I like this explanation best. Balance, you manifest your name.
Of course, Hobbes is real.
Even if you discount anything that Hobbes says, Calvin is still one very complicated kid. I very much would believe that he would imagine Hobbes having said some weird remark while Calvin races down the hill. It’s not as if imagination is stuck with the rules of time–you can imagine something having happened in the past. All Calvin has to do is think, “What would Hobbes have said while he watched me do that?” and that becomes what he did say.
I don’t really have a belief one way or the other, but I prefer Hobbes to not be real. I like that much better than there being some sort of creature that only Calvin can see, without any explanation for how such a creature could exist. I like filling in plot holes, but that’s a really big one.
Hobbes being a figment of Calvin’s imagination is not inconsistent with Hobbes being just as real as Calvin. In the context of the comic strip (the same context in which Calvin himself exists), figments can be real.
Nice answer!
But I’ll go with Hobbes is just a stuffed toy tiger owned by a very imaginative boy.
See this documentary, if you get the chance - I loved it: Dear Mr. Watterson (2013) - IMDb
I’ll agree with that but also suggest sometimes Watterson liked to screw with his readers too. That satisfies me with how Calvin sometimes needed to be untied from a tree or a chair. It’s got to be hard to resist letting some surreality out of it’s cage.
Reading this thread really takes me back…specifically, to May 30, 1989, when real!Hobbes and Calvin’s Mom appeared in the same shot.
Authorial intent and the spirit of the story and it’s artistry are all well and good…but so is that one, golden, teeny little overlooked moment where the script overlooked a plot goof. 
(For the record, I don’t consider that panel to be concrete, final evidence for or against any theory about Hobbes’ nature. I merely consider it hilarious. 
)
I vote “real”
So you people who say real, does that mean that all the other stuff is also real. Space monsters and such. And if not, what’s the difference?
Of course Hobbes is real. He’s certainly more real to Calvin than the ‘real’ world he finds himself in. Whether he’s technically ‘alive’ or not is irrelevant.
Thinking about Calvin and Hobbes always makes me tear up a little. The comics page has never been the same since it ended…
Spaceman Spiff is clearly his daydreaming, but it does get fuzzy with the Transmogrifier[sup]TM[/sup], his Time Machine and Duplicator. This was probably just his imagination or perhaps Calvin was actually a juvenile Time Lord being raised on Earth. That would fit Balance’s theory well.
Hobbes did things though that cannot be explained away so easily as just imagination, Hobbes was probably a creature of the Faerie like a púca. This fits better than most explanations. It also explains how Calvin’s kid was able to interact with the same personality when Hobbescame to her.
Hobbes is an ordinary stuffed toy owned by a boy with a wonderful imagination.
I’m still expecting to see Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs in the cereal aisle one day.
George Orwell covered this:
“Does Hobbes exist, the way you and I exist?”
“You and I do not exist.”
“Real” Hobbes also appeared in the same shot as Susie Derkins three years earlier.
I see what you did there.
That’s a great strip that shows that Hobbes is not real to the real world, but only to Calvin. When Calvin’s looking at him, he’s real. When Susie’s looking at him in panel 3, he’s not. (In fact, you can say that the first 2 panels are from Calvin’s perspective, the last 2 from Susie’s - and there we see that Susie doesn’t have much of an imagination, because Mr. Bun is still just a stuffed bunny.)
He’s both/neither real and/nor imaginary. Just enjoy the ambiguity.
Let me make sure I understand this. Some people believe that Hobbes magically comes to life?
OTOH, that could just be Mr. Bun’s problem.
Hobbes is real.
My conclusion is that there is no difference between the two options, and it doesn’t matter which happens. Hobbes is real to Calvin when they are alone together, ergo it is an irrelevant and naively “scientific” point, whether Hobbes stays a stuffed tiger or turns into a flesh-and-blood tiger.
It isn’t a situation in which a concrete analysis has any validity.
This has been around a while, but for those who haven’t seen it, it’s worth a look:
It’s so sad!
There’s also one, that I can’t find right now, where Calvin is a (actual) murdering psychopath that blames everything on Hobbes. It’s clever, but deranged!
Oh, and I believe he is a figment of Calvin’s imagination, but that Calvin does not need to be medicated.