131–140 of 153 posts
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 schoo…
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.
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.
Why so often an older man? Need we look farther than Dickens' Scrooge?
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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.
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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 disagr…
The joke is that Calvin is aligned with Hobbes’s philosophy and vice versa.
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.
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 schoo…
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.
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 schoo…
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.
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.
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.
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> 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
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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...