C - “I bet a pet dog would’ve gotten out of my way.”
I loved the way Hobbes would greet Calvin after school at the door, and the time C tried to give Susie the same experience when she stayed over one afternoon, but Hobbes greeted her with a neck-tie instead.
Hobbes was never really into the G.R.O.S.S. club thing with all his heart I think.
Cheers Mr Watterson, and thanks!
Thanks for bumping the thread!! I missed it th efirst itme, and this gave me alot of chuckles!
My favorite strip was the one where he puts goo in his hair and pretends he is ‘Astroboy’ - still cracks me up.
Mom says I should make my life an example of the principle I believe in, but whenever I do that I get in trouble.
-So the kids called me a sissy until I played baseball, then they yelled at me when I did play, then Coach called me a quitter when I stopped playing. Unless you’re a star, you can’t please anyone.
-So why not just please yourself?
-Because Mom won’t let me move to Madagascar.
Same thing happened to one of my nephews.
One of my favorite “snowmen” stips, as long as we’re sharing:
H: What’s this snowman?
C: He’s a Paleontologist. He’s looking for Cretaceous snow dinosaurs.
H: Why does he look so sad?
C: He realized that snow doesn’t fossilize. It just melts.
H: Your snowmen lead tragic lives.
C: Well, they’re not very bright.
Watterson had a wonderful ability in that strip to take a joke and twist it – making it unique and even more funny. I can’t think of a single time he did the obvious or easy joke; he always made it special and inextricably tied to the characters.
And I, too, hope to be Calvin’s Dad to my own boys.
Chocobo,
Thanks for reviving my thread. I remember starting this like two months ago. When it fell off MPSIMS I didn’t think I’d ever see it again, and I forgot about it.
“From now on, I’m devoting myself to the cultivation of interpersonal relationships”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
“But what if, when we die and go to Heaven, it turns out that God is a big chicken?”
“Just eat your dinner!”
C & H rocks. I re-read the books fairly often.
Bill Watterson seemed (to me) to do a lot of good vs. evil, and ‘religious’ stuff. Anyone know if he had any religious beliefs?
“I’ve got six slugs in me. One’s lead, the rest are bourbon.”
Yes, Tracer Bullet was one of my favourites too. Not nearly enough TB storylines, though.
Of course, even when Calvin was Calvin, the lines were priceless: “Dad, is this you with the keg and the ‘Party Naked’ T-shirt?”
One of my favorites is one without any dialogue at all until the end. Calvin is sitting at the table with a plate of green lumpy stuff in front of him. There are many panels all giving different facial expressions. Finally, he tries it. He fakes a heart attack, indicating the stuff is lethally disgusting. The only line, I think, is “There, I tried it. Are you happy now? It almost killed me.” And then it pans back and his parents are just sitting there, with straight faces, applauding.
“This is the ‘Very Sorry’ song.
Won’t you help and sing along?”
“(Bum, bum, bum)”
“I blew it”
(“He’s sorry”)
“I knew it”
(“So sorry”)
“I’m very, very sorry that I took your precious flag”
(“Just don’t do it any more you scurvy scallawag”)
Here is the link for that comic. It is one of my favorites as well.
Hee hee! From that set of strips:
C: Who’s this hussy you’re with?
D: THAT’S YOUR MOTHER!
M(off-screen): WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?
Or something like that.
I still remember the very first C&H I ever saw. Calvin walks out the front door into obviously very cold weather (snow on the ground, you can see his breath, he’s wearing coat/boots/mittens/etc). He then proceeds to make a series of very strange faces, and in the last panel says:
“Don’t you hate it when your boogers freeze?”
I was hooked for life.
My favorite snowman strip was the one where Calvin was explaining one of his snowmen, who was looking happy and eating a snowcone.
C: See here Hobbes? This snowman is on top of the world! He is happy and content just with his snowcone!
H: How nice. What about the snowman with the ice cream scoop in his back?
C: It’s a sordid story…
The huge monster grabs Spaceman’s Spiff’s ship in mid-air. Oh no!! Just when you think our hero is in a jam, the monster makes it worse by looking straight at the spaceman, and telling him the dreaded four words: “Go clean up your room.” Juxtaposition has never been funnier.
I don’t know how I missed this thread. What can I say after so much has already been said? Reading your responses, I feel a lump of nostalgia growing in my throat.
