Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Calvin is a fictional character in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. He is one of the strip's primary characters, along with Hobbes. Calvin first appeared in the first strip of the comic and in the very first panel. The first dialogue in the strip was Calvin's line, "So long, pop. I'm off to check my tiger trap". Calvin appeared in almost every strip that was printed and published.
Contents |
[edit] Personality
Named after 16th century theologian John Calvin (founder of Calvinism and a strong believer in predestination), Calvin is an impulsive, insubordinate, imaginative, energetic, curious, intelligent, and often selfish six-year-old, whose last name the strip never gives. Though Calvin is usually shown as caring only about himself, he has appeared otherwise on occasion to have a deep care for animals, such as the time he found an injured baby raccoon, got his parents to try to help it, and then cried when it died, but still thinks humans are superior as in a strip where he suddenly begins rambling about how birds can't write memoirs. Despite his low grades, Calvin has a wide vocabulary range that rivals that of an adult as well as an emerging philosophical mind, despite mistaking bats for bugs. "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid?" he says. "Well, mine are even worse!" He commonly wears his distinctive striped shirt. Watterson has described Calvin thus:
- "Calvin is pretty easy to do because he is outgoing and rambunctious and there's not much of a filter between his brain and his mouth."[1]
- "I guess he's a little too intelligent for his age. The thing that I really enjoy about him is that he has no sense of restraint, he doesn't have the experience yet to know the things that you shouldn't do."
- "The socialization that we all go through to become adults teaches you not to say certain things because you later suffer the consequences. Calvin doesn't know that rule of thumb yet."
Calvinistic predestination as a philosophical position basically entails the idea that the human action affecting a person's ultimate salvation or damnation is predestined beforehand. Calvin's consistent gripe is that the troublesome acts he commits are outside of his control: he is simply a product of his environment, a victim of circumstances. He does frequently escape from his environment into elaborate fantasy worlds; one of the strip's recurring devices is the humorous juxtaposition of Calvin's fantastic perception with the quotidian viewpoint of other characters. On many occasions, Calvin sees himself in an alternate guise: as the astronaut and explorer Spaceman Spiff, the superhero Stupendous Man, the private eye Tracer Bullet and many others (see Calvin's alter-egos).
In addition, Calvin has a highly developed artistic streak for his age. That is evident during the winter when Calvin indulges in constructing highly creative, if typically grotesque, snowmen and related tableaus.
[edit] Calvin's alter-egos
Calvin's hyperactive imagination leads him to imagine himself as other characters with different powers and goals; he sometimes vanishes into a fantasy to escape a difficult situation (like a school quiz). It is important to note that Hobbes is not seen taking part in the fantasies involving Calvin's alter-egos, other than criticizing his choice of alternate personae. On several occasions, Calvin has appeared as either a larger or a smaller version of himself, wreaking havoc like Godzilla or crawling across a book page as "Calvin, the human insect." More frequently, however, his imagination transforms him into a being of a different kind.
[edit] Spaceman Spiff
Spiff, "interplanetary explorer extraordinaire," explores the outermost reaches of the universe ("by popular request") in a red flying saucer with a bubble canopy. In all but one strip, the saucer is tiny, with just enough room for Spiff and apparently little else. Yet, the craft is equipped with an astounding array of weapons, detectors and propulsion devices. Spiff wears square glasses, or goggles, whose front openings change their shape according to his emotions. The galaxy is a cruel place where Spiff is often zapped by ferocious and disgusting aliens (who, in reality, are people such as Calvin's parents, Miss Wormwood, etc.), stranded in a desert, on a planet, or both.
The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book provides background on Spiff's character. Watterson first conceived an earlier version of Spiff when he was taking a high school German class, producing a two-page comic titled "Raumfahrer Rolf." When he was in college he reworked the strip and renamed his hero "Spaceman Mort." Later on, after finishing college, he came up with the name Spaceman Spiff and made what he hoped was a professional strip with Spiff as a hero. There was little resemblance to the Calvin-Spiff character: The early Spiff was a "diminutive loudmouth" with a Chaplin moustache who explored space in a dirigible with his sidekick Fargle. The newspaper syndicates all rejected this early strip, and the present Spiff was finally born as one of the many imaginary alter egos of Calvin when the Calvin and Hobbes strip took off.
