their families may be dealing with. For example, in one episode, Bluey's mom is despairing because Bluey isn't reaching development milestones when he should be, she's blaming herself, and another character comes to console her, and the character looks directly towards the viewer and says "You're doing great!"
I'm almost tempted to actually watch the show even though I don't have kids.
> Bluey isn't reaching development milestones when he should be
She should be. Bluey and Bingo are sisters.
The show is extremely good, and when my kids were around that age, we all watched together. Hard to explain to your 6 year old why you are bawling your eyes out, but it does lead to some important conversations. It’s also an inspiration to be a better parent, particularly for Dads. Thank you Bandit.
I don’t know if any of this stuff will hit if you aren’t a parent. It hits right into the heart of all those things people tell you “you can’t understand if you don’t have kids”.
It’s an objectively good show though, I found myself watching it even when the kids weren’t around. There are still some episodes I can’t watch; but you’d need to have had those experiences to understand.
Dr Angela Collier just did a video on children's tv. She has some good recommendations. Evidently before she became an astrophysicist she got a degree in education. Who knew?
Don't forget that in most shows where kids are the main-characters, adults in general (and particularly parents) are either absent or less mature than the kids. This is the easiest way to make the kids shine, but certainly communicates a particular message. I really respected Netflix's The Baby Sitters Club for not falling into that trap.
As always, the home model is what has greater influence than any tv show. If parents are also behaving as in the TV shows then the shows simply serve as confirmation bias to what the children observe.
I noticed that when I adopted a loving, quieter tone, and truly focused on do as i do vs do as i say attitudes, my children began to reject the "norms" shown on the tv shows. Today my children remark about how their friends act at their homes and towards their parents, and we have discussions about it.
That said, I definitely had the problem you describe, but it was resolved by focusing on consequences of actions and being ready to follow through on punishments (much like you did). Combined with the do as i do attitude, those punishments were ultimately punishments for me as well. You are being a terorrizing little bad ass? ok no TV. But then this means I can't watch TV because then they might watch TV while in the same room as me. Mutual pain.
Peppa Pig is at least funny. The one that pushed me over the edge wrt to behavior modeling was Caillou. My god people have some self respect as parents. You have to have to create some boundaries for children, not just knee-jerk syrupy-sweet coddling from dawn til dusk.
I find Peppa Pig has multiple layers and the stereotypes of the pig parents are actually targeted to entertain the human parents when they join watching.
I don't have kids so I never thought about it from that angle, but I really dislike how yell-y so many modern animated shows are. Couldn't make it through a single episode of Rick and Morty.
I'd never thought how it might impact kids, but now that you mention it, I can only dislike the trend more.
Jhonen Vasquez was previously best known for Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, an insanely dark graphic novel. I'm still stunned that the powers that be thought he should write an animated children's show. That said, I love Invader Zim. Taquitos!
Yes, sorry, I had a non-sequitur between my two sentences. The first was about modern animated shows. The second was about how dialog in shows (not necessarily Rick and Morty) could affect kids.
Regardless, I also highly doubt that Rick and Morty is only consumed by people who are no longer susceptible to getting cues on how to interact with others from media.
Human beings yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards each other, seems like a human universal, rather than something children would only learn to do from watching recent tv and movies.
One thing I always notice after trips abroad is the extent to which American newscasters are practically yelling at their audience. This is a stark contrast to many European countries, where the tone is calmer and more measured.
from my familiarity with the writing of past generations and even past civilizations it seems reasonable to conclude that contradictions and hypocrisies are generally understood to exit. I don't think it's just down to the young people.
well one obvious contradiction is if you want peace prepare for war, unfortunately Bart Simpson's paradox doesn't seem to be in the commonly bemoaned list and I don't remember the rest of the paradoxes in that episode.
IMO, Watterson stopped at just the right time to preserve his legacy and keep the strip associated with childlike wonder and innocence. In the last years of C&H there was a certain curmudgeonliness creeping in, as Waterson started to mock modern commerce and art. I think the cartoonist was naturally growing older and more disillusioned, and his strip faintly started to sound like Calvin’s dad instead of Calvin.
At least based on some of the things he's written in some of the anthologies, it seems like a lot of that disillusionment was not just because of age, but rather because of his battles with the publishers and what not that were pushing him to make changes that he felt would compromise the integrity of the strip. A lot of the comics include subtle jabs about corporate greed, artistic integrity, etc. because he was actively fighting with the corporations that distributed his strip over such matters...
Still, 100% agreed that he stopped at the right time, both because of the creeping cynicism, but also simply because he was running out of fresh ideas...
I'm currently working through the Complete Calvin and Hobbes with my 9 year old, and he had these jabs at commercialism throughout, though it might have been sharper towards the end, but he was already jaded by art in 1985 as a 27 year old.
He had dreamed of being a cartoonist from childhood (when he was 8 he wrote Charles Shulz of Peanuts who wrote him back and it changed his life). He had actually majored in Political Science at Kenyon College (class of '80) because he thought that political cartooning was going to be his route in. It was not. He was a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post briefly before they fired him, then he worked for an ad agency and freelanced a bit before Universal Press Syndicate signed him on for Calvin and Hobbes. But, even at 27 when he started working for UPS, he understood the pressure of the professional art world and was cynical about it.
Apparently he lived a miserable life for the last few years of his work. He had been injured in a bike accident and it terrified him that he would be injured in such a way that he could no longer draw (1) so he basically stopped going out, stopped doing anything that could possibly harm his ability to earn money, stopped doing anything that might bring joy to his life. He lived a recluse for several years, before deciding to just quit, then he and his wife Melissa adopted a child and gave her a good life.
1: Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was the editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times when, in 1991, he crushed his right hand attaching a snow-plow to his truck, and he had to retire. I think that incident is what inspired this fear, the timelines match up. But of course, Watterson is famously private and so this is conjecture.
I looked it up in Merriam, it said origin, unknown. HOWEVER: cur, from the 13th-century, can mean: 'a surly or cowardly fellow'. THEN: dudgeon , from the 15th, can mean 'a fit or state of indignation'.
Why so often an older man? Need we look farther than Dickens' Scrooge?
Look up some crazy sounding 20+ character word, takes three steps, and then you get a definition of the sub-sub-sub word and it says ".... blah blah, derived from the Greek base <abc>- and then also the Latin base -<xyz>", and you realize you had no chance at getting it from any kind of first principles or anything.
For what it's worth, the first two steps in your lookup would come naturally to a native speaker- it's a suffix formation similar to e.g. "cleanliness" and "friendliness".
"Curmudgeon" itself is interesting, because while it's not particularly common, I actually think a lot of native English speakers would recognize it because it's got a lot of character- for some reason, the way it feels to say and the way it sounds almost has some of the character of the meaning.
