'Calvin and Hobbes' at 40
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Comic Strips
Calvin And Hobbes
Bill Watterson
Cartooning
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Nov 20, 2025 at 7:08 AM EST
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The boxed collection is wonderful, and one of my favourites.
For folks who want a bit more, there have been a couple of homages:
"Hobbes and Bacon": https://imgur.com/gallery/all-hobbes-bacon-by-pants-are-over... --- a bit too on-the-nose for my taste, which doesn't really add anything
"Calvin and Company" by DomNX, wherein Calvin and Susie have twins named after Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir --- art not fully realized/up to the task, and again, all a bit too obvious
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....
The thing is, laughing at problems, while cathartic, isn't actually inspiring folks to actually understand/solve problems/make the world a better place.... I'm reminded of a comic from childhood where a child sees duck hunters as part of the reason why a forest is clearcut for a development, instead of the reason why such land is preserved (the Pa. State Game Commission manages over 1.5 million acres) or, maybe I'm just overly pessimistic this morning because of intractable problems where people choose wrongly, mostly through not understanding the problem/ignorance/lack of sympathy for others --- classic example, drivers in cars who get upset because following a cyclist causes them slow down on their way to a red light --- rather a shame that the strips featuring Calvin's father as a cyclist weren't didactic so as to show/discuss that sort of thing, rather than going for the laugh.
Are you sure this was a comic? It's a story someone wrote, available on Scribd.
This one?
Cul de Sac (https://www.gocomics.com/culdesac)
Wallace the Brave (https://www.gocomics.com/wallace-the-brave)
> Petting Zoo is a favorite story of David Hartwell's, the master editor who edited this book and most of my others. Do you like dinosaurs? I loved them when I was a kid, and I've noticed that Hobbes' buddy Calvin loves them at least as much. Perhaps David feels the same way.
Petting Zoo can be read here:
https://archive.org/details/yearsbestsf30000unse/page/n9/mod...
Bill Watterson also guest-drew a few precious strips for Pearls Before Swine.
https://slate.com/culture/2014/06/bill-watterson-does-pearls...
https://toostupidtotravel.org/2014/06/07/ever-wished-that-ca...
is 404.
I believe the Zen Pencils one is one of the better ones... it's not Calvin and Hobbes, but rather about Watterson himself.
http://www.zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoon...
And it still holds up for kids of today. My son is a second gen Calvin and Hobbes kid.
In other words, it's kind of amazing that Watterson was able to put himself in the mind of a child so well for that strip.
There are even more on xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Calvin_a...
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.
Look up some crazy sounding 20+ character word, takes three steps, and then you get a definition of the sub-sub-sub word and it says ".... blah blah, derived from the Greek base <abc>- and then also the Latin base -<xyz>", and you realize you had no chance at getting it from any kind of first principles or anything.
Especially as it’s not a very common word a lot of non-native speakers need to look up. Probably also a few native speakers.
"Curmudgeon" itself is interesting, because while it's not particularly common, I actually think a lot of native English speakers would recognize it because it's got a lot of character- for some reason, the way it feels to say and the way it sounds almost has some of the character of the meaning.
Still, 100% agreed that he stopped at the right time, both because of the creeping cynicism, but also simply because he was running out of fresh ideas...
He had dreamed of being a cartoonist from childhood (when he was 8 he wrote Charles Shulz of Peanuts who wrote him back and it changed his life). He had actually majored in Political Science at Kenyon College (class of '80) because he thought that political cartooning was going to be his route in. It was not. He was a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post briefly before they fired him, then he worked for an ad agency and freelanced a bit before Universal Press Syndicate signed him on for Calvin and Hobbes. But, even at 27 when he started working for UPS, he understood the pressure of the professional art world and was cynical about it.
Apparently he lived a miserable life for the last few years of his work. He had been injured in a bike accident and it terrified him that he would be injured in such a way that he could no longer draw (1) so he basically stopped going out, stopped doing anything that could possibly harm his ability to earn money, stopped doing anything that might bring joy to his life. He lived a recluse for several years, before deciding to just quit, then he and his wife Melissa adopted a child and gave her a good life.
1: Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was the editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times when, in 1991, he crushed his right hand attaching a snow-plow to his truck, and he had to retire. I think that incident is what inspired this fear, the timelines match up. But of course, Watterson is famously private and so this is conjecture.
I think they still believe what I told them about how they determine weight limits for bridges though.
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 school. It had finished by the time I was in high school.
I still love it, but my feelings now are mixed as well.
