Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for July 21, 2014

Is a tiger faster than an allosaurus?

@ leftwing patriot

He had better be!

Dropped the camera, too bad.

Sort of like the old joke, that to survive an attack by a man eating animal you just have to be able to run faster than the other people in your party.

The Allosaurus was smaller than a T-Rex, and had bigger arms.

Calvin didn’t drop the camera. It’s on a strap around his neck.

On Saturday I posted two strips from The Far Side, and several people commented.When The Far Side was introduced in 1980, it was so different and so clever that it totally broke the mold. Initially, readers couldn’t figure out what Gary Larson was thinking, and they couldn’t understand a lot of his humor. A similar thing had happened at the beginning of the 1950s when Peanuts was introduced, although it’s hard for us to imagine it now. It made no sense to many readers that little children were using big words that only adults would understand, and Charles Schulz received a lot of mail and a lot of criticism on this initially.By the time Calvin and Hobbes was introduced in 1985, everyone had become used to hearing little children use big words in Peanuts, so Bill Watterson didn’t shock everyone with that one. (And Bill Watterson was of course inspired by Charles Schulz.) But Bill confused his readers initially with the duality of Hobbes who was usually real but was sometimes a stuffed animal.It is very common for people to be confused initially by the thinking of a true genius who is breaking new ground. But while genius often leads to confusion, causing confusion does not necessarily indicate genius. My personal strategy is to continually cause confusion, hoping that someday someone will mistake it for true genius.

Here are two more strips from The Far Side.

Hobbes’ snacks are probably safe. Can’t imagine an allosaur liking tuna.

Hobbes The Snack, but a sweet one!!

The easiest way to tell is count the number of fingers on the front claws. Allosaurus has3, T-Rex only has 2

Calvin and his pet tiger Hobbes meet an allosaur and unless they give him something to munch on, they may find themselves a snack for the extinct meat-eater.

Yay, Allosaurus, the dinosaur that bites heads off!

Calvin’s right, Hobbes. You would only end up as food yourself!

xxx

Brooklyn51: Beat me to it. Anyway, size is a poor distinction since individuals vary. You can’t even put them side by side since they lived a few million years apart (excluding fossilized skeletons, of course).

Run Calvin Run!

The T-rex is significantly larger, and its arms proportionately shorter than the allosaurus’. Additionally the Allosaurus lived in the Jurassic, T-Rex lived in the Cretaceous.

Hmmmm…I thought I posted a rather bland message here late last night. Can’t imagine what happened to it! I don’t Think I wrote anything that was insulting… Anyway, I think I said something about both Calvin and Hobbes being snacks themselves… =-O

The size of the dinosaur is in direct proportion to the level of panic.