If memory serves, Waterson said the later years were colored by his feelings from dealing with publishers. One of the most memorable comics for me is one where Calvin ends up in bed after resisting his parents' bedtime commands. In the final panel he bitterly declares that clearly his desires have no impact on his outcomes.
George Carlin, in my opinion, followed a similar arc. In the end he was just ranting for an hour. I appreciated his perspective (and delivery) but it was a lot more nihilistic, less funny.
I'm sure it was also for his own sake/sanity. He took two ~9-month sabbaticals toward the last half, which was not the norm for cartoonists at the time.
What a profound and beautiful comic. The art. The storytelling. The expanse of Calvin's vivid imagination.
Every day, I have a reminder to think of three things for which I'm grateful. I was just trying to find the third for today when I saw this headline.
I am grateful that I love my tattoos (and have no regret, which is the risk of tattoos), one of which is Stupendous Man. He was the first and it's because CnH holds such a special place in my heart. The comic largely shaped my childhood.
Bill Waterson had the integrity not to license his work, preferring that the reader not have the characters spoiled. He opted not to make boatloads of money in making this decision (cough, garfield, snoopy). He also declared that Sunday papers could print his comic unbroken or they could drop him and this allowed for truly magnificent art pieces where stories could be told in new ways. His integrity is legendary in the field.
"Calvin and Company" by DomNX, wherein Calvin and Susie have twins named after Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir --- art not fully realized/up to the task, and again, all a bit too obvious
There was also one simply heart-breaking one, where Calvin has cancer, gets a decrepit Hobbes out of storage, and gifts him to a troubled grandchild, but not finding it on searching....
The thing is, laughing at problems, while cathartic, isn't actually inspiring folks to actually understand/solve problems/make the world a better place.... I'm reminded of a comic from childhood where a child sees duck hunters as part of the reason why a forest is clearcut for a development, instead of the reason why such land is preserved (the Pa. State Game Commission manages over 1.5 million acres) or, maybe I'm just overly pessimistic this morning because of intractable problems where people choose wrongly, mostly through not understanding the problem/ignorance/lack of sympathy for others --- classic example, drivers in cars who get upset because following a cyclist causes them slow down on their way to a red light --- rather a shame that the strips featuring Calvin's father as a cyclist weren't didactic so as to show/discuss that sort of thing, rather than going for the laugh.
> There was also one simply heart-breaking one, where Calvin has cancer, gets a decrepit Hobbes out of storage, and gifts him to a troubled grandchild, but not finding it on searching....
Are you sure this was a comic? It's a story someone wrote, available on Scribd.
The weird thing is, I distinctly remember art to go with it.... maybe I was conflating the other homages which I found. Drat that uncertain organic memory.
When I used to read fiction, I would visualise the story as a movie. I don't know if there's a name for this effect. Sometimes I can rewind the story in my head as a movie. Maybe that's whats going on? I don't know.
Gene Wolfe wrote a story titled Petting Zoo, and here is the introduction he wrote for it:
> Petting Zoo is a favorite story of David Hartwell's, the master editor who edited this book and most of my others. Do you like dinosaurs? I loved them when I was a kid, and I've noticed that Hobbes' buddy Calvin loves them at least as much. Perhaps David feels the same way.
The comic "Frazz" is also often compared to Calvin and Hobbes (as if Frazz the janitor is an adult Calvin), there's a long section on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazz
My wife and I will actually be going to an exhibition of Watterson's work this weekend—we're lucky enough to live not too far from Cooperstown, NY, where the Fenimore House Art Museum has the exhibition running all this fall.
As an '80s kid, Calvin and Hobbes ran for almost my entire childhood, and we have a number of the collections. I never fail to be impressed either by Watterson's talent, both in the art and in choosing the right words to say, nor by his integrity and restraint, both in refusing to allow his work to be merchandised and in choosing to stop when he did—when he felt he had said all he came to say.
Many more artists of all types could take so many lessons from him. Even some that are already great. He is a very humble man, but he stands among the legends of our time.
We were there a few weekends ago. The C&H exhibit had quite the crowd!
It is largely a collection of original strips. You won't see anything new or original, that is not in one or more of the books. But it is interesting to see his process, to note where he made mistakes, to listen to everyone chuckle at one strip or another, and to see the progression of the characters and artist as you walk through the lifetime of the comic.
You might as well torrent/etc the books, no sense with using web middlemen who get takedowns because they don't have the rights either. Direct piracy gives you a better experience than indirect piracy.
(You should also buy real copies if you still can, because they're great.)
One thing that always struck me about Calvin & Hobbes is how well it ages. The humor lands when you’re a kid, but the subtext only becomes clear as an adult.
Watterson managed to keep that dual perspective without letting the strip drift into cynicism, which is rare for long-running comics.
Watterson serves as one of the symbols of an era when selling out was considered a great sin. It makes me laugh how thoroughly that idea - that selling out is bad - has been defeated.
That being said, I'm sure he would've done it the same way today.
As a kid, I had no idea they would someday print books, so each day I cut out the strip from the newspaper and paste it into a book. I’m sure my mom threw it away decades ago, but I wish I still had it.
The title got mangled from the grammatically correct "40 years ago, Calvin and Hobbes' raucous adventures burst onto the comics page" (though some of us learned "Hobbes's" in elementary school) to "40 years ago, Calvin and Hobbes' burst onto the page" (the ' definitely doesn't belong).
Calvin and Hobbes was the only comic I ever truly loved and collected. All of the books are well-worn from my childhood. They sat on a shelf for a couple of decades, and now I get to enjoy watching my kids fall in love with them too.
I don’t think I fully appreciated the range of humor and topics Bill Watterson explored when I was young. Plenty of strips are perfect for my 9 year old; she was in fits of laughter just yesterday at Hobbes’s physical comedy and the elementary school drama with Susie and Mrs Wormwood. But other strips are much more intellectual, touching on politics, life, and morality. I appreciate these more now as well, because they often spark deeper conversations with my kids when they ask me to explain them.
I doubt he’ll ever see it, but thank you, Bill, for giving multiple generations so much laughter.
I was actually just thinking of that "cow milk" one the other day. I remember when I read C&H as a kid thinking that one was absolutely hilarious and oh so true. Then I realized, now that I'm older and more experienced in the world, and have had kids, that the idea of drinking cow milk is not actually that far-fetched. Udders look weird, sure, but you know what they are.
In other words, it's kind of amazing that Watterson was able to put himself in the mind of a child so well for that strip.
C&H was the first time that I realized how authenticity resonates with people. I think people love C&H because they recognize Calvin, Hobbes, Suzie, Biff, the parents (or even Rosalyn) in themselves. Calvin often said the things that we thought only ourselves were thinking (remember the strip where Calvin is selling swift kicks in the pants for 10c because the world clearly needs it?).