Calvin wasn't exactly a pro-social role model for me. He was the hero of the smartest media I was acquainted with - the sharpest mouthpiece for what was going on around me and how to be alive. It was vitally important for me to live up to his disdain for schooling, his aloofness, his contrarianism. Nothing horrified eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-two year old me so much as conforming (gross) to a Susie Perkins mode of existence - smart, but seemingly oblivious or indifferent to life's contradictions and hypocrisies.
Some thirty years later I understand that a person can move pragmatically, without self-harm or self-righteousness, through life's contradictions and hypocrisies without being oblivious or indifferent. Who knew?
Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Then we wonder why kids adopt those attitudes. It's simply because mimic what they see. And worse yet, when they see it in movie/show form, they think those attitudes are cool and relatable.
My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up.
I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
I somehow had never heard about Bluey until TheOdd1sOut (YouTuber who does hilarious 10-15 minute video on slice-of-life topics) did a video about it.
The TL;DW is that Bluey is a kids show that not only recognizes that the parents will likely be in the room while the show is on and therefore will occasionally have lines that are meant for them, but will actually tackle tough topics that children and their families may be dealing with. For example, in one episode, Bluey's mom is despairing because Bluey isn't reaching development milestones when he should be, she's blaming herself, and another character comes to console her, and the character looks directly towards the viewer and says "You're doing great!"
I'm almost tempted to actually watch the show even though I don't have kids.
She should be. Bluey and Bingo are sisters.
The show is extremely good, and when my kids were around that age, we all watched together. Hard to explain to your 6 year old why you are bawling your eyes out, but it does lead to some important conversations. It’s also an inspiration to be a better parent, particularly for Dads. Thank you Bandit.
I don’t know if any of this stuff will hit if you aren’t a parent. It hits right into the heart of all those things people tell you “you can’t understand if you don’t have kids”.
It’s an objectively good show though, I found myself watching it even when the kids weren’t around. There are still some episodes I can’t watch; but you’d need to have had those experiences to understand.
I noticed that when I adopted a loving, quieter tone, and truly focused on do as i do vs do as i say attitudes, my children began to reject the "norms" shown on the tv shows. Today my children remark about how their friends act at their homes and towards their parents, and we have discussions about it.
That said, I definitely had the problem you describe, but it was resolved by focusing on consequences of actions and being ready to follow through on punishments (much like you did). Combined with the do as i do attitude, those punishments were ultimately punishments for me as well. You are being a terorrizing little bad ass? ok no TV. But then this means I can't watch TV because then they might watch TV while in the same room as me. Mutual pain.
I'd never thought how it might impact kids, but now that you mention it, I can only dislike the trend more.
Regardless, I also highly doubt that Rick and Morty is only consumed by people who are no longer susceptible to getting cues on how to interact with others from media.
Although there are definitely a ton of kids shows that I find 100% garbage and would never let my kids watch under any circumstances, none of the 'name-brand' kids movies I've seen in the past 10 years struck me as unacceptably negative in the way you describe.
On the contrary, I get the impression that at least some of these movies are attempting to depict feelings and situations that some kids are feeling in a way that helps them understand 1) they're not alone and 2) their feelings or situations aren't wrong or abnormal.
Like, I took my kids to see Elio when it came out. BAM, right off the bat, dead parents. Anger. Frustration. Fear. Power struggles with parental figures.
This is all intentional—to the point that it's formulaic. A 2021 study found that slightly over 61% of the 155 animated kids features of the last ~80 years had no mention of the child protagonist's biological parents. There are a lot of reasons for this. The simplest are that it's way easier to come up with challenges and conflict for the protag(s) when their parents aren't around.
A more charitable reason is that there are all too many kids who, well, do have absent or fucked up parents. But it doesn't have to be that specific case either—any kid eventually has feelings of anger, fear and frustration, and seeing depictions of this in stories is important (for everyone, of any age, at any time).
I overall doubt that watching those stories causes kids to act angry and frustrated even when they're not angry and frustrated. I'm well aware of how profoundly mimetic human children are (and why that's important), but it doesn't happen with everything 100% of the time.
But this is also age-dependent in various ways. An 8-year-old can absorb a movie depiction of a fight between child and parent in a way that a 3-year-old can't. Are some toddlers going to act out because they watched that? Maybe? Probably?
Anyway, it's tricky to have these discussions because every child is different, even though there are broad anthropological patterns to humanity. But I've been more impressed than annoyed with lots of animated kids movies that I expected to loathe.
It makes things like Bluey stand out - wow, a show that is entertaining and fun where you don't have to kill one or more parents to make it work!
Which came first—the chicken or the egg?
