When Calvin Met Hobbes

Revisiting the Classics

Because this newsletter is called A Lonely Impulse of Delight, I’m going to try out a recurring bit. I hope you’ll forgive me—as always, feel free to yell at me in the comments.

Interspersed with other writing, I’m going to regularly revisit by far the most important text in the Western canon. By which I mean, of course, Calvin and Hobbes.

Not familiar with Calvin and Hobbes? I won’t scold you. I envy you. You are as a babe ushered blinking into a realm of wonders. Go buy the collected works of Bill Watterson immediately. And follow along. This is very important.

Where to start but the beginning? When we first meet Calvin, he has not yet met Hobbes.

In that first panel, we have a wonderfully boxy car—this is 1985. We also have the least ironic “Pop” in the entire ten-year run of C+H. For one brief beat, at least, Watterson could let Calvin ventriloquize the comic-strip kids of yore. Pith-helmeted Calvin sounds like he might respect his father, like he might even look up to him. “Pop” might even be the hero of the comic strip, for all we know.

It’s all charmingly quaint. You get the feeling that Watterson didn’t yet realize what he was going to create, and that he was learning about Calvin along with the rest of us. You wonder whether maybe Calvin didn’t sneak up behind Watterson and filch his Diet Coke—only to run away shrieking about space aliens—while he was mid-way through drawing this first installment. Maybe Hobbes darted into the shadows of the forsythias out in the garden. Something quickly alerted the cartoonist to what he was dealing with.

Because by the third panel, having passed over Calvin’s elucidation of his motivations, we get the sardonic squint from the ever-unnamed Dad. Calvin takes no heed. He strides out of the frame and toward the unknown. There are tigers out there. Party for the haters.

A wise person once said there are two stories: Someone leaves town, or a stranger comes to town. Watterson gives us both in four newspaper cartoon panels. Calvin is leaving disapproving domesticity in the dust, and when he crests the horizon, he’ll meet the striped stranger.

In the fourth panel, we finally meet Hobbes the tiger. There are quite a few images in the run of C+H that are said to capture the spirit of the comic. Because most discourse about C+H is undiluted adult nostalgia, we often worship at the altar of heartwarming renderings of Calvin and his stuffed tiger companion. Fans go for images of the duo sledding, or exploring the forest, or lounging by the fireplace.

For my money, though, the spirit of Calvin and Hobbes is captured just as well by the fourth panel of this very first installment. Hobbes has been caught by a marauding six-year-old kid. He’s strung up by his hindpaw, swaying in the breeze. And his response is to enjoy a sandwich and serenely make fun of his own stupidity. He got the simple thing he wanted, and if the situation has its complexities, so be it. The sandwich is worth savoring.

Party for the haters indeed.

Other fun things:

— Friend of the newsletter (and YA writer) Emma Berquist showed me this article about the Tarkovsky-inspired cultists causing trouble near Chernobyl

— Another friend of mine recently launched a new literary journal called New Gothic Review . Their inaugural issue came out recently and is available online in its entirety. I can vouch for the seriousness of their search for what “the gothic” means in our era of ever-more haunted houses

— From a few years ago, but there was a viral tweet recently that reminded me of one of the greatest blog posts of all time: David Roth on Wyatt Koch and his shirts

A poem:

A funny one by Muriel Rukeyser