Now, I see this technique work so well for business and political leaders, comics, social commentators, etc. It is a very effective technique to capture the hearts of your audience.
Thirty-two years ago, I got them tattooed onto my leg, the day after I arrived at Ft. Bragg, NC. It's faded and blurred out from the waxing and waning of muscle tone in my calf, and sunlight, and the occasional scrape from crashing the bike. But it's been part of me for so long, the only real option left is to get it lasered-down and redone.
My role model as a parent. I had the why are old pictures in black and white conversation with my kids almost word for word. It wasn’t until they were in fourth grade that they learned that the world didn’t used to be black and white.
I think they still believe what I told them about how they determine weight limits for bridges though.
We didn't have C&H in France when I was a kid in the 80s. I discovered it at the university through a German girlfriend who said that she's kniwn it for some time already.
It is interesting how some random things from far away just used to catch in a country, but not in the neighbour one.
Our nr 1 hero at that time was Goldorak - everyone who is in their 50s today can sing the intro song (at least the first line) and knows a few of the attacks. Girls had Candy but we were absolutely watching it as well (I actually don't know if girls were watching Goldorak, I need to ask)
My personal favorite and my grandfather’s personal favorite (“What’s that boy and his tiger going to do next?”). My son learned to read at age 5 using Calvin and Hobbes books (lots of funny conversations of the form, “Dad, what does X mean?” where X was a rather grown-up concept of some sort because Watterson had a great vocabulary and wasn’t afraid to use it). Good times. I wish it still ran.
I always loved that Bill Watterson gave Calvin an extensive vocabulary. He didn't dumb it down. Instead, he allowed young readers like me to learn new words as I read along.
I was born in 92 and thus didn't start reading them until after the original run of Calvin and Hobbes, but I discovered these comics via book collections at the library and became OBSESSED.
I am so incredibly happy that Watterson never "sold out" and gave away film/animation rights to his characters. They are perfect the way they are.
It's curious that of all the famous American syndicated strips, only The Far Side, and maybe Garfield, seem to have bridged the Atlantic divide to the UK.
Maybe C&H and Peanuts were just too rooted in US suburban family culture. Dilbert had a niche following here and beyond that I struggle to even name another strip.
Strangely, The Far Side is even known here and there on the European continent in translation, even though so many of the jokes depend on English puns that the translators don’t even attempt to work with. The result is weird and inexplicable, but that creates a humor of its own, even if it is different from what Gary Larson intended.
Bill also ended the strip exactly ten years after he started. Frankly, I appreciated his honesty and integrity around the strip. The comic stuck around just long enough to leave a lasting impression but never too long to overstay its welcome.
smbc-comics has done a whole slew of C+H inspired strips with two kids out having a deep but strage philosophical conversation. It's very difficult to actually find anything you're looking for in the SMBC archives though... E.g. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/qualia
It nearly breaks me, too. It breaks me because it stigmatizes medication that has helped make me function in a world not designed for me. It breaks me because it stigmatizes medication that on average is going to let me enjoy being on this earth ~7 more years than I otherwise would be.
I'm there with you on that, but... there's a time and place for it. I hate that our schools are designed around "sit down, shut up, and toil in silence for a few hours straight", and treat those of us with ADHD as mutants which have to be medicated to fit in.
Montessori Method schools, my friend. Or Waldorf. There's likely a school near you that is public and uses these methods. If not, there are scholarships too. It's not for everyone, but for all the Calvins it's a godsend.
We sent our kids through Montessori. Unfortunately, in the city where we lived when they were elementary school age, Montessori went through 4th grade before the kids had to go back to regular or religious schools. That was a rough transition.
But I still think that's a sucky situation for the 95% of kids who go to the nearest public school. Their days shouldn't be awful just because their parents didn't have the time, money, or awareness to consider non-default options.
That is just two years after I burst onto the page.
Calvin and Hobbes was a major part of my childhood - I loved it. For something casually consumed on the daily at the breakfast table, it was so earnestly, so obviously, smarter than the median cultural offering. Smarter also then the local nightly news broadcasts. Smarter also than the median educational intervention I experienced through elementary and middle school. It had finished by the time I was in high school.
I still love it, but my feelings now are mixed as well.
Calvin wasn't exactly a pro-social role model for me. He was the hero of the smartest media I was acquainted with - the sharpest mouthpiece for what was going on around me and how to be alive. It was vitally important for me to live up to his disdain for schooling, his aloofness, his contrarianism. Nothing horrified eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-two year old me so much as conforming (gross) to a Susie Perkins mode of existence - smart, but seemingly oblivious or indifferent to life's contradictions and hypocrisies.
Some thirty years later I understand that a person can move pragmatically, without self-harm or self-righteousness, through life's contradictions and hypocrisies without being oblivious or indifferent. Who knew?
The first C&H comic strip compared to the last one:
https://imgur.com/a/semJX
:.)
That last one still makes me tear up. What a beautiful way to exit the stage.
I agree. It was graceful, humble, optimistic, and memorable. I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone else to have pulled that off in ending something.
Star Trek The Next Generation's All Good Things comes to mind.
Fun fact - Hobbes eventually lost those little paw pads
Reading some of the compendiums with Watersons commentary are a really interesting look into how things changed over the years and an insight into comic publishing
I think Calvin was of a common archetype of that era. The sarcastic, mildly anti-heroic protagonist. And I think that archetype did all of us who grew up in that era and imbibed the culture were done a disservice. I, too, have found my way to respecting and admiring the pragmatic, the persistent, and even the earnest among us over the smart alecs and the sarcastic wits.
It could have been so much worse, and did become so. Late 90s / early 00s had Cartman being a role model to kids.
Cartman was not a role model for kids, he was portrayed as a lazy, fat, and stupid asshole in an edgy comedy show not intended for children.
Cartman typically had the most and funniest jokes and almost always got his way. He exercised power over others and only extremely rarely did the way he acted have negative consequences for him. That's a pretty attractive role model for the type of kid who's going to watch South Park. Role models don't have to be consciously selected, that's kind of the point, you see success and you imitate it. South Park is an especially stupid show but you'll see this in plenty of TV - it's basically the sitcom model: some character will be an asshole to everyone around them, but the show will frame it as a joke and consequence-free. The writers want you to think that character is funny and you probably do if you continue watching, so if you want to be a funny person you probably start acting like an asshole. Most adults can't see that for what it is - kids are screwed.
And South Park was (is?) on TV during daytime hours, of course kids watched it.
He was, factually, a role model for kids. I was there. Everybody watched South Park, everybody thought Cartman was awesome.
It's absurd to even deny it, Cartman was admired and emulated by a whole generation.
