This is the third and final volume of a box-set (this) comprising the whole roughly-a-decade span of newspaper comic Calvin & Hobbes, of which I've already done posts for the first and second volumes. In the post about the first volume, I try to give a general overview of what, superficially the comic is about - in this post, I'm going to go into more depth about some of the recurring themes Bill Watterson explores through the world he's created in this comic, and try to give some shape to why I think it's so timelessly special as well as timefully poignant as an enduring body of artistic work.
Okay...
I'm returning to this post having left that first paragraph sat as a neglected unclosed tab on my browser for a full week. I simply don't know where to start. There's too much that could be said about this comic and it's too dear to my heart to devise a deconstruction, so I'm just going to do what happens to a small (lol) proportion of my posts and gonzo it. Or whatever the term is.
Reading the comic in its entirety, a ten-year span, had somewhat of a Groundhog-Day-esque feel, in that Calvin is, of course, perpetually a six-year-old, but Watterson, as part of his construction of a real-feeling world to a daily-newspaper-reading audience, allows the change of the seasons to permeate Calvin's environment, activities, and moods. You watch him spend ten years in first-grade, struggling to restrain his over-active imagination for long enough to learn simple addition, struggling against alienated boredom within an education system that genuinely fails to engage lots of children, his brief respites at recess and lunchtime hampered often by the bully or by his own weirdness driving away his only real friend (Susie Derkins - well, both would deny being the friend of the other, but they live on the same street, and she's the only kid in the comic who Calvin regularly talks to who doesn't tend to end their encounters by thumping him and stealing his lunch money; arguably as a know-it-all she is on a similar popularity level to the out-and-out weirdo with a stuffed tiger that he fights with (and loses to sometimes), Calvin). Much of the comic explores the regularities and routines of a child's life as part of an incomprehensible structure of disappointment - evident in everything from waiting for the bus to performing household chores to bathing to keeping oneself entertained around the house - and Calvin's imagination provides gateways to 'play his way out' of these all-too-commonplace scenarios. But the comic strikes a careful balance between his reality and his dreams, such that the adult sensibilities of the boring traps laid out for Calvin's everyday experience and the childlike excitements of escaping these are both avenues for the comic: his parents, I think, provide an extremely important presence of normality. The burden and joy of parenthood, the thankless domestic life of the stay-at-home mom and the paper-weight drudge of an office-working dad, are shown through the admittedly extreme prism of raising a kid who is just as likely to be found sitting quietly reading a comic by the fire as he is hammering nails into the coffee table, assembling some sort of catapult to fire rocks at Susie, or trying to sell glasses of pondwater to passers-by - he's a handful, to say the least, for all the good his father's attempts to get him to do 'normal' (i.e. unpleasant) activities to 'build character'. Calvin's imaginativeness lets the comic take some brilliantly broad-ranging directions in terms of illustration (the dinosaur ones are often among my favourites), but it is his real-world high-demand six-year-old-style selfishness that forms the core of the comic's capacity for social commentary, of which there is a lot, neatly diffused into it bit-by-bit over the decade of its run. Bill Watterson, if it be his own worldview that he allows to flourish in the words of Calvin and Hobbes, has a considerable uneasiness around the political, economic and cultural trends that were becoming all-but-unstoppable in the years the comic ran (late '80s to early '90s; basically the Soviet Union fell, and suddenly everyone in the world was an American style democratic liberal capitalist, a universal consensus masking neoliberal hegemony, which had been developing an extremely strong base of consumer culture in the West for centuries, and the '80s was when it centralised itself as the Western way of life); work was unproductive and unfulfilling, advertisements for stuff people didn't need was everywhere, supplemented by sociocultural pressures to feel needs for the stuff being advertised; people were losing their connection with nature, their capacity to trust each other and the media, and their capacity to actively care about anything substantive or meaningful in a world where suburbia could become everything, where TV replaces thought, and kids are primed to expect to find a place in this world where they can follow their dreams - even when their actual dreams (of day-to-day