In comparison, the behavior in the kids shows from other producers (Disney, Nickelodeon, etc.) sometimes presents nasty behavior and name-calling as either inevitable, or something that's "someone else's problem": the instigator, if they're punished at all, might suffer the wrath of an authority figure, or simply bad karma.
My intent when choosing shows is not to hide the existence of bad behavior from children, but to teach them how to deal with it.
(My children also read Calvin and Hobbes. And watch those less-wholesome shows. And binge-watch MrBeast when I'm not around...)
Great recommendation. Angela Collier has a recent piece on kids' television and PBS in particular that is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DGyatqN63RZ4
:.)
It's absurd to even deny it, Cartman was admired and emulated by a whole generation.
And South Park was (is?) on TV during daytime hours, of course kids watched it.
I think it was a hangover from Gen-X and the 80's. Ferris Bueller was pretty aloof and angst'd to the gills wasn't he?
As an '80s kid, Calvin and Hobbes ran for almost my entire childhood, and we have a number of the collections. I never fail to be impressed either by Watterson's talent, both in the art and in choosing the right words to say, nor by his integrity and restraint, both in refusing to allow his work to be merchandised and in choosing to stop when he did—when he felt he had said all he came to say.
Many more artists of all types could take so many lessons from him. Even some that are already great. He is a very humble man, but he stands among the legends of our time.
Edit: realized it would be good to add a link to the exhibition: https://fenimoreartmuseum.org/future-exhibitions/calvin-and-...
It is largely a collection of original strips. You won't see anything new or original, that is not in one or more of the books. But it is interesting to see his process, to note where he made mistakes, to listen to everyone chuckle at one strip or another, and to see the progression of the characters and artist as you walk through the lifetime of the comic.
Well worth the trip!
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/318702d0df96013172...
(I am genuinely considering a trip to Cooperstown now.)
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.
The "complete" box set is the first thing I ordered from Amazon US as a teenager, in 2000 or 2001 iirc.
Gocomics seems to go after everyone who posts these comic strips on a regular basis.
The C&H sub-reddit stopped posting some time ago. [0]
The only C&H Search out there is not allowed to show the strips and instead redirects to Gocomics. [1]
Here's a blog post by S. Anand detailing some background on the takedown notice he received, although he doesn't mention who sent it. [2]
I feel saddened that the one comic strip that resisted commercialization has to have its fans face this.
But I suppose that's the nature of the web now.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1m8j09a/th...
[1]: https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/
[2]: https://www.s-anand.net/blog/the-calvin-and-hobbes-search-ta...
(You should also buy real copies if you still can, because they're great.)
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Calvin-Hobbes-Box-Set/dp/074...
I got this when it came out. It's absolutely amazing, filled with commentary from Bill Watterson.
I've read the whole set twice, but it's been at least 15 years. I should read it again.
That being said, I'm sure he would've done it the same way today.
Watterson, famously, never sold out. He is sort of an idealized, godlike figure, to many cartoonists.
Reminds me of this Onion story: https://theonion.com/peeing-calvin-decals-now-recognized-as-...
I don’t think I fully appreciated the range of humor and topics Bill Watterson explored when I was young. Plenty of strips are perfect for my 9 year old; she was in fits of laughter just yesterday at Hobbes’s physical comedy and the elementary school drama with Susie and Mrs Wormwood. But other strips are much more intellectual, touching on politics, life, and morality. I appreciate these more now as well, because they often spark deeper conversations with my kids when they ask me to explain them.
I doubt he’ll ever see it, but thank you, Bill, for giving multiple generations so much laughter.
Now, I see this technique work so well for business and political leaders, comics, social commentators, etc. It is a very effective technique to capture the hearts of your audience.
Every day, I have a reminder to think of three things for which I'm grateful. I was just trying to find the third for today when I saw this headline.
I am grateful that I love my tattoos (and have no regret, which is the risk of tattoos), one of which is Stupendous Man. He was the first and it's because CnH holds such a special place in my heart. The comic largely shaped my childhood.
Bill Waterson had the integrity not to license his work, preferring that the reader not have the characters spoiled. He opted not to make boatloads of money in making this decision (cough, garfield, snoopy). He also declared that Sunday papers could print his comic unbroken or they could drop him and this allowed for truly magnificent art pieces where stories could be told in new ways. His integrity is legendary in the field.
Check out his recent work, The Mysteries.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-novel-review-bill-watters...
I am so incredibly happy that Watterson never "sold out" and gave away film/animation rights to his characters. They are perfect the way they are.
Watterson managed to keep that dual perspective without letting the strip drift into cynicism, which is rare for long-running comics.
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