The bottom line is, Cartman got the biggest laughs. He modeled that a certain type of behavior resulted in certain outcomes. Kids aren’t stupid. They see right through the overt morality (“he’s a jerk and he got his comeuppance “) to the revealed truths: being an asshole, in some contexts, can be very funny.
Whether or not he was intended as one is irrelevant.
Vs. the fine, upstanding young Beavis and Butt-Head were from the early 90's...
Hey, Butt-Head became a senator in his later years: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
With regard to Cartman, that critique is valid. With regard to Calvin, he is there to be the foil to Hobbes, who dispenses the wisdom. Calvin and Hobbes is a transmission of wisdom. Moreso in the later years, admittedly, but even early on. There is such a thing as the fool archetype. Frodo in LOTR, Emmet in the LEGO movie, and so on. These characters who know nothing, and are demonstrably unfit for the tasks that life demands of them, are not meant to be admired for their ignorance, rather it is their ignorance that allows the writer to send them on a journey to learn a lesson that is valuable to the audience. This is a bit harder to pinpoint in Calvin and Hobbes due to the episodic nature of a weekly strip, where the plot resets each time and the punchline almost invariably involves Calvin reverting to some stubborn point of view or refusing to learn a lesson. Yet if you read the works from beginning to end in the anthology, you can see a progression in both Calvin's attitude and the subject matter on Watterson's mind. The theme is maturation. To critique Calvin for being all that you said is to miss the point. Which, if you were a child reading them at the time (as I was!) nobody can blame you for. It might have been recieved better if your parents had been party to the reading of the strips, so they could bring forward the subtext. But anyway, it is not accurate to say that Calvin and Hobbes glorifies the anti-hero, sarcastic, childishness. Calvin is constantly lampooned and presented as being the cause of his own suffering for refusing to learn.
I was going to comment something similar. I think I'm about the same age as the commenter grew up reading C&H, and also had a disaffected attitude. I don't think it was Calvin that made me that way, but the broader media at the time. Heck, most kids at my school did not read it but the general way to be cool was to be aloof.
I think it was a hangover from Gen-X and the 80's. Ferris Bueller was pretty aloof and angst'd to the gills wasn't he?
I am earnestly inclined to double down on smart alecs and sarcastic wits as a matter of pragmatism.
Ok, but will you do so persistently?
Huh, I'm basically the same age as you but only started reading it as a teenager. It was pretty obvious to me that Calvin thought too highly of himself and that Hobbes was the sensible one. Like, the punchline of many of these comics is him being wrong about something but too stubborn to admit it in a funny way.
But Hobbes is just another side of Calvin himself...
Watterson explicitly left that up to head-canon, so I disagree on a personal level but without dismissing your interpretation
I’m the same age and also read C&H voraciously. Looking back I was (to a point) blueprinted on the kid, but mostly by virtue of being a single child, smart and alienated from most of my peers at school. I wish Susie gave me the time of day. Calvin wasn’t a role model, he was an accurate portrayal. (To a point)
I see what you're getting at, and your sentiment is thoughtfully expressed, but come on... it's Calvin and Hobbes! It's part of that rarefied echelon of media that taps into something true about the human condition. Calvin doesn't need to be a manual for how to live your life - it's enough to be an island you can sometimes visit when you're in a Calvin mood.
Well said. In fact Calvin shouldn’t be a manual for life, I think. What makes it so funny is we know that Calvin is way off base all the time, but he’s got a great imagination and we’ve all struggled in the same ways, with the same things, and wish we could just wander off with our imaginary tiger and leave the world’s problems behind, too.
They’re not supposed to be pro-social. The characters are supposed to represent the philosophers, John Calvin (predestination) and Thomas Hobbes (man is an animal). Watterson is probably making fun of them.
Watterson explicitly stated that the names have no relation to the characters' personalities or philosophical views. As someone familiar with John Calvin's views and writings, I can say safely that Calvin is not much in any way similar in personality or spirit to anything John Calvin ever taught or expressed. At best, Watterson is projecting the typical libertine caricature of John Calvin as a cantankerous and disagreeable curmudgeon onto the character. John Calvin was in reality quite progressive for his time, and by all impressions did all that he did out of love for those around them in line with a plain reading of scripture. But to see him that way requires nuance that seems to be lost on the anti-religious.
Disagreeing with the idea that your fate has already been sealed no matter what, and that you have no real agency in the end has nothing to do with being anti-religious. Furthermore, I am not anti-religious
The joke is that Calvin is aligned with Hobbes’s philosophy and vice versa.
No? Like d-us-vb said, the characters' names have nothing to do with their personalities.
Yes, they occasionally discuss philosophy.
No, that does not mean that the philosophy being discussed has any relation to John Calvin or Thomas Hobbes.
The joke is that they're a kid and a stuffed tiger named after philosophers.
Well said. I feel similarly despite being born about 15 years later.
You know, your comment reminds me of something my wife and I were talking about. We have been starting to let our child have a little more screen time and choose what he wants to watch (within the parameters we set).
Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Then we wonder why kids adopt those attitudes. It's simply because mimic what they see. And worse yet, when they see it in movie/show form, they think those attitudes are cool and relatable.
Try the PBS Kids app. The shows are consistently cast with good role-model children and adults, without being preachy. Many episodes show how to resolve mistakes, frustration, and conflict in beneficial ways.
In comparison, the behavior in the kids shows from other producers (Disney, Nickelodeon, etc.) sometimes presents nasty behavior and name-calling as either inevitable, or something that's "someone else's problem": the instigator, if they're punished at all, might suffer the wrath of an authority figure, or simply bad karma.
My intent when choosing shows is not to hide the existence of bad behavior from children, but to teach them how to deal with it.
(My children also read Calvin and Hobbes. And watch those less-wholesome shows. And binge-watch MrBeast when I'm not around...)
> Try the PBS Kids app
Great recommendation. Angela Collier has a recent piece on kids' television and PBS in particular that is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DGyatqN63RZ4
there is a reason why they call TV programming.
I watched Home Alone last year and the characters call each other names constantly. It's funny for sure, but no wonder me and my friends had such filthy mouths as kids. You grow up on that and sitcoms where the characters just rip on each other. It's so strange to watch as an adult.
I grew up in the seventies, we didn’t have the “filthy mouthed kids” media examples until Bad News Bears…however, prior to that, even without examples we still managed to be pretty filthy mouthed kids organically.
Which came first—the chicken or the egg?
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Although there are definitely a ton of kids shows that I find 100% garbage and would never let my kids watch under any circumstances, none of the 'name-brand' kids movies I've seen in the past 10 years struck me as unacceptably negative in the way you describe.
On the contrary, I get the impression that at least some of these movies are attempting to depict feelings and situations that some kids are feeling in a way that helps them understand 1) they're not alone and 2) their feelings or situations aren't wrong or abnormal.
