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The Ache in Calvin and Hobbes

by Christian Huebner 

 

Next month, the U.S. Postal Service will release a new set of postage stamps featuring classic newspaper comic strip characters.  The lineup will include Beetle Bailey, Archie, Garfield, Dennis the Menace, and – most importantly – Calvin and Hobbes.

It is a brilliant choice – Calvin, I mean, not the others.  The other strips are all still running in some form or another, as they have been for decades, empty shells of characters recycling throwaway gag lines.  Funnies that no one would ever mistake for being funny.

Calvin is different.  Calvin ran for only ten years, beginning as a delightful comic strip, and ending as a true work of art.  By the time creator Bill Waterson put down his sketching pen, the strip’s characters had transcended their medium, a cramped one-and-a-half by three inch rectangle six days a week at the back of the sports section, plus a quarter-page panel on Sundays buried amidst the pull-out ads.

What made Calvin special was not only that it was funny, though it certainly was.  During its decade-long run from 1985-1995, only The Far Side was as consistently smart, with a sense of timing that could actually make you laugh out loud.

The strip centered around the title characters, six-year-old Calvin and his best – and only – friend Hobbes, a tiger whom everyone else seems to perceive as a stuffed animal, but whom Calvin understands as a walking, talking, pouncing coadventurer.

Calvin got into just as much trouble as his hyperactive imagination would allow, while Hobbes looked on with a good-natured feline stoicism: love cured with just a hint of condescension.

You’re home from school early, says Hobbes.  I don’t want to talk about it, says Calvin.  Silence for a panel, as the two walk across a crisp September afternoon.  Does that explain all the sirens this afternoon? asks Hobbes.  Calvin: I said I don’t want to talk about it.

But like I said, Calvin wasn’t merely funny.  The strip went far beyond most comics to explore the subtler regions of childhood.  There was death – the Sunday panel about the dead bird, the early daily series about an orphaned baby raccoon that Calvin and his parents just couldn’t save.  There was violence – the brutality of bullies and school administrators, Calvin’s earnest fantasies of wiping his elementary school off the face of the earth.  There was the love/hate/curiosity of the opposite sex, courtesy of young Susie Derkins down the street.

Most of all there was imagination.  And this is where Calvin and Hobbes really shone.  The strip was famous for its bombastic dinosaurs, intergalactic voyages, and transmorgification schemes, painted (especially in the Sunday panels) as vividly as a six-year-old boy could dream up.

Early on, these fantasy strips were vehicles for humor – Calvin the hungry prehistoric alligator swimming across panels one and two before Calvin the boy-under-the-kitchen table seized his mother’s ankle in panel three, demanding lunch.  But as the strip matured, Waterson caught on to something else about Calvin’s fantasy life: its exuberance was bound up in a kind of sadness.

First panel: Calvin approaches his dad, quietly reading a book in the living room easy chair.  Kazam! says Calvin.

Second panel: Calvin’s dad, ignoring him, is still quietly reading.  Except that now he is a green one-eyed grub monster.  Kazam! says Calvin.

Third panel: Calvin’s dad responds.  Quiet! he says.  Dad does not notice, of course, that he is a grub monster.  Nor does he notice the rest of the living room, whose decor has been transformed into that of a bizarre alien hunting lodge.  Kazam! says Calvin.

Fourth panel: What did I just tell you? says dad-grub monster.  Calvin’s mom has appeared under the aspect of a snub-nosed she-beast.  Calvin, she says, if you’re bored I’ll find something for you to do.

A series of compressed mini panels: Calvin marches upstairs to his bedroom, sulking.  He goes to the window, and as he pushes it open, the sulk vanishes.  Calvin thrusts his head and arms out the window and says, Kazam!

Final panel: The world outside has been transformed into an eerie alien moonscape at nightfall, cast in purples and oranges.  Calvin looks out on all of this, chin slumped down on folded arms, and he sighs.

In our Romanticized praise of the imaginative lives of children, one secret of childhood we fail to mention is that dreaming carries an equal proportion of disappointment.  Even as Calvin wanders off to alien moons and brontosaurus riding, he feels the ache of separation between this world and the real one, the one that keeps insisting upon his attention.  It is the subtle and tender exploration of this childhood sadness that makes Calvin and Hobbes truly great.

This is a sadness we continue to feel as adults, I think, except that for us it has a different name: hope.  In hope we were saved.  The testing of faith produces perseverance, and perseverance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.  Hope sounds cheerful, but its flipside is longing, an ache for something great and fantastic and altogether wonderful, something we have not yet been able fully to perceive.  Hope is like Calvin, sighing in his bedroom window, pining for the day when the realm he sees outside might all become real.

So next month, take the chance to buy a book of stamps.  Send off the Garfields and the Dennises for fun, but as you paste the ones with the kid and tiger mugging rude faces, remember there’s something more to them than the antics, something precious and beautiful and something we share.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)