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"Life's a lot more fun when you're not responsible for your actions." Main Characters

Calvin Named after 16th century theologian John Calvin, Calvin is an impulsive, imaginative, energetic, curious, intelligent, and often selfish six-year-old, whose last name the strip never gives. Despite his low grades, Calvin has a wide vocabulary range that rivals that of an adult as well as an emerging philosophical mind. "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." "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. 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 of his own creation; 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 one of his many alternate guises: as the superhero Stupendous Man, the astronaut and explorer Spaceman Spiff, the private eye Tracer Bullet, and many others.

... and Hobbes Hobbes is Calvin's stuffed tiger who, from Calvin's perspective, is as alive and real as anyone in the strip. He is named after 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had what Watterson described as "a dim view of human nature." Hobbes is much more rational and aware of consequences than Calvin, but seldom interferes with Calvin's troublemaking beyond a few oblique warnings — after all, Calvin will be the one to get in trouble for it, not Hobbes. Hobbes also has the habit of regularly stalking and pouncing on Calvin, most often when Calvin returns home from school. From Calvin's point of view, Hobbes is an anthropomorphic tiger, much larger than Calvin and full of his own attitudes and ideas. But when the perspective shifts to any other character, readers see merely a little stuffed tiger. This is, of course, an odd dichotomy, and Watterson explains it thus: When Hobbes is a stuffed toy in one panel and alive in the next, I'm juxtaposing the "grown-up" version of reality with Calvin's version, and inviting the reader to decide which is truer. Although the first strips clearly show Calvin capturing Hobbes by means of a snare (with tuna fish as the bait), a later comic (1 August 1989) seems to imply that Hobbes is, in fact, older than Calvin, and has been around his whole life. Watterson eventually decided that it was not important to establish how Calvin and Hobbes had first met. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Calvin and Hobbes" and has been added for completeness of this site.

[ HOME ]	Cool Calvin & Hobbes Collection Cool Calvin & Hobbes Collection, a fan site about the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, was created in 1995 and was my first website. It received a lot of updates until 1999 when I 'retired' so that I could focus on other things. In 2006, I couldn't stand some of the tacky design choices I had originally made in 1995 and so re-designed the site and updated some of the content. Hopefully Cool Calvin & Hobbes Collection will be good for another 10 years or more!	Have a look at ...	You should read ... Calvin and Hobbes (Apr, 1987)
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