Like, I took my kids to see Elio when it came out. BAM, right off the bat, dead parents. Anger. Frustration. Fear. Power struggles with parental figures.
This is all intentional—to the point that it's formulaic. A 2021 study found that slightly over 61% of the 155 animated kids features of the last ~80 years had no mention of the child protagonist's biological parents. There are a lot of reasons for this. The simplest are that it's way easier to come up with challenges and conflict for the protag(s) when their parents aren't around.
A more charitable reason is that there are all too many kids who, well, do have absent or fucked up parents. But it doesn't have to be that specific case either—any kid eventually has feelings of anger, fear and frustration, and seeing depictions of this in stories is important (for everyone, of any age, at any time).
I overall doubt that watching those stories causes kids to act angry and frustrated even when they're not angry and frustrated. I'm well aware of how profoundly mimetic human children are (and why that's important), but it doesn't happen with everything 100% of the time.
But this is also age-dependent in various ways. An 8-year-old can absorb a movie depiction of a fight between child and parent in a way that a 3-year-old can't. Are some toddlers going to act out because they watched that? Maybe? Probably?
Anyway, it's tricky to have these discussions because every child is different, even though there are broad anthropological patterns to humanity. But I've been more impressed than annoyed with lots of animated kids movies that I expected to loathe.
Once you realize the "dead parent trick" you see it everywhere (with variations of single parent, etc).
It makes things like Bluey stand out - wow, a show that is entertaining and fun where you don't have to kill one or more parents to make it work!
My mother used to call it the "Disney story," due to it's utter prevalence in their media. Be it death or divorce, seems like you cant throw a rock at the Disney catalog without hitting it
Many of the fairy tales have it too. Maybe its something deeper common to humanity
This is interesting; I always assumed that the Grimm's tales and all kinds of folklore throughout cultures and history were responding to anxieties about, say, super-high rates of infant death.
It would be, in a way, hilarious if it was all just lazy writing the entire time.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up.
I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
> Bluey is the saving grace there
I somehow had never heard about Bluey until TheOdd1sOut (YouTuber who does hilarious 10-15 minute video on slice-of-life topics) did a video about it.
https://youtu.be/nEQHiJVH79o
The TL;DW is that Bluey is a kids show that not only recognizes that the parents will likely be in the room while the show is on and therefore will occasionally have lines that are meant for them, but will actually tackle tough topics that children and their families may be dealing with. For example, in one episode, Bluey's mom is despairing because Bluey isn't reaching development milestones when he should be, she's blaming herself, and another character comes to console her, and the character looks directly towards the viewer and says "You're doing great!"
I'm almost tempted to actually watch the show even though I don't have kids.
> Bluey isn't reaching development milestones when he should be
She should be. Bluey and Bingo are sisters.
The show is extremely good, and when my kids were around that age, we all watched together. Hard to explain to your 6 year old why you are bawling your eyes out, but it does lead to some important conversations. It’s also an inspiration to be a better parent, particularly for Dads. Thank you Bandit.
I don’t know if any of this stuff will hit if you aren’t a parent. It hits right into the heart of all those things people tell you “you can’t understand if you don’t have kids”.
It’s an objectively good show though, I found myself watching it even when the kids weren’t around. There are still some episodes I can’t watch; but you’d need to have had those experiences to understand.
Dr Angela Collier just did a video on children's tv. She has some good recommendations. Evidently before she became an astrophysicist she got a degree in education. Who knew?
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyatqN63RZ4
Don't forget that in most shows where kids are the main-characters, adults in general (and particularly parents) are either absent or less mature than the kids. This is the easiest way to make the kids shine, but certainly communicates a particular message. I really respected Netflix's The Baby Sitters Club for not falling into that trap.
Yes - that's a really good way of putting it.
As always, the home model is what has greater influence than any tv show. If parents are also behaving as in the TV shows then the shows simply serve as confirmation bias to what the children observe.
I noticed that when I adopted a loving, quieter tone, and truly focused on do as i do vs do as i say attitudes, my children began to reject the "norms" shown on the tv shows. Today my children remark about how their friends act at their homes and towards their parents, and we have discussions about it.
That said, I definitely had the problem you describe, but it was resolved by focusing on consequences of actions and being ready to follow through on punishments (much like you did). Combined with the do as i do attitude, those punishments were ultimately punishments for me as well. You are being a terorrizing little bad ass? ok no TV. But then this means I can't watch TV because then they might watch TV while in the same room as me. Mutual pain.
Peppa Pig is at least funny. The one that pushed me over the edge wrt to behavior modeling was Caillou. My god people have some self respect as parents. You have to have to create some boundaries for children, not just knee-jerk syrupy-sweet coddling from dawn til dusk.
I find Peppa Pig has multiple layers and the stereotypes of the pig parents are actually targeted to entertain the human parents when they join watching.
I don't have kids so I never thought about it from that angle, but I really dislike how yell-y so many modern animated shows are. Couldn't make it through a single episode of Rick and Morty.
I'd never thought how it might impact kids, but now that you mention it, I can only dislike the trend more.
Invader Zim (2006) was a great cartoon but every character was basically screaming every line of dialogue
Jhonen Vasquez was previously best known for Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, an insanely dark graphic novel. I'm still stunned that the powers that be thought he should write an animated children's show. That said, I love Invader Zim. Taquitos!
Rick and Morty is absolutely not a kids show.
Yes, sorry, I had a non-sequitur between my two sentences. The first was about modern animated shows. The second was about how dialog in shows (not necessarily Rick and Morty) could affect kids.
Regardless, I also highly doubt that Rick and Morty is only consumed by people who are no longer susceptible to getting cues on how to interact with others from media.
Human beings yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards each other, seems like a human universal, rather than something children would only learn to do from watching recent tv and movies.
One thing I always notice after trips abroad is the extent to which American newscasters are practically yelling at their audience. This is a stark contrast to many European countries, where the tone is calmer and more measured.
What are these contradictions and hypocrisies? Maybe I'm just old, but I've never understood the angst younger people seem to have these days.
from my familiarity with the writing of past generations and even past civilizations it seems reasonable to conclude that contradictions and hypocrisies are generally understood to exit. I don't think it's just down to the young people.
I'm curious about this too. No debate about whether they're generally understood, but I'm curious if anyone can name one.
well one obvious contradiction is if you want peace prepare for war, unfortunately Bart Simpson's paradox doesn't seem to be in the commonly bemoaned list and I don't remember the rest of the paradoxes in that episode.
IMO, Watterson stopped at just the right time to preserve his legacy and keep the strip associated with childlike wonder and innocence. In the last years of C&H there was a certain curmudgeonliness creeping in, as Waterson started to mock modern commerce and art. I think the cartoonist was naturally growing older and more disillusioned, and his strip faintly started to sound like Calvin’s dad instead of Calvin.