Early in the strip's career, the alien planets Watterson invented were, in his words, "rather generic." As his work matured, Watterson brought the Spiff saga in line with his principle that "Things are funner when they're specific, rather than generalized," basing his alien landscapes on the rock formations of southern Utah, as well as the landscapes within Krazy Kat. Gradually, the monsters also took on more detail, becoming more than blobs of slime. The vocabulary, and in particular Spiff's array of high-tech gadgetry, offered a caricature of the "science" found in many science fiction books and TV series.
Watterson himself described Spaceman Spiff as a parody of Flash Gordon. The grand "space opera" style of Spiff's adventures may also point to a spoof of Star Trek and Star Wars. Since all the Spiff adventures have a lone protagonist playing with reality, they are close to the early work of Philip K. Dick and that of other writers who have featured lone individuals going to the edge of their perceived world. In the final years of Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson began to show an interest in information technology, often pitting the progressive and computer-savvy Calvin against his reactionary father, who comments, "It's bad enough to have a telephone." Watterson's satire of the personal computer and its effects spilled over into the Spaceman Spiff strips. For example, in one strip, Spiff's ship was depicted as having a computerized weapon control system that was so finicky and slow that Spiff was hit by the aliens before he had a chance to use any of his weapons.
Spiff has also been used as a 'character' in Cosmic Encounter, with the special ability to 'crash land' on opponents' planets.
[edit] Spaceman Spiff's planets
Spaceman Spiff visits a number of planets with names ranging from the generic sci-fi type to the absurd, sometimes concealing puns. They include:
- Ahnooie-4, where Spiff decides to put a repulsive blob (Susie Derkins) out of its misery by setting his blaster on "liquefy" (shooting spitballs). "Ahnooie" is a novel spelling of ennui, reflecting Calvin's in-class boredom.
- Bog, where pools of toxic chemicals bubble under a choking atmosphere of poisonous gases. Aside from that, it isn't much like Earth. Inhabited by Zorgs.
- Gloob, above which Spiff has a malfunction in his freem drive and is blasted with a deadly frap ray by the aliens.
- Gorzarg-5, a desolate planet where methane clouds rain sodium hydroxide, "a caustic alkali."
- Mok, where Spiff crash-lands and undergoes water torture (his mother washes his hair).
- Mysterio 5 and Mysterio 6, two planets that devastatingly but inevitably collide in a cosmic addition catastrophe.
- Plootarg, where Spiff crashes after being zorched by a Zarch spacecraft.
- Q-13, where Spiff faces despicable scum beings with his mertilizer beam and mordo blasters.
- Quorg, a desolate world of deep gorges and canyons, where Spiff finds disturbingly familiar rock formations.
- X-13, where Spiff is captured and brought before the Zorg Despot.
- X-351, a star whose closest planet harbors definitely hostile aliens.
- Z-12, a desolate, uncharted planet without vegetation.
- Zark, where Spiff has several adventures escaping sinister aliens.
- Zartron-9, home of the awful bug beings who blast Spiff while he reboots his saucer's computer and tries to recalibrate his weapons.
- Zog. A dismal planet with a surface not unlike some of those zit cream commercials, where Spiff blasts into the fifth dimension, where "time has no meaning", not unlike his math class.
- Zok, where Spiff is marooned.
- Zokk, where Spiff bounds across the landscape given the low gravity.
- Zorg, where Spiff sets his gun on "deep-fat fry" to blast alien Graknils.
[edit] Stupendous Man
Stupendous Man is a superhero Calvin often becomes, with the help of a mask and cape his mother created for him. Calvin only possesses the maroon cape and cowl; his imagination supplies the rest of the spandex outfit. He seems entirely oblivious to the fact that his costume does not effectively disguise his identity, and is absolutely baffled when he is punished for things he did while wearing it. Stupendous Man has several nemeses: Evil Mom Lady (Calvin's Mom), Babysitter Girl (Rosalyn), Annoying Girl (Susie Derkins), and the Crab Teacher (Miss Wormwood). Despite his frequent use of various "stupendous powers", Stupendous Man has admittedly only won "moral victories".
