If there was such a thing as a quintessential comic of childhood, it was Bill Watterson’s masterpiece, Calvin and Hobbes. For years, my brother and I industriously hunted the shelves of bookstores, in search of a volume that was not yet owned. Upon finding such a book, we would parade it triumphantly, crowing like the victors we were, all the way to the billing counter. Whereupon, our mutual father would pay and escort us from the premises, with the practiced ease of a man long used to his children drawing looks of mirth from fellow-shoppers.
When I was younger, the superficial aspect of Calvin and Hobbes was initially the focus of my attention. Adoringly, I would gaze at the panels, rendered in art that was for me, slapstick and blunt. The simplicity stood out the most though, and it appealed tremendously to my schoolboy-self, obsessed as he was with doodles. Try as I might though, I could never come anywhere close to even a respectable imitation of the illustrations.
In particular, I loved seeing all the times Calvin gets mauled by Hobbes upon his return from school. No doubt it was partly due to the fact that, despite the numerous occasions my brother and I had pleaded for a pet of our own, we didn’t really live in an ideal location to raise one. Our parents emphasised this point time and again; although I guess they more than made up for it by continuing to concede to our demands for more volumes of the various misadventures of Calvin and his carnivorous friend.
As I grew up and my understanding of the comic strips took on new meanings, I was somewhat surprised by the depth of the panels. It helped that I managed to chance upon a special volume from a library nearby, which carried notes alongside each strip — a short comment from Bill Watterson himself. A common thread that I noticed there was the interesting fact that he received more e-mails from complaining parents rather than from young fans gushing with admiration. It appears to be that adults read the strips along with their children, and more often than not, they object to Calvin’s actions within the strip. It’s funny to hear this because it does give the readers a feeling that Calvin comes off as someone authentic, so much so that ordinary people would be compelled to admonish him as they would a real child.
Probably they were referring to the influence of a person like Calvin on the lives of children. For a six-year-old he certainly lived larger than life. Here he was discussing existentialism, crudely commenting on capitalism, and ripping the covers off the most embarrassing secret of all adults — that they’re just making it up as they go along, and are as clueless as their offspring about the meaning of life. Simultaneously, and just as naturally, we see Calvin acting his age; he has a close friend he argues with all the time in Hobbes, an aversion to the opposite gender, which was so common to all of us at that age, and a propensity for picking up right where Dennis the menace left off.
Themes such as bullying, ‘developing character’ and the freedom to question things that are being taken for granted by adults are visited time and again. An inquisitive kid at heart, sometimes Calvin, in all his innocence, asks questions that cause us, readers, to be startled by guilt.
“How does soldiers killing each other solve the world’s problems?” He once asked his father. Certainly the profoundness of the question arose from the mind of Watterson, but the vehicle of innocence that is Calvin, upon which the question is posed, causes a deeply moralistic effect. Calvin succeeds in forcing us to face our consciousness, fully aware of having ignored it for far too long. He reminds us of the best of our childhood, when we lived as we wanted to, and dreamt of having the sun and the sky. Together they ridicule our notions of being unable to chase our dreams because ‘life’ came in the way; they point to the absurdity of conforming to a set of beliefs blindly, just because we were told of the same in our own childhoods. Like the philosophers they were inspired from, Calvin and Hobbes in their contemporary selves deeply affect our perception of life as dictated by society.
Personally, the most striking feature of the work was the salute to the great outdoors. Despite his grumbling, some of Calvin’s greatest misadventures have come outside of his house, in the backwoods where, if they wished for it, they would travel to the ends of the earth and back on their red trolley. I gaze at that trolley wistfully now, and feel only a deep sense of tragedy. For years now, our parents warned us that the only memories we would make, that would be worth remembering at all, would be between the sky and the earth, with nothing needing a battery in between.
I do find it hard to imagine that I would wake up twenty years from now, as I can only assume that Calvin will, only to remember all the cool times I spent in front of my computer. But the sad transition has already begun; all too often a ‘conversation’ with a friend happens more over social media than on a squalid bench by the side of the road. We talk in terms of memes and trolls and pages on Facebook that squander the lives of meme-creators, meme-curators and meme-consumers. Not to mention meme-reviewers. It feels like the sheer expanse and the excitement of palpable possibility offered by the outside has been consumed and subverted by the digital world.
And as I turn to the autumn of my four-year stint as a student of engineering, I wonder how many memories I will indeed carry on with me. For my time has come, and the period of sheltered living does indeed draw to a taut close. The real world beckons to me, as it does to all from my batch. The sheer desperation to live fully and to feel alive resonate strongly, and I feel Calvin’s insidious voice egging me on, to throw away the shackles of life and to break all the rules. For his sake, and for the six-year-old that I know is hiding away inside of me, I do believe that I will give that sort of life a go.
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