At least based on some of the things he's written in some of the anthologies, it seems like a lot of that disillusionment was not just because of age, but rather because of his battles with the publishers and what not that were pushing him to make changes that he felt would compromise the integrity of the strip. A lot of the comics include subtle jabs about corporate greed, artistic integrity, etc. because he was actively fighting with the corporations that distributed his strip over such matters...
Still, 100% agreed that he stopped at the right time, both because of the creeping cynicism, but also simply because he was running out of fresh ideas...
I'm currently working through the Complete Calvin and Hobbes with my 9 year old, and he had these jabs at commercialism throughout, though it might have been sharper towards the end, but he was already jaded by art in 1985 as a 27 year old.
He had dreamed of being a cartoonist from childhood (when he was 8 he wrote Charles Shulz of Peanuts who wrote him back and it changed his life). He had actually majored in Political Science at Kenyon College (class of '80) because he thought that political cartooning was going to be his route in. It was not. He was a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post briefly before they fired him, then he worked for an ad agency and freelanced a bit before Universal Press Syndicate signed him on for Calvin and Hobbes. But, even at 27 when he started working for UPS, he understood the pressure of the professional art world and was cynical about it.
Apparently he lived a miserable life for the last few years of his work. He had been injured in a bike accident and it terrified him that he would be injured in such a way that he could no longer draw (1) so he basically stopped going out, stopped doing anything that could possibly harm his ability to earn money, stopped doing anything that might bring joy to his life. He lived a recluse for several years, before deciding to just quit, then he and his wife Melissa adopted a child and gave her a good life.
1: Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was the editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times when, in 1991, he crushed his right hand attaching a snow-plow to his truck, and he had to retire. I think that incident is what inspired this fear, the timelines match up. But of course, Watterson is famously private and so this is conjecture.
I had to look up what curmudgeonliness means, Wiktionary was extremely helpful:
curmudgeonliness: The state or condition of being curmudgeonly.
okay, let's look up curmudgeonly:
curmudgeonly: Characteristic of a curmudgeon; churlish
nearly there:
curmudgeon: An ill-tempered person full of stubborn ideas or opinions, often an older man.
I looked it up in Merriam, it said origin, unknown. HOWEVER: cur, from the 13th-century, can mean: 'a surly or cowardly fellow'. THEN: dudgeon , from the 15th, can mean 'a fit or state of indignation'.
Why so often an older man? Need we look farther than Dickens' Scrooge?
Yea English be like that sometimes
Look up some crazy sounding 20+ character word, takes three steps, and then you get a definition of the sub-sub-sub word and it says ".... blah blah, derived from the Greek base <abc>- and then also the Latin base -<xyz>", and you realize you had no chance at getting it from any kind of first principles or anything.
I meant the remarks about wiktionary in a sarcastic way. Explaining the word’s meaning twice by itself was a bit funny.
Especially as it’s not a very common word a lot of non-native speakers need to look up. Probably also a few native speakers.
For what it's worth, the first two steps in your lookup would come naturally to a native speaker- it's a suffix formation similar to e.g. "cleanliness" and "friendliness".
"Curmudgeon" itself is interesting, because while it's not particularly common, I actually think a lot of native English speakers would recognize it because it's got a lot of character- for some reason, the way it feels to say and the way it sounds almost has some of the character of the meaning.
If memory serves, Waterson said the later years were colored by his feelings from dealing with publishers. One of the most memorable comics for me is one where Calvin ends up in bed after resisting his parents' bedtime commands. In the final panel he bitterly declares that clearly his desires have no impact on his outcomes.
George Carlin, in my opinion, followed a similar arc. In the end he was just ranting for an hour. I appreciated his perspective (and delivery) but it was a lot more nihilistic, less funny.
I'm sure it was also for his own sake/sanity. He took two ~9-month sabbaticals toward the last half, which was not the norm for cartoonists at the time.
What a profound and beautiful comic. The art. The storytelling. The expanse of Calvin's vivid imagination.
Every day, I have a reminder to think of three things for which I'm grateful. I was just trying to find the third for today when I saw this headline.
I am grateful that I love my tattoos (and have no regret, which is the risk of tattoos), one of which is Stupendous Man. He was the first and it's because CnH holds such a special place in my heart. The comic largely shaped my childhood.
Bill Waterson had the integrity not to license his work, preferring that the reader not have the characters spoiled. He opted not to make boatloads of money in making this decision (cough, garfield, snoopy). He also declared that Sunday papers could print his comic unbroken or they could drop him and this allowed for truly magnificent art pieces where stories could be told in new ways. His integrity is legendary in the field.
Check out his recent work, The Mysteries.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-novel-review-bill-watters...
I can still remember choosing between the morning or evening paper based on which included _Calvin and Hobbes_, so it certainly worked to sell papers.
The boxed collection is wonderful, and one of my favourites.
For folks who want a bit more, there have been a couple of homages:
"Hobbes and Bacon": https://imgur.com/gallery/all-hobbes-bacon-by-pants-are-over... --- a bit too on-the-nose for my taste, which doesn't really add anything
"Calvin and Company" by DomNX, wherein Calvin and Susie have twins named after Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir --- art not fully realized/up to the task, and again, all a bit too obvious
There was also one simply heart-breaking one, where Calvin has cancer, gets a decrepit Hobbes out of storage, and gifts him to a troubled grandchild, but not finding it on searching....
The thing is, laughing at problems, while cathartic, isn't actually inspiring folks to actually understand/solve problems/make the world a better place.... I'm reminded of a comic from childhood where a child sees duck hunters as part of the reason why a forest is clearcut for a development, instead of the reason why such land is preserved (the Pa. State Game Commission manages over 1.5 million acres) or, maybe I'm just overly pessimistic this morning because of intractable problems where people choose wrongly, mostly through not understanding the problem/ignorance/lack of sympathy for others --- classic example, drivers in cars who get upset because following a cyclist causes them slow down on their way to a red light --- rather a shame that the strips featuring Calvin's father as a cyclist weren't didactic so as to show/discuss that sort of thing, rather than going for the laugh.
> For folks who want a bit more, there have been a couple of homages:
I believe the Zen Pencils one is one of the better ones... it's not Calvin and Hobbes, but rather about Watterson himself.
http://www.zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoon...
Much, but not all, of 'Phoebe and Her Unicorn' has just-enough echoes of C&H while doing its own thing.
https://www.gocomics.com/phoebe-and-her-unicorn
Thank you for that!
Ordering the first boxed set for my daughter's birthday next year.
This is so cute!
> There was also one simply heart-breaking one, where Calvin has cancer, gets a decrepit Hobbes out of storage, and gifts him to a troubled grandchild, but not finding it on searching....
