I have had a recurring desire for years to create a comic strip about a little girl who spends half her time in a fantasy world. There are two problems with carrying this desire out. The first is that I doubt I have the talent to actually draw such a strip, although I suppose I could team up with an artist. The second problem worries me just a bit more, and that is that I would be accused of ripping off the great Calvin & Hobbes.

I believe I was about seven or eight years old when I first read a Calvin & Hobbes comic strip. This particular comic was previously unknown to me. It was in the Sunday paper, and it featured this little blonde boy who, while taking a bath, pretended he was a creature from the deep. The fantasy was apparently inspired by a Japanese monster movie he had watched earlier that afternoon.

I remember finding it amusing, especially since this boy's imagination seemed quite akin to mine, and looked for it again the next Sunday.

I had misread the title, thinking it to be called "Calvin & Hobbies" (as in this is a comic about a kid named Calvin and we're reading about all the hobbies he enjoys). The first few strips I read didn't tell me otherwise, as they actually didn't contain Hobbes or any reference to him at all.

When he finally did show up, I recognized that the title read "Hobbes" and not "Hobbies", but now I was faced with an enigma.

Was this tiger real or simply a part of Calvin's imagination?

Much later on, I read a quote by Bill Watterson on this particular subject. He said he didn't imagine that Hobbes was some magical stuffed animal who came to life whenever Calvin was around, but he also didn't feel that Hobbes was entirely a product of Calvin's imagination.

Anyone who's read the strip has seen both personifications of Hobbes...the motionless, expressionless (but undeniably cute) stuffed tiger verses the taller, sleeker tiger who walks upright, is capable of as many facial expressions as his counterpart Calvin, has a wicked and often dry sense of humor, and quite a deep soul.

When I was a kid, this was a very real issue for me. I desperately wanted to believe that Hobbes WAS in fact a magical stuffed animal who would come to life only for Calvin. I even used a few strips as arguments in my favor, strips that depicted Calvin getting into situations that he couldn't have possibly gotten into without help...Hobbes's help to be specific.

I couldn't bear to think that when I was reading these strips where Calvin and Hobbes were taking walks through the woods, Calvin was, in reality, only dragging along his toy tiger who wasn't contributing at all to the conversation.

But now, however many years it's been later, I don't agonize over this issue. I know the truth. Is Hobbes a toy tiger? Of course he is. Is Hobbes a real, live friend of Calvin's? Of course he is.

It's one of those concepts my brain completely understands but is unable to perfectly explain.

I always felt that somehow Susie Derkins could "see" Hobbes too. Not in every strip, as is probably best illustrated by the one in which she says something to the effect of, "I don't know what's weirder, that you're having a fight with your toy tiger or that you seem to be losing". But something about the way she would occasionally talk about Hobbes and to him (even if he was only depicted as his toy self while she was around) made me feel that she totally got the situation.

What a marvelous idea...to create a comic strip in which the existence of one of the characters was not only never proved nor disproved, but in which the act of trying to prove or disprove his existence never came up either. The reader simply takes it as it is.

And that's just one of the wonderful things about Calvin and Hobbes.


One of my elementary school teachers always told me I reminded her of Calvin. (This could be taken the wrong way, but I assure you, she said it with only positive thoughts.) I was a pretty good student in elementary school, so I was unlike Calvin in that regard. I also was never the troublemaker he was. But one would be hard-pressed to find differences between Calvin's imagination and my own, and this is what my teacher was referring to. My imagination came out not only in my class writings, but also in the many adventure games I created for my friends and I to play during recess. The truth is, I don't think my teacher even knew how much like Calvin I was...as she wasn't around when I had all my lone adventures in my backyard once school was over. I too had personal alter egos, very much along the lines of Spaceman Spiff. I spent a good deal of time exploring alien planets and fantasy worlds. I also had a horde of imaginary friends who existed only in my make-believe world.


Despite the fact that Calvin was not supposed to be a very good student, the wide breadth of his vocabulary was always quite stunning. He's the only six year old I know of who has used the words 'impunity', 'cynical', 'arbitrary', 'Australopithecus', and 'somnambulist' to name just a few. He also seems to know a few phrases in Spanish, French, and German. And he understands complex scientific concepts. Are we to assume that if Calvin actually paid attention in school, he'd most likely do fairly well? We've seen that he's got a math block (and boy, can I relate to that), but perhaps, had he ever read a book he was assigned, he might have aced some of his other studies?

Very possibly. Just look at how much he knew about dinosaurs. Another thing he and I have in common...the first thing I ever wanted to be was a paleontologist.


One of the reasons I think people loved Calvin & Hobbes so much is that fact that Watterson illustrated this world so richly. I grew up in Southern California (where once, when I was in the second grade, it hailed slightly, and that was a BIG event) and yet sometimes I swear I have memories of building snowmen in my front yard and pelting neighbor kids with snowballs. I also feel as though I really used to spend warmer days walking through the woods out back behind my house (even though there WEREN'T woods out back behind my house). There was just something so close to home about how Watterson wrote this world. He was especially good at capturing the feelings of a kid close to Christmas. There's one particular panel in a strip where Calvin and Hobbes are coming down the stairs, early Christmas morning, and it is nothing short of wonderful. It shows the two of them from behind, standing very close to each other as they silently peek through the doorway into the living room where Santa has left their presents. Calvin's hand is placed on Hobbes's back, and Hobbes's hand is placed on the wall as the two of them tilt their heads to look into the room where the joys of Christmas morning await.

The reader can absolutely hear the silence - you just know they're holding their breath. This depiction is so much more perfect than showing them racing down the stairs and barging into the living room. It is the tentative, priceless, anticipatory moment that was always the best part of Christmas morning, even if we didn't realize it then.


In December of 1995, the very last Calvin & Hobbes strip graced the pages of the Sunday newspaper. I was saddened by its ending, as was everyone who had spent the years with this 6-year-old lad and his tiger friend, who had had hundreds of conversations ranging from serious to hilarious, angry to joyful, trivial to philosophical. But I must say that the last strip was fantastic. I read an article by some cynic who claimed to love Calvin & Hobbes but clearly didn't learn anything from it. He predicted that the last strip would feature Calvin speaking to Hobbes, and then, confused at why Hobbes didn't answer, would turn to see a mere stuffed tiger. (Perhaps this person was just so bitter at Calvin & Hobbes coming to an end that he felt the need to be equally bitter in his article.)

The very last Calvin & Hobbes couldn't have been more different than this. It featured the friends out in the new-fallen snow, and this is how their dialogue went:


Calvin: Wow, it really snowed last night! Isn't it wonderful?
Hobbes: Everything familiar has disappeared. The world looks brand-new!
Calvin: A new year...a fresh clean start!
Hobbes: It's like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!
Calvin: A day full of possibilities! It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy...let's go exploring!


This was, most likely, a metaphor for how Watterson felt about his own life (the cartoonist stated that he felt limited with the space in which he had to draw, and Hobbes's second line in this strip seems to reflects that). But looking purely at the cartoon, thinking only of what you know about the Calvin & Hobbes universe, this is a great ending. I suppose this is because it doesn't feel like an ending at all. It leaves us with the impression that although we no longer will be able to glimpse the life of these two friends, we know it will continue unabated. Calvin will always be six years old, he and Hobbes will always be friends, and their world will always be magical. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be.

And who could ask for a better "ending" than that?