Calvin – No. 934

Calvin is a precocious, mischievous and adventurous six-year-old boy. Calvin and Hobbes is a daily comic strip by American cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from 1985 to 1995. The strip follows Calvin’s humorous antics, his flights of fancy and his friendship with Hobbes, a sardonic stuffed tiger. To Calvin, Hobbes is a live anthropomorphic tiger, but all the other characters see him as an inanimate stuffed toy. The pair is named after John Calvin, a 16th-century French Reformation theologian, and Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English political philosopher. At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. Reruns of the strip still appear in more than 50 countries. There are 20 Calvin and Hobbes books, which encompass all newspaper strips plus extra content.

I’m excited for the day when my daughter is old enough to appreciate the humor of Calvin and Hobbes, especially the relationship of Calvin and his dad. I plan to read all of Watterson’s books to her just like my dad did for my sister and me. When I was in junior high school in the early 1990s, I expressed my fondness for Calvin and Hobbes by meticulously shaping and painting a papier-mâché head of Calvin (spiked hair and all) for a Mardi Gras art project. My second Mardi Gras head was of the Fat Kid from The Far Side by Gary Larson. Those were my two favorite newspaper comics. It was exactly 30 years ago tomorrow (November 18, 1985) that we first met a boy and his tiger.