Are you sure this was a comic? It's a story someone wrote, available on Scribd.
Maybe that's what I'm recalling.
This one?
https://www.scribd.com/document/848787362/Calvin
Probably. Can't see the full thing without jumping through hoops but it looks like it.
The weird thing is, I distinctly remember art to go with it.... maybe I was conflating the other homages which I found. Drat that uncertain organic memory.
When I used to read fiction, I would visualise the story as a movie. I don't know if there's a name for this effect. Sometimes I can rewind the story in my head as a movie. Maybe that's whats going on? I don't know.
Found a non-scribd link:
https://www.coachmyrna.org/blog/in-the-final-moments-of-his-...
Gene Wolfe wrote a story titled Petting Zoo, and here is the introduction he wrote for it:
> Petting Zoo is a favorite story of David Hartwell's, the master editor who edited this book and most of my others. Do you like dinosaurs? I loved them when I was a kid, and I've noticed that Hobbes' buddy Calvin loves them at least as much. Perhaps David feels the same way.
Petting Zoo can be read here:
https://archive.org/details/yearsbestsf30000unse/page/n9/mod...
Bill Watterson also guest-drew a few precious strips for Pearls Before Swine.
https://slate.com/culture/2014/06/bill-watterson-does-pearls...
It wounds me that I missed that latter, and that the commentary on it at:
https://toostupidtotravel.org/2014/06/07/ever-wished-that-ca...
is 404.
> The boxed collection is wonderful, and one of my favourites.
And it still holds up for kids of today. My son is a second gen Calvin and Hobbes kid.
I think the comic achieves something deeper than a lecture. The humor might reconnect us with a sense of awe we often lose as adults.
A couple of other comics with their own distinct personalities but an unmistakable C&H vibe:
Cul de Sac (https://www.gocomics.com/culdesac)
Wallace the Brave (https://www.gocomics.com/wallace-the-brave)
The comic "Frazz" is also often compared to Calvin and Hobbes (as if Frazz the janitor is an adult Calvin), there's a long section on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazz
My wife and I will actually be going to an exhibition of Watterson's work this weekend—we're lucky enough to live not too far from Cooperstown, NY, where the Fenimore House Art Museum has the exhibition running all this fall.
As an '80s kid, Calvin and Hobbes ran for almost my entire childhood, and we have a number of the collections. I never fail to be impressed either by Watterson's talent, both in the art and in choosing the right words to say, nor by his integrity and restraint, both in refusing to allow his work to be merchandised and in choosing to stop when he did—when he felt he had said all he came to say.
Many more artists of all types could take so many lessons from him. Even some that are already great. He is a very humble man, but he stands among the legends of our time.
Edit: realized it would be good to add a link to the exhibition: https://fenimoreartmuseum.org/future-exhibitions/calvin-and-...
A painting of a comic strip panel. Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging... "high" art.
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/318702d0df96013172...
(I am genuinely considering a trip to Cooperstown now.)
We were there a few weekends ago. The C&H exhibit had quite the crowd!
It is largely a collection of original strips. You won't see anything new or original, that is not in one or more of the books. But it is interesting to see his process, to note where he made mistakes, to listen to everyone chuckle at one strip or another, and to see the progression of the characters and artist as you walk through the lifetime of the comic.
Well worth the trip!
A bit off-topic, but it's been increasingly tough to view Calvin and Hobbes on the internet.
Gocomics seems to go after everyone who posts these comic strips on a regular basis.
The C&H sub-reddit stopped posting some time ago. [0]
The only C&H Search out there is not allowed to show the strips and instead redirects to Gocomics. [1]
Here's a blog post by S. Anand detailing some background on the takedown notice he received, although he doesn't mention who sent it. [2]
I feel saddened that the one comic strip that resisted commercialization has to have its fans face this.
But I suppose that's the nature of the web now.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1m8j09a/th...
[1]: https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/
[2]: https://www.s-anand.net/blog/the-calvin-and-hobbes-search-ta...
You might as well torrent/etc the books, no sense with using web middlemen who get takedowns because they don't have the rights either. Direct piracy gives you a better experience than indirect piracy.
(You should also buy real copies if you still can, because they're great.)
> (You should also buy real copies if you still can, because they're great.)
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Calvin-Hobbes-Box-Set/dp/074...
I got this when it came out. It's absolutely amazing, filled with commentary from Bill Watterson.
I've read the whole set twice, but it's been at least 15 years. I should read it again.
Yes, I have this too, but like I said, seeing C&H suddenly always brightens up my day.
What I enjoyed about the reddit feed was coming across a strip (which I remembered) and still having a good laugh.
Seeing a strip which I'd forgotten was an even more pleasurable bonus!
And I do own the books as well.
One thing that always struck me about Calvin & Hobbes is how well it ages. The humor lands when you’re a kid, but the subtext only becomes clear as an adult.
Watterson managed to keep that dual perspective without letting the strip drift into cynicism, which is rare for long-running comics.
Watterson serves as one of the symbols of an era when selling out was considered a great sin. It makes me laugh how thoroughly that idea - that selling out is bad - has been defeated.
That being said, I'm sure he would've done it the same way today.
Growing up, we had collected volumes of Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, and The Boondocks. Surprisingly good bedfellows. Covered the bases, so to speak.
I also tend to associate "Bloom County" with "Calvin and Hobbes". I think I was reading both of them around the same time.
Same here, though I started bloom county a lot later. Almost all of my 80s cultural knowledge stems from that comic haha…
The Boondocks is probably the most witty cartoon ever made. It still holds up because we've largely not advanced as a society
I break out Black Power Revolutionary Jar Jar Binks whenever possible.
I'm sad that whatever went on with McGruder and the media gatekeepers prevented him from Schultzing it up through to the present day. We need him.
As a kid, I had no idea they would someday print books, so each day I cut out the strip from the newspaper and paste it into a book. I’m sure my mom threw it away decades ago, but I wish I still had it.
The title got mangled from the grammatically correct "40 years ago, Calvin and Hobbes' raucous adventures burst onto the comics page" (though some of us learned "Hobbes's" in elementary school) to "40 years ago, Calvin and Hobbes' burst onto the page" (the ' definitely doesn't belong).
Calvin and Hobbes was the only comic I ever truly loved and collected. All of the books are well-worn from my childhood. They sat on a shelf for a couple of decades, and now I get to enjoy watching my kids fall in love with them too.
I don’t think I fully appreciated the range of humor and topics Bill Watterson explored when I was young. Plenty of strips are perfect for my 9 year old; she was in fits of laughter just yesterday at Hobbes’s physical comedy and the elementary school drama with Susie and Mrs Wormwood. But other strips are much more intellectual, touching on politics, life, and morality. I appreciate these more now as well, because they often spark deeper conversations with my kids when they ask me to explain them.
