Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for July 07, 2019

I hope Calvin doesn’t tell Hobbes Susie called him a “dumb ol’ tiger.” It will break his heart.

In (I believe) the Tenth Anniversary Book, Bill said he enjoyed drawing in a more realistic style, and wondered if people briefly thought Calvin and Hobbes had been replaced with a new comic.

Also, I know it’s from a six year-old’s point of view, but this comic raises so many questions from an adult perspective.

How did the husband not know his wife was pregnant? Why is the wife treating giving birth as a simple errand to the point where her husband wasn’t there? Did the woman give birth to the rabbit somehow, or did she adopt him? If it’s the former, did she cheat on her husband in favor of a giant rabbit person, hence why he’s angry? Also, knowing how rabbits reproduce, shouldn’t there be a whole litter instead of just one baby rabbit? Will Jeffrey have to deal with bullies taunting him for being a rabbit boy when he grows up? And who knows how mentally scarred he’ll be by the fact that his own father disowns him for his appearance? Am I thinking about this too hard?

Adult Calvin smokes a pipe?

Pop quiz time: This strip is a parody of which old time strip?

Marriage even takes the fun out of imagination.

This is how the kids imagine it! Great fun!

Go get Hobbes. The rabbit can either be his new little brother or his lunch.

There is no Susie around when Hobbes and Calvin play.

When this originally came out, I had to glance at the last panel just to make sure that a horrible mistake hadn’t been made. That art work is fantastic!

Note, perhaps not incidentally, that Adult Susie’s clothes and hair are the same colours as real Susie’s. Adult Calvin’s hair is the same colour as real Calvin’s, and his tie has the red and black stripe of real Calvin’s t-shirt.

You are way overthinking this. A six-year-old has little knowledge of how a baby is made or born or otherwise acquired. And since this is six-year-old pretend, those questions you asked would not have even occurred to them. And then there is the obvious fact that this is a comic and supposed to be funny.

And, of course, Calvin doesn’t play pretend with Hobbes.

“Let’s play house. I’ll go in the bathroom and pretend I’m shaving, then you come in and barf.”

So, this is how Calvin and Susie are going to look when they grow up?! LOL. Interesting. He’s gonna smoke a pipe? Where a suit? Still be blond?

Rabbits are tiger food.

So interesting to see Watterson’s fantastic abilities at straight illustrations here.

This was one of my favourite strips of all time when I first saw it. It had me busting out laughing all day long. People on the bus thought I was crazy.

I still want to put this up on my fridge, maybe with the last panel cut off and posted somewhere lower down on the fridge.

1, as an adult, Susie is pretty hot, and 2, “Jeffrey”, it has a nice ring to it.

Because the tiger’s a tiger while pretending, but a rabbit isn’t a boy.

Yesterday, Calvin was playing baseball by himself. Today, he’s playing with Susie. I think he must have had a row with Hobbes.

Hobbes is not dumb and he is certainly smarter than Calvin.

I count myself fortunate never to have watched the show.

Sort of reminds me of David Lynch’s weird movie, “Eraserhead”.

One of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes strips! Its like Mary Worth meets The Twilight Zone!

Because a tiger would eat a bunny…if they shared an ecosystem.

This strip should settle the question of Hobbes’ status. He’s as real as Mr. Bun.

Yes

DARLING!!

If this is how Calvin sees the people on TV, hilarious. If this is how he sees his parents and how they feel about him, pretty dark.

Heck, they bypassed all the fun parts of this game.

Because the “dumb ol’ tiger” is a ferocious, man-eating carnivore. If Calvin doesn’t play with him he could wake up with a missing limb.

Careful with that dumb ol’ tiger stuff, Suzie – he likes your smooches…

The genius of Bill Watterson…

Watterson always said he based Suzie on his wife. There is a lot of fan art of Calvin & Suzie as teenagers, a married couple & raising their own Child who had inherited Hobbes as a playmate

“Just repeat to yourself, ’It’s just a comic, and I really should relax’”

What the heck is Calvin doing playing house with Susie anyway. They should both know better. However, I suppose these lessons in judgement are best learned by ‘playing’.

the two of them married would be good strip

What sort of name for a Bunny is Jeffrey? Every one knows that huggable, squeezable bunnies are called George.

I should do this when my cousin wants me to play “house”

So, before this, was Mr. Bun in the oven? ☺

Reminds me of E.B. White’s “Stuart Little,” where a human family somehow had a baby mouse.

The swaddled rabbit is so cute.

Bill Watterson is an astonishing graphic artist.

Calvin is such a jerk,…

Perhaps the apex of C&H. Utterly brilliant strip. “He’s not a rabbit, he’s a little boy. We’ll call him Jeffrey, OK?”. I think when i first seen this in the paper, I thought they had mislabeled the comics. Until the “Our baby is a rabbit?” line

This is one of my all-time favorite strips from Calvin & Hobbes. Absolutely timeless!

I love the CH stripes when Watterson drew realistic adults having childish pretend conversations. Wish he’d done a few more of ’em. Makes me think of the webcomic Axe Cop, which featured dark, gritty professional drawings with a story written by a 6 year old. It was hilarious.

He stuck to the hair coloring. A nice touch. I guess the pipe is Hobbs’s adult replacement.

Bet this won’t be the last marriage Calvin walks out of.

I don’t blame him; his fantasy world is more interesting.

I find it interesting that the only panel where the rabbit looks like a real rabbit is the panel where Calvin insists that “He looks like a rabbit to me.” The rest of the panels it looks like Mr. Buns being treated like a baby, but Calvin imagines Mr. Buns as a real rabbit. Unlike adults whom he often imagines as aliens or monsters he appears to only see toys as real versions of themselves.

I glanced at this and wondered if this was the right comic…

Yet another reason why Calvin and Hobbes is top-shelf.

gawd – I loved this when it first came out – I still remember the mind-wrenching changes of perspective, the totally surreal feeling of it. It was magnificent. I read it over and over. It’s just as glorious now. Bravo.

I just love how it starts off looking so serious and then it goes into the cartoony stuff at the end. It makes the joke work really well.