6 Hilarious 'Calvin and Hobbes' Comics Where Calvin is a Weird Little Genius
Words and verbs and adjectives, painted up like a picture in these iconic Calvin and Hobbes comic strips
Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes comics, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, had a lasting impact on 21st-century writers and cartoonists. One of the recurring themes in the strip was Calvin's advanced vocabulary for his age. In one particularly memorable Sunday strip, Calvin brags about his "fist of defiance" from inside a snow fort, only to be thwarted by Hobbes tossing a snowball in his face. This exchange could have been inspired by the Tipper Gore-led controversy over explicit lyrics in music at the time.
Another favorite strip features Calvin defending a C-minus grade on an art project by blaming society's cultural illiteracy. Watterson's own background in drawing and political science seeped into his work, and Calvin often subtly commented on the pretensions of the art world.
A Sunday strip reimagining Calvin and Susie as a 1950s romance comic showcased Watterson's artistic style and introduced the term "psychosomatic." In a later strip, Calvin confronts his father about his decisions, asking if he's living vicariously through him to compensate for his own mediocre life. Watterson's phrase "with malice aforethought" inspired this article, as it was frequently used sarcastically over the years.
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