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9 days ago on Nancy Classics

Looks like her “watering the garden to make it rain” plan really did work!
12 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

Sure it’s an extreme gesture to use on one’s own kid, but this isn’t meant to be a documentary or a how-to guide for parenting. It’s only meant to be funny, even if in a somewhat grim and startling way in this instance. Here the normally mild-mannered father making such a threatening gesture is both unexpected and exaggerated and, for many i’d wager, it is is funny precisely because it is both unexpected and exaggerated. Would it have been funny if dad had simply wagged his finger back and forth in a “don’t you dare misbehave” type of way? No not really, or at least not much, because that would have been the expected and realistic thing for a mild-mannered father to do.
Nor do i believe the intention of this entry is to make us see Calvin’s father in a negative light. If this were a serious comic strip then yes, but it’s not, and the characters (other than Moe obviously) are generally meant to be viewed in a positive or at least neutral light. Otherwise we could easily make Calvin himself out to be a demonic child if we viewed his actions in a real-world sort of way divorced from its comedic intent. Such as calling the library for books on how to make bombs or asking Santa for a flame thrower or building snowmen depicting sadistic and violent acts.
But that would be taking the strip too seriously and would be completely missing his true nature: that of an imaginative boy who, in spite of some of his antics, is at heart a pretty good kid. And i’d argue that this same consideration should apply to his parents as well. Are they monsters? No. They are never shown beating up Calvin or telling him he’ll never amount to anything or things of that nature. Did Watterson on rare occasion go too far with their portrayals? Possibly. But i don’t think Watterson intended at all to have readers see them as monsters despite sometimes depicting them as such in Calvin’s daydreams. Just like it wasn’t his intent for us to think Calvin would be destined to become a mass-murderer.
13 days ago on Frank and Ernest

Yes but whether the bar weighs 45 or 100 or even 200 lbs it can still be called weightless (in a wordplay type of way) since it doesn’t have any weights attached to it.
14 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

That’s a good catch. And if this were a novel i would say you’re right, it does indicate a multi-year camping cycle. However, as a comic strip, i’m not at all convinced that Watterson intended for it to be read that way even if it DOES read that way upon close examination. For as opposed to a novelist, a cartoonist is primarily concerned with coming up with something that’ll amuse readers today and will largely be forgotten by tomorrow. They’re not as concerned with possible plot holes and timeline issues cropping up over the course of the strip.
Also when a Looney Toons character like Bugs Bunny runs off a cliff into midair, then slams to a halt and scrambles back to the cliff again, we call that cartoon physics. Cartoon timelines often work in a similar way and aren’t meant to necessarily comport with the real world.
A good example of this is the Foxtrot strip from Feb 4 2024. Peter is excited about a new Grand Theft Auto game coming out next year and says that when it does he’ll be 17 and finally old enough to play it. Jason points out that they basically had the same conversation before the previous GTA came out. Peter is perplexed since that game was released 10 years ago. So in the last panel Jason says “It’s probably better if we DON’T think about it.” Which of course is Bill Amend’s way of poking fun at comic strip characters remaining the same age even as time and events in other respects keep flowing pass them in the usual way.
15 days ago on Peanuts

I loved it too. Never thought i would read it but some years ago i saw the BBC miniseries starring Anthony Hopkins and that spurred me on to listen to an audiobook version while going on long walks (having seen the miniseries first made it a LOT easier keeping track of who was who, lol).
15 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

The latter statement could simply refer to them going there every year ever since he was old enough to remember such things, say going back to when he was 3 or 4 years old. To me though it’s just a recurring theme in the strip much like Christmas and isn’t meant to signify anything in regards to Calvin’s age. If Watterson had wanted Calvin to grow older during the course of the strip, i’d think he would have done so in a more straight-forward way and in any event he would have mentioned that this was the case at some point by now.
16 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

That reminds me of something i had almost forgotten about from back when Watterson was still doing the strip towards the end. I’m going from a very vague memory but it was along the lines of Watterson saying that he was going to (or was thinking about) making a really big change to the strip to where Calvin would now be 7 instead of 6 (or would now be in the 2nd grade instead of the 1st). At the time i took it as him just joking around, since i was thinking there really isn’t much difference between a 6 year old or a 7 year old and so that was the joke.
Joking or not though, i don’t think anything ever came of it since Mrs Wormwood was Calvin’s one and only teacher throughout the run. That’s a tough hurdle to get around for realistically he would have had a new teacher or at least there needed to be an explanation as to how Mrs Wormwood was now teaching the 2nd grade, along the lines of what they did with Helen Crump staying Opie’s teacher in Andy Griffith.
As to the camping trip, to me a single mention of that sort isn’t really indicative of much. For it might simply be an oversight or not expecting readers to read anything into it beyond the current story arc. Plus we can imagine that we’re shown Calvin’s life oscillating from one summer to the next. So a ‘year ago’ might simply be at the start of that oscillation when he just turned 6. However if Calvin had said a ‘year ago’ in reference to a documented school event (such as him and Susie almost getting paddled that one time), that would definitely be an obvious tell by Watterson that Calvin was no longer locked within the timeframe of a single year.
16 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

Right. I only wanted to push back a bit on the notion that Calvin is miserable or has a miserable life because i don’t think Watterson intended people to see Calvin that way at all, even if he occasionally had to deal with bad things happening just like everyone does. For of course no one ever had perfect parents or a perfect childhood where everything was wonderful and happy 24/7. Plus we’re seeing a single year stretched out over 10 years of publication, which make both the positive stuff (such as getting Christmas presents) and negative stuff (Moe’s encounters) happen more often than they would have in reality.
17 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

Actually i’d argue that he has a mostly happy existence. For starters he lives in a nice house with nice parents who are always there for him when he needs them. Plus he has lots of fun pestering Susie and building snowmen and of course whiling away many an hour playing with Hobbes. Many kids would gladly trade places with him i bet.
And while it’s true that he gets bullied, that’s not really a focal point of the series or of his life. They’re just one-offs of him encountering the overgrown man-child named Moe. One-offs which are exaggerated in many ways (such as having Moe look more like a 15 yr old than a 6 yr old which in turn tells us that the beatdowns are likely wildly exaggerated as well).
Nor are there other strips (far as i recall) that show him so scared of getting bullied that he fears going to school or that shows him coming home with a black eye or things of that sort. So imo it’s not really meant to be seen as a big deal for Calvin. It’s just playing off of the kind of thing that often happens in elementary school when you have 1 boy who is quite a bit bigger and stronger than other boys his age.
21 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

There are almost always going to be inconsistences in any series, especially long-running ones. Here though i don’t think the focus is supposed to be on Calvin’s parents in any way. It’s just Watterson poking fun at the kind of stuff kids in America at least were typically eating for breakfast back in those days.