One of the things about the Internet is that you can think you’re the world’s biggest Calvin and Hobbes fan, only to discover that thousands of other people love the strip just as much, if not more, than you. It’s a bit disconcerting.
Growing up, I knew people who enjoyed the strip, but I never met anyone who bought every single book and obsessed over every single panel like I did. I rarely read the strip while it was in the daily paper because I preferred to read it in book form. One of the greatest pleasures of my life was taking home the latest collection from Crown Books, curling up under the covers late at night, and reading an entire year’s worth of strips in one sitting — three or four hours of pure, unadulterated pleasure. Then I’d read it again a few weeks later, my enjoyment hardly diminishing the second, third, and fourth times around. When I was an adolescent, if I ever felt down or had thoughts about suicide, all I had to do was pull out one of my Calvin and Hobbes books and my problems would disappear like magic. It was better than any drug.
I’m glad Watterson decided to end the strip. I think he said what he needed to say. Anything more would be superfluous. Like life, Calvin and Hobbes is tragically finite. It’s more precious for that reason. If the strip were as perennial as Garfield or Peanuts, we wouldn’t treasure it as much.
–Caliban
I rarely make it MPSIMS, but I see I’m missing out, you guys are the hippest.
First, I can’t believe my favorite line isn’t here yet:
H (to C, pondering the universe): “Do you believe in God?”
C: “Well, somebody’s out to get me.”
Yes, Tracer was a deep well barely tapped. My favorite character. I even block printed myself some T’s with him on it. Totally blows folks away.
And Filthy floored me with a BDG quote. “Grab that, friends. Weigh it.” Talk about hip, that guy…YES!!! We need a thread for him alone.
Juniper, great tag, too. But then I’m a bad wolf, too.
and Dennis Miller quotes. Just a big THANK YOU to all you posters. This definately brightened up my day.
This motivated me to go into my basement and find my Calvin and Hobbes 10th Anniversary book, which includes Watterson’s excellent essay on the state of modern newspaper comics.
I cried just a little reading the raccoon series of strips. And the one where Calvin pictures his mom as an alien about to kill him, only to be given a sandwich and some lemonade reminds me a lot of how I’ve grown to appreciate my mother. Others just made me laugh my ass off.
I hope that some years from now, people will realize that Calvin and Hobbes ranks right up there with the best movies, books and other works of the post-WWII era.
Anyone who doesn’t/didn’t like this strip has some sort of mental problem. Seriously. This strip, from the raccoon series, sums it up rather well. Calvin does all the talking, so each line is from a new panel.
(Calvin and Hobbes stand at the base of a tree.)
C: This is where dad buried the little raccoon.
C: I didn’t even know he existed a few days ago and now he’s gone forever. It’s like I found him for no reason. I had to say good-bye as soon as I said hello.
C: Still… in a sad, awful, terrible way, I’m happy I met him. sniff
(Calvin, Hobbes, start walking off.)
C: What a stupid world.
Too true.
ditto
As much as I hate to admit it, I think you’re right, Caliban. For a few years, Watterson allowed us in to see Calvin’s world, and all that made it up. We should be glad for what we were allowed to see.
I think that deep down, we all knew that it was going to end someday. Things that go on too long tend to change over time and not necessarily for the better; it seems to be the nature of things. I’m not looking to start a debate, but while “MASH” was a great TV show, it seemed to get a little preachy in its later years. Even the last few years of “Peanuts” seemed to be much different from the way it was in the Happiness is a Warm Puppy and Red Baron days.
But we have precious memories of Calvin and Hobbes as they were, as they always will be. Our memories will keep Calvin like a photograph captures an instant in time. To us, Calvin will continue to pepper his imagination with dinosaurs (in F-14s, I hope!), with Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, Tracer Bullet, and with assorted outer space aliens. Rosalyn and Miss Wormwood and Moe will continue to be the monkeys on his back, Mom and Dad will forever remain nameless, Dad’s polls will continue to slip, and Susie will always be Calvin’s one true love, although he will never admit it.
Watterson might not be updating us with Calvin’s adventures any more, but I like to think that somewhere out there, Calvin and Hobbes are still around, playing Calvinball, building snow goons, tormenting Susie, and inventing transmogrifiers, duplicators, and cerebral enhancers.
This is how I remember them, and I’m glad that the strip ended before they could change into anything other than the characters I knew and loved.