I doubt he’ll ever see it, but thank you, Bill, for giving multiple generations so much laughter.
My own personal favorites: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XryL7duzj_WZEy0dtdDO48_s...
I was actually just thinking of that "cow milk" one the other day. I remember when I read C&H as a kid thinking that one was absolutely hilarious and oh so true. Then I realized, now that I'm older and more experienced in the world, and have had kids, that the idea of drinking cow milk is not actually that far-fetched. Udders look weird, sure, but you know what they are.
In other words, it's kind of amazing that Watterson was able to put himself in the mind of a child so well for that strip.
The ones about Calvin having an awful day due to what's demanded of him are honestly heartbreaking.
C&H was the first time that I realized how authenticity resonates with people. I think people love C&H because they recognize Calvin, Hobbes, Suzie, Biff, the parents (or even Rosalyn) in themselves. Calvin often said the things that we thought only ourselves were thinking (remember the strip where Calvin is selling swift kicks in the pants for 10c because the world clearly needs it?).
Now, I see this technique work so well for business and political leaders, comics, social commentators, etc. It is a very effective technique to capture the hearts of your audience.
Thirty-two years ago, I got them tattooed onto my leg, the day after I arrived at Ft. Bragg, NC. It's faded and blurred out from the waxing and waning of muscle tone in my calf, and sunlight, and the occasional scrape from crashing the bike. But it's been part of me for so long, the only real option left is to get it lasered-down and redone.
I love that comic.
Watterson, famously, never sold out. He is sort of an idealized, godlike figure, to many cartoonists.
Reminds me of this Onion story: https://theonion.com/peeing-calvin-decals-now-recognized-as-...
Calvin's dad was quite a character, wasn't he?
My role model as a parent. I had the why are old pictures in black and white conversation with my kids almost word for word. It wasn’t until they were in fourth grade that they learned that the world didn’t used to be black and white.
I think they still believe what I told them about how they determine weight limits for bridges though.
We just finished rebuilding the bridge in the center of Mr. Watterson’s hometown, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to reference that one!
https://councilmandrum.net/notes/bridge-closure/
You should show then the linear velocity vs angular velocity thing, to keep them awake until 3am
I hope this is a joke. Calvin's dad lying to him wasn't supposed to be idealized.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
As a child I identified with Calvin. Now as a 50+ year old I find I identify much more with the dad.
We didn't have C&H in France when I was a kid in the 80s. I discovered it at the university through a German girlfriend who said that she's kniwn it for some time already.
It is interesting how some random things from far away just used to catch in a country, but not in the neighbour one.
Our nr 1 hero at that time was Goldorak - everyone who is in their 50s today can sing the intro song (at least the first line) and knows a few of the attacks. Girls had Candy but we were absolutely watching it as well (I actually don't know if girls were watching Goldorak, I need to ask)
My personal favorite and my grandfather’s personal favorite (“What’s that boy and his tiger going to do next?”). My son learned to read at age 5 using Calvin and Hobbes books (lots of funny conversations of the form, “Dad, what does X mean?” where X was a rather grown-up concept of some sort because Watterson had a great vocabulary and wasn’t afraid to use it). Good times. I wish it still ran.
I always loved that Bill Watterson gave Calvin an extensive vocabulary. He didn't dumb it down. Instead, he allowed young readers like me to learn new words as I read along.
If you want something to hang on your wall, an original strip is coming up for auction in Stockholm more or less as I write. The bid is currently at over 1 MSEK (100kUSD)... https://auctionet.com/sv/events/891-the-modern-art-design-sa...
I was born in 92 and thus didn't start reading them until after the original run of Calvin and Hobbes, but I discovered these comics via book collections at the library and became OBSESSED.
I am so incredibly happy that Watterson never "sold out" and gave away film/animation rights to his characters. They are perfect the way they are.
The older i get the more I see watterson's comics as a form of philsophical commentary on the state and evolution of the world
it's art and meaning and entertainment all in one
if it's been a while you should read them again with fresh eyes.
It's curious that of all the famous American syndicated strips, only The Far Side, and maybe Garfield, seem to have bridged the Atlantic divide to the UK.
Maybe C&H and Peanuts were just too rooted in US suburban family culture. Dilbert had a niche following here and beyond that I struggle to even name another strip.
Strangely, The Far Side is even known here and there on the European continent in translation, even though so many of the jokes depend on English puns that the translators don’t even attempt to work with. The result is weird and inexplicable, but that creates a humor of its own, even if it is different from what Gary Larson intended.
When I was a kid, C&H strips were translated and published by the main newspaper in Geneva.
The "complete" box set is the first thing I ordered from Amazon US as a teenager, in 2000 or 2001 iirc.
Not my experience - my father had questionable taste in newspapers, but the daily express ran C&H and we had all of the compendia.
I think it was quite big in Sweden.
Bill also ended the strip exactly ten years after he started. Frankly, I appreciated his honesty and integrity around the strip. The comic stuck around just long enough to leave a lasting impression but never too long to overstay its welcome.
My favorite Calvin and Hobbes reference: https://xkcd.com/409/
There are even more on xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Calvin_a...
smbc-comics has done a whole slew of C+H inspired strips with two kids out having a deep but strage philosophical conversation. It's very difficult to actually find anything you're looking for in the SMBC archives though... E.g. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/qualia
Zach Weinersmith’s Beawolf graphic novel is basically an ode to Calvin. He has a new book coming out soon, too.
Looks like it's "Bea Wolf" (I had not heard of it and Googled.)
Mobile view -
https://m.xkcd.com/409/
1985, I thought they were around a lot longer.
I remember people at work talking about that comic and loving it. But the my City Newspaper did not carry it :(
I can see it now in gocomics and it is great.
Mandela.
Someone wrote drew a one-off followup cartoon that nearly broke me: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/6vwll2/is_...
It nearly breaks me, too. It breaks me because it stigmatizes medication that has helped make me function in a world not designed for me. It breaks me because it stigmatizes medication that on average is going to let me enjoy being on this earth ~7 more years than I otherwise would be.
I'm there with you on that, but... there's a time and place for it. I hate that our schools are designed around "sit down, shut up, and toil in silence for a few hours straight", and treat those of us with ADHD as mutants which have to be medicated to fit in.
Montessori Method schools, my friend. Or Waldorf. There's likely a school near you that is public and uses these methods. If not, there are scholarships too. It's not for everyone, but for all the Calvins it's a godsend.
We sent our kids through Montessori. Unfortunately, in the city where we lived when they were elementary school age, Montessori went through 4th grade before the kids had to go back to regular or religious schools. That was a rough transition.
But I still think that's a sucky situation for the 95% of kids who go to the nearest public school. Their days shouldn't be awful just because their parents didn't have the time, money, or awareness to consider non-default options.
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