Occasionally, Watterson seemed to use Stupendous Man to parody popular superhero comics with his use of inhuman powers for useless plans, like rotating the Earth around to give Calvin another day off school. This may or may not be a take-off of a Superman film in which he spins the earth backwards to reverse time so that he can save Lois Lane. In another strip Calvin is seen reading a superhero comic and praising its greatness to Hobbes, who seems unimpressed by it, asking for example if Amazon Woman's superpower is the ability "to fit that figure into that suit."
[edit] Tracer Bullet
Bullet is a tough-guy private investigator styled after film noir and detective fiction stereotypes; consequently, he wears a trench coat and fedora. He resembles Calvin, though the high-contrast art style Watterson uses in the Tracer Bullet strips (which heavily resembles the film noir-style Frank Miller adopted for his comic series Sin City) obscures Bullet's features. Watterson considered this style dramatic but regarded it as time-consuming, so he drew relatively few Tracer Bullet strips (Tenth Anniversary Book). The name Tracer Bullet is a pun on tracer ammunition, a type of round fitted with a glowing chunk of phosphorus used in machine guns to let the operator see where they are hitting.
Watterson first used Tracer Bullet in a story where Calvin has Hobbes cut his hair because, "the barber never cuts it the way I like." This story turned out to be one of Watterson's favorites: the sight of Calvin's haircut was one of the few times his own work made him laugh out loud while he was making a strip, and Calvin's use of a fedora to cover his head led to the introduction of Tracer Bullet. Watterson would later lament, "Would that I could write like this more often" (Tenth Anniversary Book).
[edit] Others
- Dinosaurs: Calvin loves dinosaurs; they are one of the few subjects he studies of his own free will. This, of course, means that Calvin imagines himself as a dinosaur in many of the strips. Whenever Calvin is pretending to be a dinosaur, he is usually a predator (such as a Tyrannosaurus rex) on the hunt. He has also, on occasion, imagined himself as a 'Calvinosaurus,' a monstrous theropod that could apparently devour even the largest sauropods in one bite.
- Animals: Calvin sees himself in a variety of animal bodies as well, from large mammals to insects. Sometimes this is a result of being transmogrified.
- Forces of nature/objects: Calvin sometimes imagines himself as a gigantic thunderstorm, a light particle, an active volcano, a planet causing a solar eclipse, a "C-bomb," an omnipotent deity, a safe, and so on.
- Calvin occasionally finds himself being randomly mutated into various forms, such as a giant or tiny form of himself, somehow reversing his "personal gravity," or becoming half-human, half-fly.
- Captain Napalm: a superhero who protects "truth, justice and the American Way." Only seen on two occasions and is a satirical Captain America of sorts. Calvin draws this character from a comic book hero of the same name, leader of the "Thermonuclear League of Liberty," whose exploits he diligently reads, though he is rarely seen with a new issue of it. According to Calvin, Hobbes frequently reads Calvin's comic books, neglects to put them back in the correct order, spoils the plots of Calvin's new issues by reading them first and commenting on the story as he reads, and will genuinely mistreat them (i.e., folding the cover back, drawing moustaches on the characters in pen, etc).
- Safari Al:once in a daily strip Calvin acted as Safari Al , a jungle explorer, and discovers a "giant gorilla". The gorilla turns out to be Calvin's mom stating "clean your room, it's a jungle in here".
[edit] References
- ^ Williams, Gene (1987). Watterson: Calvin's other alter ego.
[edit] External links
- The Official site of Calvin and Hobbes at GoComics
- Official Calvin and Hobbes Publicity site at Andrews McMeel Publishing
| Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson |
|---|
| Characters |
| Calvin | Hobbes | Secondary characters |
| Terms and objects |
| Recurring themes | Horrendous Space Kablooie | Opposite Day | Transmogrifier |
| Other |
| Calvin and Hobbes in translation | List of Calvin and Hobbes books | References to Calvin and Hobbes | Setting of Calvin and Hobbes |