imagination) are constantly shattered and grounded by representatives of the same grown-up community perpetuating their being kept in the dark about the vacuousness of the whole endeavour. That was a horrific sentence, I know. But some of the hardest-hitting strips are simply Calvin watching television, or his dad's thoughts on the drive to work, or his mom's thoughts upon receiving junk mail ads; surprisingly subversive for a comic that was printed in thousands of American popular newspapers. The anti-consumerism critique* ramps up toward Christmas each year in the comic, alongside, interestingly, vaguely theological and moral ponderings about the nature and possibility of being good in the hope of a reward (from Santa). The winter periods also see Calvin making many bizarre, grotesque, or as he calls them 'avant-garde' snowmen - these ones are as visually amusing as they are littered with topsy-turvy commentary on the world of art that any aesthete would appreciate. Likewise Calvin's summers are crammed with school-free romps around the wilderness, riding carts down perilous hills while making casual existential chitchat, throwing water-balloons at Susie, finding frogs, meetings aliens, holding club meetings in a treehouse - all of these elements are completely dependent on the comradeship of Hobbes, who, ostensibly self-evident to everyone except Calvin, is an inanimate stuff tiger, and also the voice of Calvin's self-doubt in the comics - which means the things Hobbes says (Calvin's self being one of TV-raised fantasy-embroiled narcissistic noise) tend to be on the wiser side. As well as enabling exploration of a child's developing understanding of his place in the world through Hobbes taking up one side of the inner dialogue, Hobbes is Calvin's constant playmate - they scheme together, invent games, explore, argue, snack, fight, find new uses for cardboard boxes, rest, and muse. It is through conversation with Hobbes that the depth and nuance of Watterson's voice in the comic shines through best - this is not a strip that shies away from big questions, and though it doesn't claim to have answers, reminding people to ask them is often good enough.
This comic achieves more, artistically, in terms of both writing and drawing, than any other newspaper-daily comic I have ever encountered. It is well worth discovering, even if you don't plough through it in its entirety like me - this post has been a structureless shambles, but I hope it gives some insights into the sheer breadth and depth of what makes Calvin and Hobbes such endearing characters at the heart of this lovely comic.
* Something that Bill Watterson stuck to his guns about IRL - he spent years fighting his publishing syndicate for the rights to the characters so they couldn't be used for corporate merchandising.
Okay...
I'm returning to this post having left that first paragraph sat as a neglected unclosed tab on my browser for a full week. I simply don't know where to start. There's too much that could be said about this comic and it's too dear to my heart to devise a deconstruction, so I'm just going to do what happens to a small (lol) proportion of my posts and gonzo it. Or whatever the term is.
Reading the comic in its entirety, a ten-year span, had somewhat of a Groundhog-Day-esque feel, in that Calvin is, of course, perpetually a six-year-old, but Watterson, as part of his construction of a real-feeling world to a daily-newspaper-reading audience, allows the change of the seasons to permeate Calvin's environment, activities, and moods. You watch him spend ten years in first-grade, struggling to restrain his over-active imagination for long enough to learn simple addition, struggling against alienated boredom within an education system that genuinely fails to engage lots of children, his brief respites at recess and lunchtime hampered often by the bully or by his own weirdness driving away his only real friend (Susie Derkins - well, both would deny being the friend of the other, but they live on the same street, and she's the only kid in the comic who Calvin regularly talks to who doesn't tend to end their encounters by thumping him and stealing his lunch money; arguably as a know-it-all she is on a similar popularity level to the out-and-out weirdo with a stuffed tiger that he fights with (and loses to sometimes), Calvin). Much of the comic explores the regularities and routines of a child's life as part of an incomprehensible structure of disappointment - evident in everything from waiting for the bus to performing household chores to bathing to keeping oneself entertained around the house - and Calvin's imagination provides gateways to 'play his way out' of these all-too-commonplace scenarios. But the comic strikes a careful balance between his reality and his dreams, such that the adult sensibilities of the boring traps laid out for Calvin's everyday experience and the childlike excitements of escaping these are both avenues for the comic: his parents, I think, provide an extremely