Calvin and Hobbes

Nothing reminds me of childhood like reading Calvin and Hobbes comics.  Every so often I stumble across my old anthologies of all of the comics and I read through them all from beginning to end.  It’s fun and amusing, but more than that it reminds me of a seemingly simpler and easier time.

Calvin is an interesting character.  He’s smart but he hates school, he’s cool but he’s dorky, he has no friends but he’s best friends with Hobbes.  In many ways he’s unpleasant, selfish, mean, and obtuse, but we love him all the same.  He says many things that everyone thinks—whether he’s contemplating the meaning of life or reflecting on why people laugh or shouting “BORING!” during a class lecture (when he is sent to the principal’s office for this he says “Yeah, yeah, kill the messenger,”) and he always says it in a funny way.  He is a constant troublemaker, and is always trying to hit the neighbor girl with a water balloon or a snowball, or locking his babysitter out of the house and watching cartoons all night.  We don’t begrudge him his misbehavior, partly because it is so over-the-top as to be ludicrous, but also because we know that he is not bad at heart.

The other titular character is sometimes Calvin’s comic foil and sometimes his partner-in-crime, but most importantly he is a stuffed tiger named Hobbes.  Or at least, that’s what he appears to be whenever someone besides Calvin is looking at him.  When he is alone with Calvin, he becomes a real life tiger, complete with a penchant for sneaking up on people and pouncing on them.  This duality is a major mystery of the comics.  Is Hobbes a real tiger that no one else can see, or a stuffed one that Calvin imagines to be real?  The answer seems obvious but the author leaves it ambiguous.  In personality, Hobbes is more relaxed, less of a troublemaker, more philosophical, and at times pessimistic about the inner goodness of man, true to his namesake, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.  But most importantly, Hobbes is Calvin’s friend and companion, without whom the story could not exist.

I encourage anybody who hasn’t read Calvin and Hobbes to read some.  They’re at times hilarious, thought-provoking, and touching, and no matter how old I get they’ll always remind me of being a kid.