Boy and Tiger

Author’s Note: If writing about Calvin and Hobbes in this blog feels familiar, you’re not mistaken. I did a previous post about enjoying the strip, and my own attempts at cartooning in a post back in 2015.

I’m just old enough to remember reading Calvin and Hobbes in its original newspaper form. Bill Watterson wrapped up his ten-year run with the popular comic strip when I was twelve years old, and thus old enough to have had several years of being able to read the strips (not to mention growing up in a time when everyone still got physical newspapers). I was at a point in life, too when I started to rank things and develop favorites, and remember it seeming to mean something that Calvin and Hobbes got the top left spot for the black and white daily comics page, and the top of the front page for the full color Sunday comic insert with my hometown paper.

More so than those newspaper days, I remember reading the treasury collections of the strip. Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat was the first one I got my hands on, but I’d go on to accumulate the full collection, read them from beginning to end, and then read them over again over weekend mornings and holiday breaks.

Throughout these readings, I remember the strip introducing a fundamental question. Were the more speculative elements—Calvin’s transmogrifier, the monsters under his bed, or, of course, the matter of his best friend the talking tiger--all real or figments of the boy’s imagination?

After mostly putting Calvin and Hobbes aside for twenty years, I revisited the comic after my son was born. In his first months, he simply liked to hear my voice, such that I could read whatever literary work I’d have liked to have been reading anyway and entertain him. Around the four month mark he started to get a bit more discerning, and the old comic strip treasuries filled a space between what I wanted to read and proper illustrated children’s books. Watterson’s illustrations--particularly those full color Sunday ones--are beautifully drawn and compelling to look at while you listen to words.

In rereading the strips all of these years later, one of the more striking elements was how clear it was there was no speculative question at all. Of course the flights of fancy were Calvin’s imaginings. It's the only way the strip could function in the world we know, and the intensive friendship between the kid and his stuffed tiger is emblematic of not only the boy’s imagination, but also that he is lonely and seeking comfort in the inanimate for lack of living, breathing friends.

I’m not sure if I like the comic more or less for this reading, but I know it is not the same.

I hope that this first read-through will not be the last time Riley and I, or at least Riley himself, will engage with Calvin and Hobbes, if only because I want for him to encounter it all when he can understand the language and plots on whatever terms he may accept as true. Most of all, I want for Riley to encounter the world of imagination entailed in Calvin’s gravity reversing itself, or making a time machine out of a cardboard box, or breaking earth’s orbit through the sheer velocity of a downhill wagon ride.

It's good for a boy to believe.