important presence of normality. The burden and joy of parenthood, the thankless domestic life of the stay-at-home mom and the paper-weight drudge of an office-working dad, are shown through the admittedly extreme prism of raising a kid who is just as likely to be found sitting quietly reading a comic by the fire as he is hammering nails into the coffee table, assembling some sort of catapult to fire rocks at Susie, or trying to sell glasses of pondwater to passers-by - he's a handful, to say the least, for all the good his father's attempts to get him to do 'normal' (i.e. unpleasant) activities to 'build character'. Calvin's imaginativeness lets the comic take some brilliantly broad-ranging directions in terms of illustration (the dinosaur ones are often among my favourites), but it is his real-world high-demand six-year-old-style selfishness that forms the core of the comic's capacity for social commentary, of which there is a lot, neatly diffused into it bit-by-bit over the decade of its run. Bill Watterson, if it be his own worldview that he allows to flourish in the words of Calvin and Hobbes, has a considerable uneasiness around the political, economic and cultural trends that were becoming all-but-unstoppable in the years the comic ran (late '80s to early '90s; basically the Soviet Union fell, and suddenly everyone in the world was an American style democratic liberal capitalist, a universal consensus masking neoliberal hegemony, which had been developing an extremely strong base of consumer culture in the West for centuries, and the '80s was when it centralised itself as the Western way of life); work was unproductive and unfulfilling, advertisements for stuff people didn't need was everywhere, supplemented by sociocultural pressures to feel needs for the stuff being advertised; people were losing their connection with nature, their capacity to trust each other and the media, and their capacity to actively care about anything substantive or meaningful in a world where suburbia could become everything, where TV replaces thought, and kids are primed to expect to find a place in this world where they can follow their dreams - even when their actual dreams (of day-to-day imagination) are constantly shattered and grounded by representatives of the same grown-up community perpetuating their being kept in the dark about the vacuousness of the whole endeavour. That was a horrific sentence, I know. But some of the hardest-hitting strips are simply Calvin watching television, or his dad's thoughts on the drive to work, or his mom's thoughts upon receiving junk mail ads; surprisingly subversive for a comic that was printed in thousands of American popular newspapers. The anti-consumerism critique* ramps up toward Christmas each year in the comic, alongside, interestingly, vaguely theological and moral ponderings about the nature and possibility of being good in the hope of a reward (from Santa). The winter periods also see Calvin making many bizarre, grotesque, or as he calls them 'avant-garde' snowmen - these ones are as visually amusing as they are littered with topsy-turvy commentary on the world of art that any aesthete would appreciate. Likewise Calvin's summers are crammed with school-free romps around the wilderness, riding carts down perilous hills while making casual existential chitchat, throwing water-balloons at Susie, finding frogs, meetings aliens, holding club meetings in a treehouse - all of these elements are completely dependent on the comradeship of Hobbes, who, ostensibly self-evident to everyone except Calvin, is an inanimate stuff tiger, and also the voice of Calvin's self-doubt in the comics - which means the things Hobbes says (Calvin's self being one of TV-raised fantasy-embroiled narcissistic noise) tend to be on the wiser side. As well as enabling exploration of a child's developing understanding of his place in the world through Hobbes taking up one side of the inner dialogue, Hobbes is Calvin's constant playmate - they scheme together, invent games, explore, argue, snack, fight, find new uses for cardboard boxes, rest, and muse. It is through conversation with Hobbes that the depth and nuance of Watterson's voice in the comic shines through best - this is not a strip that shies away from big questions, and though it doesn't claim to have answers, reminding people to ask them is often good enough.
This comic achieves more, artistically, in terms of both writing and drawing, than any other newspaper-daily comic I have ever encountered. It is well worth discovering, even if you don't plough through it in its entirety like me - this post has been a structureless shambles, but I hope it gives some insights into the sheer breadth and depth of what makes Calvin and Hobbes such endearing characters at the heart of this lovely comic.
* Something that Bill Watterson stuck to his guns about IRL - he spent years fighting his publishing syndicate for the rights to the characters so they couldn't be used for corporate merchandising.
