Calvin... and Hobbes?

Well reader, once again I am going to indulge myself in a random post. Today, we are going to talk about one of the greatest comic strips ever, Calvin and Hobbes.

*WARNING* If you like Calvin and Hobbes, and are sensitive to darker or more serious issues, please refrain from reading further as it may distress you. This blog not responsible for any ruined childhoods or emotional trauma cause by its content. Thank you.

I do not know how many of you have read, or even know about this dynamic duo, so allow me to give you a brief description. Calvin is a little boy trying to get through life despite his temper and a somewhat twisted sense of humor and morality. His companion (and conscience in a way) is his stuffed tiger Hobbes, who is brought to life by Calvin's limitless imagination. Together, they go on adventures in the world around them.

I was remembering some of the old strips I used to read, and one of them stuck out in my mind. It was one of those philosophical discussion the two tended to have. Calvin and Hobbes are sitting beneath a tree on a fall afternoon. Calvin begins discussing friendships, and how we interact with others. His logic was this: If you get most people to leave you alone, then you are doing pretty well in life. If you can somehow find someone who you can tolerate, that means you are lucky. This is especially true if they tolerate you in return. When Hobbes asks him what it means to have a friend who you can talk with and eat apples with on a fall afternoon, Calvin replies “Yeah well... I guess there's no sense in getting greedy is there?”

Now obviously this made me laugh when I first read it. After all, that is literally what they are doing. But after a minute, I realized that Calvin really was alone. Hobbes is a creation of Calvin, he is born from imagination. He is not really there. Calvin does not have a friend to sit with on a fall afternoon. He in fact, has no friends in the cannon of the story beyond Hobbes, who is alive only in his imagination. This really made me think about the strip in a different way. It is not so much about Calvin and his best friend Hobbes, as it about Calvin and Calvin's world. Calvin creates persona's that he can experience adventure and new worlds with. Spaceman Spiff for example, is a space explorer that travels the universe. Calvin often sees the world though his imagination in the strip, and that experience he has becomes the content of the story. It becomes the story of a weird little boy, too different to be accepted. His own personality and interests turn off the people around him, leaving him without friends because he refuses to alter them. In the end, he is left with only his own world, that has become safer than the real tangible one around him. The story becomes very altered in this light, and we begin to see Calvin differently than when it was merely himself and his best friend.

When I thought about the strip like this, it made me realize why I liked it so much. That underlying story appealed to me in a way I did not even realize I saw. I wont go into that here, but it made me wonder something. How often do we go through life and miss the story behind the story? How often do we over look the more powerful, or the more serious themes that become buried beneath the surface? What about other similar stories, like Winnie the Pooh? Can we see other hidden elements in these as well? I guess what I want to say is, sometimes it pays to look deeper than the surface. Sometimes we find things we never knew existed.

-BlackFox

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