Calvin and Hobbes enchants, teaches

By Sarah Tereniak
Collegian Staff
February 7, 2007

When I was a kid, there was nothing I loved more than going to the bookstore on the weekend with my parents and brother. I’d run straight to the Comics section, snag a Calvin and Hobbes book off the shelf, plop down on the floor of the aisle and read until it was time to leave. I had to find new things to read at the store after I’d bought every single one of the Calvin and Hobbes books.

I’ve always loved Calvin. When I was younger, I coveted his anti-establishment nature, his bravery and his toboggan. I was always a good student and I wasn’t too much of a hassle to my parents; Calvin is my rebellious opposite. He’s a lovable terror. He isn’t afraid to do what he wants, when he wants—he plays when he should do homework, he repeatedly attempts to thwart his babysitter and he tortures the neighborhood girl he subconsciously has a crush on. Calvin does it all with Hobbes, his proud, sardonic cohort, unfailingly by his side. It may be the greatest partnership ever to grace a comic strip panel.

The strip is almost impossibly hilarious. Calvin and Hobbes get themselves into some screamingly funny situations that I won’t even attempt to explain, but lots of the humor comes from the strip’s side characters: the totalitarian babysitter, Rosalyn; Calvin’s exasperated mom and dad and Calvin’s cigarette-smoking teacher, Ms. Wormwood. As Calvin spouts off philosophical questions with an extensive vocabulary no 6-year-old could ever really have, the side players in his story are forced to try and keep up while preventing themselves from strangling him.

I’ll admit that I didn’t understand a lot of the strip’s humor when I was younger. It’s not really my fault; Watterson threw a lot of subliminal social commentary into the mix that I couldn’t have noticed when I was 10 years old. I’m not sure that I had a favorite character when I was younger, either, but now that I’m old enough to understand everything that’s going on in the strips, my favorite is Calvin’s dad. He wanted a dog but had a kid instead, so he has to deal with spending long days in the office as a patent attorney and then must come home to a frazzled wife and Calvin’s mutant snowmen all over the front lawn. Calvin’s dad tries to instill a sense of “character” in Calvin by making him shovel snow and pick up sticks from the yard; he doesn’t know, or chooses to ignore, the actual answers to Calvin’s questions about how things work (the ATM, the sunrise/sunset), so he gives Calvin a lot of fanciful stories, including explaining away wind by saying it’s nothing but trees sneezing.

Calvin’s sentiment in the final strip ever published covers everything I felt as a kid: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy… Let’s go exploring!”

tereniaks1@lasalle.edu