2. Mo, the bully who torments Calvin, later went on to be Donald Trump's Nickname Strategist Timmy Jenkins, as interviewed by Steven Colbert. In kindergarten, of course, he was not normally that articulate, but he already had promise ("Hey twinky, give me a quarter... for the Let Calvin Live Through Recess Fund"). And the self-awareness to answer Calvin's philosophical challenges to his bully role with "Because it's fun".
3. I am not aware of any successful defense of Christmas Eve fireplace usage in the years since Calvin screeched "What's THIS? Santa Flambe?!?!?"
4. Calvinball is as much fun to play as you think it is, but it is hard. I recommend all parents attempt to play it with their children once in awhile, because inventing new rules on the spot is excellent practice. This is sort of the principle behind which my Mom and I would allow any Scrabble word that a player could come up with a slightly plausible definition of, a la "awok" as army slang for "absent without ketchup" or "bozone" as "a political region ruled by clowns". But in Calvinscrabble there'd also be no inherent reason why letters would need to be played on a board, instead of grass hieroglyphics being played inside a stovepipe hat on a driveway. Played, of course, while hopping on one leg. Do not let Little League get its hands on this.
4a. It doesn't snow enough in North Carolina for me to know whether Calvin's snowmen would be fun to build. Or physically possible.
5. Calvin's father, who looks very much like a drawing of Bill Watterson, could have had a fine second career as a science columnist. My favorite is his explanation of sunsets: the sky turns red as the sun catches fire, and it sets in the west because it ends the day in Flagstaff, Arizona, which explains why the rocks there are red, but isn't dangerous for the people there because the sun, which as you can see by looking is very small, goes out (leaving the sky dark).
That said, it isn't true. Unlike his explanations of why ice rises to the top of a glass, and why old TV shows were in black and white -- both of which exactly parallel Aristotle's musings on the same subjects.
I will briefly reproduce here one of my all-time favorite poems: "Cartoon Physics, Part 1" by Nick Flynn.
"Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon animation,
that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries
will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down—earthbound, tangible
disasters, arenas
where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships
have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump
you will be saved.
A child
places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows
the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn
that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall
until he notices his mistake."
I personally have taught my kids genuine engineering and science principles from a preciously young age. I couldn't help it; D would ask me how something worked, and if I didn't know, which was embarrassingly often, I'd look it up and translate it to toddler language as best I could. (I think D was Calvin's age when answering one of his questions forced me to give myself a quick tutorial on quantum physics.) The boys love this stuff; in some ways they and I feel that reality is more magical and flat-out bizarre than anything some guy with a pencil could invent. But Flynn and Calvin's Dad have an excellent point too, so I find occasions, here and there, to grasp it after all.
6. Every external indicator through ten-plus years of Calvin & Hobbes is that Hobbes is simply a stuffed tiger: certainly that is all anyone but Calvin sees in him. I prefer to assume that Hobbes is real, hidden only by the weird interdimensional physics of newspaper comic strips. Calvin is six, and has the maturity of a six-year-old at best. Even when he gets all sociological about the art world or commercial media, or philosophical about the universe, which happened with increasing frequency over the four compiled volumes, it's always in the service of self-interest. ("On the one hand, it's a good sign for us artists that, in this age of visual bombardment from all media, a simple drawing can provoke and shock viewers. It confirms that images still have power. On the other hand, my teacher's reactionary grading shows that our society is culturally illiterate ... This drawing I did obviously challenges the know-nothing complacency of those who prefer safe, digested, bucolic genre scenes. My C-minus firmly establishes me on the cutting edge of the avant-garde".)
Hobbes (whose response in that particular strip is "Don't you have to wear silly clothes then?") is the relative realist, coded somewhere between much-older brother and adult. He suggests Calvin take care of homework and chores; he calls him on his nonsense; he teases Calvin with insults slightly above his head; he sabotages sabotaging their club GROSS (Get Rid Of Slimy girlS) by referring to Susie Derkins as a "babe" and accepting smooches. Hobbes is of course, like any ideal adult, equally capable of being completely immature and going on magical adventures. Still, much of his dialogue is not plausibly something Calvin could ever imagine.
Also, if we assume Calvin pounces on himself and gets into angry physical fights with himself -- rather than, as he perceives, Hobbes does it -- the strip is disturbing. Much more disturbing than if we simply assume that a tear in the fabric of reality can cause intelligent beings to be perceived by almost the entire world as inanimate stuffed toys.
7. On the other hand, I construe the extended multi-week fantasy sequences, which are often among the series' highlights -- the one where Calvin and Hobbes learn to fly, the one where they travel very short distances into the future to meet future Calvins, the one where they travel to another planet and meet an alien, the one where Calvin invents the transmogrifier -- as Calvin's imagination. That is because they end up providing excuses for Calvin failing to attempt some mundane task he would prefer to avoid.
They are gorgeous as well as funny, and presented straight, though; my boys assume they are real as I'm allowing Hobbes to be, and this works too. They also assume Calvin's bicycle truly is trying to kill him, rather than that being a projection of Calvin's fear. There is a level on which that goes far beyond "one character in the strip is imperceptible by most of the universe", and seems like too much suspended disbelief, a level of weirdness explainable only in "his house is located on a Hell Bellybutton" terms. There is another level on which Calvin, his parents, Hobbes, Susie, Mo, Mrs. Wormwood, the principal, and Rosalyn the babysitter are line drawings on pieces of paper.
8. My one genuine criticism of Calvin & Hobbes, although it's a criticism in the sense of "I think maybe the best character-based comic strip of all time should have been EVEN BETTER", is that we never get to see Calvin age beyond six. I've written a little piece about a YA novel I recently read to my kids, though. The novel, by John Gosselink, is called the Defense of Thaddeus A. Ledbetter. It never mentions Bill Watterson's strip at all. But to both me and the boys, it feels like some interesting speculation.
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