Calvin And Hobbes - Blog Posts
I need a strike team of people so we can figure out what the noodle incident was
Sketches I'm Proud of Making.
#1: Bag of Dreams
The Bag of Dreams: A bag containing your wonderful imaginations that came to life
Warning: Don't use it for malicious intentions, or you might suffer deep regret sooner later!
#2: Susanne and Sophia as Humans
Yep, it's Susanne and Octavia during their human years (5 notes for lore)
#3-4: Inanimate Insanity related stuff
Drawing #3: This is all the Inanimate Insanity Invitational cast if they replicate the iconic wonders of early season 1 of Inanimate Insanity.
Drawing #4: Does this need context?
#5: Big Nate meets Calvin & Hobbes
Run
i'm sorry i don't know the source of this because it was posted on reddit without credit but i'm obsessed with this
Sorry, didn’t have a lot of time to draw today ;-;
at least the ‘ink’ part of inktober is right
Everyone knows stuffed animals love tea parties.
I thought it was silly- I feel like kid Stan gives off Calvin vibes tbh
Teenagers have been deformed by social media. There's a sense they fit, but not as agents, not as full human beings who are making a future for themselves. They fit as human fodder that has been sucked into a machine and molded to what the machine wants out of them, which is their attention. — Jonathan Haidt from Our Kids Are the Least Generation Flourishing We Know Of
Image by Bill Watterson
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jonathan-haidt.html
me.
people can hate doom scrolling and yes yes sense. go wiggle your toes. clouds and sunshine are nice. rolling in grass and hoarding pebbles seems is joyful and these papers need to be folded or scribbled over. numbers and words are very productive i see.
but ,honestly the internet is so beautiful. its good to delve deep. find those oyesters.
goto go make origami for my rocks to look at.
There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
I can die happy now.
This Calvin and Hobbes short by Adam Brown made me smile so hard.
Awesomeness. Great song. Great animation. Legendary characters. A perfect short.
Gave it a shot at drawing Hobbes. I think i made his forehead a bit small but I still like it.
Watterson pulled no punches
thinking about that one wordless calvin and hobbes sunday strip thats just calvins dad ditching his work to go play in the snow... its going to make me cry
“We don’t value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way!”
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, 1995
As someone who has multiple Calvin and Hobbes books, this just makes me love them even more. You done good, Bill. You done good.
I thinks folks expressing incredulity at the quality of the writing and composition in Calvin and Hobbes are often missing the context that Bill Watterson is arguably the most influential sequential artist of his generation. Like, this is a guy who once told the editors of nationally syndicated newspapers to go fuck themselves when they wanted to mess with his panel layouts, and not only did he keep his job, he got his way. He could have had literally any gig he wanted, and he chose to be the Sunday funnies guy because that's what made him happy. He's basically the Weird Al of sequential art.
I grew up reading Calvin & Hobbes, and one of my favorite running jokes was the snowmen that Calvin would build.
To all of the odd guys and everyone in between
They remind me of Calvin and Hobbes if I squint (Sorry for posting this twice I wanted to make a few changes)
Calvin And Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child
Calvin didn’t have trouble focusing on the world around him, he had trouble reconciling himself to the fact that the world around him was such a disappointment. The reason the strip appealed to people both young and old is because Calvin was feeling underwhelmed at a college graduate level. It’s not unheard of for children to experience this, particularly those who are more sensitive to their surroundings, and for many it was a relief to know that seeing the world without the luster and facade constantly created for us wasn’t so unusual.
“Calvin made it okay to be disheartened and disappointed by life and normalized the inherent loneliness that childhood can bring.”
He was there for us as we grew up and while we learned that things were capable of getting so much better and so much worse as we experienced puberty and beyond, he was still mired in the first grade, raging against the machine.
