Is Hobbes supposed to be real or not? If he wasn’t real, he wouldn’t be able to cut off Calvin’s hair or hit Calvin with a snowball or throw Calvin into the rain barrel. Plus, how tall is Calvin supposed to be? And another question, if he’s supposed to be so dumb, how does he come up with such smart questions like: “How do soldiers killing each other solve the world’s problems?” or “How would people like it if animals bulldozed a suburb and filled itwith trees?”. I love Calvin and Hobbes, I’m just curious.
Oh, is hobbes supposed to be female? you can’t see any parts to prove whether he is male or female.
Of course Hobbes is real. The rest of the world merely percieves him as a stuffed animal. And he is a he, or he is a lesbian, since s/he has a thing for Suzy.
Calvin is an underappreciated child prodigy. Which is why only he can see Hobbes.
They are both real, you know. The rest of us are a comic strip.
Hobbes is real from Calvin’s point of view, and an overactive imagination from everyone else’s. If you watched a security cam of Calvin’s life, you’d probably find out he cut his own hair and fallen in the snow. He didn’t really ride his wagon to mars, either.
You’ve never seen a kid blame/credit something on an imaginary friend or an inanimate object?
He can ask smart questions and has a more mature view of gender relations then you’d expect for two reasons. First, because he’s not dumb, he just doesn’t pay attention, and second because there’s a rather clever adult writing his dialog.
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“I’ll just imagine the music which would have added a lot to this scene . . .”
Hobbes’ creator has pointed out that he intentionally avoids resolving the question of whether Hobbes is real or not: he prefers just to show to different views of reality, oen from the point of view of Calvin and one for everybody else. This is supposedly also part of the reason for not licensing Calvin and Hobbes tie-in products: he doesn’t want a toy company deciding which is the “real” Hobbes.
AS for Calvin’s vocabulary, Bill Watterson has said that it “puzzles some readers, but Calvin has never been a literal six-year-old.”
Also, Calvin would never actually spend that much time hanging out with a girl.
Anybody remember the early sketch where Calvin and Suzy are yelling over the cruel Valentine Calvin had given her? It ends with thought balloons where it is revealed that they secretly have a crush on each other, with hearts and everything. That plot element was quickly removed in favor of the gender wars between the two.
If it helps, just think of Hobbes as a modern day Harvey.
I’ve never seen anyone mention this before, so I’ll do it.
I think that Watterston got the names of his characters from adjacent volumes of a set of “Great Books”. Hobbes was, of course, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, while Calvin probably represented the writings of theologian John Calvin. In a few comics Calvin had an imaginary younger brother Melville, who would have been the next volume in the set.
Hobbes is almost certainly male. Not only was Thomas Hobbes male, but Hobbes sometimes goes into raptures over Susie. It’s possible that Hobbes was female, and this was the first lesbian relationship in a mainstream comic strip, but I seriously doubt it.
According to Watterson (from the extensive intro to the Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book), “Calvin is named for a sixteenth-century theologian who believed in predestination” and Hobbes is “[n]amed after a seventeenth-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature[…].”
I own (in no particular order):
The Indispensable C&H
Scientific Progress Goes “Boink”
Attack of the Deranged Killer Mutant Monster
Weirdos from Another Planet
Something Under the Bed is Drooling
Calvin & Hobbes
Revenge of thr Baby-sat
Yukon Ho!
It’s a Magical World
There’s Treasure everywhere
Homocidal Pscho Jungle Cat, (best cover art, IMHO)
The C&H Tenth Anniversary Book, (a must own)
The days are just packed
And there is a new one just released - sorry, can’t remember the title. But it’s cool. Adds Bill’s insites to certain strips.
"I like to stare death straight in the eye and make him blink! If your adrenalin isn’t pumping, you’re not really living!" - Calvin