Full story at avclub.com
CALVIN AND HOBBES MENTIONED
GUYS IM WATCHING THE NEW PENGUIN EPISODE FOR BEN COOK AND NOW HIS NAME IS CALVIN AND MY FUCKED UP BRAIN REALIZED HE COULD SO EASILY PLAY A GROWN UP CALVIN FROM CALVIN AND HOBBES
My favorite genre of self-portrait is cartoonists being bothered by their characters while trying to draw
Bill Watterson – Calvin and Hobbes (1986)
Hergé – Tintin (1947, Tintin Magazine)
Albert Uderzo – Asterix (the cover of Uderzo l'Irreductible (2018), but originally much older)
Jeff Smith – Bone (1993, Bone Holiday Special)
Walt Kelly – Pogo (1950, Maclean's Magazine)
And a bonus:
Berkeley Breathed – Bloom County
A super late posting, but priestessofnox made these absolutely adorable Calvin and Hobbes tree ornaments for me.
Thank you again! :D
Actually all fossil reconstructions are wrong because flesh only evolved recently. Before that it was bone world
some important calvin and hobbes facts in case you haven't read the original comic strip in a long time or only absorbed stuff on it from memes and out of context bits on here:
Calvin's last name has never been given, and neither has any of his parent's names. This was actually why his uncle Max only showed up for a brief storyline; the creator of the comic, Bill Watterson, ultimately felt that while it was fine to have him as someone for his parents to talk to, it felt far too awkward to never have Max refer to them by name and he never made a return appearance.
The general tone of the comic is fairly light-hearted, with a big emphasis on goofy slapstick comedy contrasted by clever wordplay and often surprising adult-centered jokes that'll hit you like a slap. A big part of the comedy is, as Watterson put it (paraphrased) "It's really funny to me when people express deeply stupid ideas with really fancy terminology." One notable example you might have seen is that one bit where Calvin asks his mom for money to buy a Satan-worshiping rock album and his mom replies that there's nothing genuine about them and they're just putting on the attitude for shock value, and comisserates with Calvin as he deplores that mainstream nihilism can't be trusted. He concludes that childhood is disillusioning.
There is a LOT of criticism of the extreme materialism and selfish mentality of the late 80s, when the comic was initially written. This may go a long way to explain how its aged so well; much of what it criticizes resonates well with people today.
Bill Watterson views comic strips a legitimate form of artwork, and repeatedly fought to have more space to draw more beautiful and artistic backgrounds, which was a very hard fight and unpopular even with other comic strip artists. He eventually did win some compromises and a lot of Calvin And Hobbes' artwork shows it, with the use of space to indicate time as well as a sharp contrast between the often plain environments of mundane life contrasted by the wildly beautiful imagery of Calvin's imagination (which often sports realistic depictions in an art shift of sorts).
Hobbes is explicitly not an imaginary friend, by word of Watterson himself. We don't know WHAT he is exactly, and Hobbes is apparently unaware of the strange nature of his reality; people look at him and only see an ordinary stuffed tiger plushie, but he has a tangible effect on the world that would be physically impossible for Calvin to do on his own. He's apparently been around for a while, and was apparently around when Calvin was a young baby.
On that note; Hobbes has implicitly killed (notably treated as both a gag and also with the vibe of 'he's a tiger, duh') and while he doesn't do it again on-screen, he doesn't have any moral issues about it. Calvin claims that he's never had trouble bringing Hobbes to school because the last time he did, Hobbes killed and ate a bully named Tommy Chestnut and simply comments that it was gross and he needed a bath. Calvin's tried to repeat this again, but Hobbes was grossed out at the thought having to eat a kid raw and not being allowed to use an oven first, or complaining that children are too fattening.
Hobbes became gradually less human-like in body language and more like an actual cat in both body language and behavior; this was due to Watterson drawing more inspiration from his cat, who also inspired a lot of Hobbes' running gags, such as pouncing on Calvin when he got home. Several years into the syndication of the strip, Watterson's cat passed away, and he did a tribute to her with a comic strip of the two of them agreeing to try to dream together so they can keep playing when they have to sleep; Watterson's commentary (if I recall right), remarks on his cat: "We can see each other again in dreams."
my favorite calvin and hobbes comic is the one where his dad just rolls up and casually destroys his entire night by pointing out some neat trivia about record players
