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Calvin and Hobbes is a comic strip written and illustrated by Bill Watterson, following the humorous antics of Calvin, an imaginative six-year-old boy, and Hobbes, his energetic and sardonic – albeit stuffed – tiger. Syndicated from November 18, 1985 until December 31, 1995, at its height Calvin and Hobbes was carried by over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. To date, almost 23 million copies of 17 Calvin and Hobbes books have been printed. The strip is set in the contemporary United States, in the outskirts of unspecified suburbia. Calvin and Hobbes themselves appear in most of the strips, though several have focused instead upon Calvin's family. The broad themes of the strip deal with Calvin's flights of fantasy, his friendship with Hobbes, his misadventures, his views on a diverse range of political and cultural issues and his relationships and interactions with his parents, classmates, educators, and other members of society. The series does not mention specific political figures or issues. Due to Watterson's strong anti-merchandising sentiments and his reluctance to return to the spotlight, almost no legitimate Calvin and Hobbes material exists outside of the published collections of newspaper strips. However, the strip's immense popularity has led to the appearance of various "bootleg" items, including t-shirts, keychains, and bumper stickers, often including obscene language or references wholly uncharacteristic of the whimsical spirit of Watterson's work. 
HistoryCalvin and Hobbes was first conceived when Watterson, having worked in an advertising job he detested, began devoting his spare time to cartooning, his true love. He explored various strip ideas but all were rejected by the syndicates he sent them to. However, he did receive a positive response on one strip, which featured a side character (the main character's little brother) who had a stuffed tiger. Told that these characters were the strongest, Watterson began a new strip centered around them. The syndicate (United Features Syndicate) which gave him this advice actually rejected the new strip, and Watterson endured a few more rejections before Universal Press Syndicate decided to take it. The first strip was published on November 18, 1985 and the series quickly became a hit. Within a year of syndication, the strip was published in roughly 250 newspapers. By April 1, 1987, only sixteen months after the strip began, Watterson and his work were featured in an article by the Los Angeles Times, one of the nation's major newspapers. Calvin and Hobbes twice earned Watterson the Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year award from the National Cartoonists Society, in 1986 and 1988. Watterson took two extended breaks from writing new strips – from May 1991 to February 1992, and from April through December of 1994. In 1995 Watterson sent a letter via his syndicate to all editors whose newspapers carried his strip. It contained the following:
The last strip ran on Sunday, December 31, 1995. It depicted Calvin and Hobbes outside in freshly-fallen snow, reveling in the wonder and excitement of the winter scene. "It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy!" Calvin exclaims in the last panel. "Let's go exploring!" Syndication and Watterson's artistic standardsFrom the outset, Watterson found himself at odds with the syndicate, which urged him to begin merchandising the characters and touring the country to promote the first collections of comic strips. Watterson refused. To him, the integrity of the strip and its artist would be undermined by commercialization, which he saw as the primary negative influence in the world of comic art. Watterson also grew increasingly frustrated by the gradual shrinking of available space for comics in the newspapers. He lamented that without space for anything more than simple dialogue or spare artwork, comics as an art form were becoming dilute, bland, and unoriginal. Watterson strove for a full-page version of his strip (as opposed to the few cells allocated for most strips). He longed for the artistic freedom allotted classic strips such as Little Nemo, and he gave a sample of what could be accomplished with such liberty in the opening pages of the Sunday strip compilation, The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book. During Watterson's first sabbatical from the strip, Universal Press Syndicate continued to charge newspapers full price to re-run old Calvin and Hobbes strips. Few editors approved of the move, but the strip was so popular that they had little choice but to continue to run it for fear that competing newspapers might pick it up and draw its fans away. Then, upon Watterson's return, Universal Press announced that Watterson had demanded that his Sunday strip be guaranteed half of a newspaper or tabloid page for its space allotment. Many editors and even a few cartoonists, such as Bil Keane (The Family Circus), criticized him for what they perceived as arrogance and an unwillingness to abide by the normal practices of the cartoon business—a charge that Watterson ignored. Watterson had negotiated the deal to allow himself more creative freedom in the Sunday comics. Previous to the switch, he had to have a certain number of panels with little freedom as to layout (due to the fact that in different newspapers the strip would appear at a different width); afterwards, he was free to go with whatever graphic layout he wanted, however unorthodox. His frustration with the standard space division requirements is evident in strips before the change; for example, a 1988 Sunday strip published before the deal is one large panel, but with all the action and dialogue in the bottom part of the panel so editors could crop the top part if they wanted to fit the strip into a smaller space. Watterson's explanation for the switch:
Despite the change, Calvin and Hobbes remained extremely popular and thus Watterson was able to expand his style and technique for the more spacious Sunday strips without losing carriers. Since ending the strip, Watterson has kept aloof from the public eye and has given no indication of resuming the strip or creating new works based on the characters. He refuses to sign autographs or license his characters, staying true to his stated principles. However, he has been known to sneak autographed copies of his books onto the shelves of a family-owned bookstore near his home. MerchandisingBill Watterson is notable for his insistence that cartoon strips should stand on their own as an art form, and he has resisted the use of Calvin and Hobbes in merchandising of any sort. This insistence stuck despite what was probably a cost of millions of dollars per year in additional personal income. This also explains why the strip has never been made into an animated series. Except for the books (see below) and two extremely rare 18-month calendars (1988–1989 and 1989–1990), all Calvin and Hobbes merchandise, including T-shirts as well as the ubiquitous stickers for automobile rear windows which depict Calvin urinating on a company's or sports team's name or logo are unauthorized; after threat of a lawsuit, one of the sticker makers (Custom Vehicle Graphics) replaced Calvin with a different boy. Style and influencesCalvin and Hobbes strips are characterized by sparse but careful draftsmanship, intelligent humor, poignant observations, witty social and political commentary, and well-developed characters that are full of personality. Precedents to Calvin's fantasy world can be found in Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, Percy Crosby's Skippy, Berke Breathed's Bloom County, and George Herriman's Krazy Kat, while Watterson's use of comics as sociopolitical commentary reaches back to Walt Kelly's Pogo. Schulz and Kelly in particular influenced Watterson's outlook on comics during his formative years. Notable elements of Watterson's artistic style are his characters' diverse and often exaggerated expressions (particularly those of Calvin), elaborate and bizarre backgrounds for Calvin's flights of imagination, well-captured kinetics, and frequent visual jokes and metaphors. In the later years of the strip, with more space available for his use, Watterson experimented more freely with different panel layouts, stories without dialogue, and greater use of whitespace. Watterson's technique started with minimal pencil sketches (though the larger Sunday strips often required more elaborate work); he then would use a small sable brush and India ink to complete most of the remaining drawing. He was careful in his use of color, often spending a great deal of time in choosing the right colors to employ for the weekly Sunday strip. SettingMost strips avoid giving specific clues to where Calvin's home may be located, both not to be bound by pointlessly particular local detail and keep the everyman appeal, and—as The Simpsons did later—to play with the readers' curiosity about such trivia. (In one strip, Calvin's teacher asks him to name the state in which he lives, but he replies "Denial".) However, Watterson gives rather more clues which aren't as self-contradictory as The Simpsons:
The main charactersCalvin is named for 16th-century theologian John Calvin, founder of Calvinism and a strong believer in predestination. Hobbes is named after 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had what Watterson described as "a dim view of human nature." According to Watterson, the two names are intended as a joke for people studying political science. Thomas Hobbes's most famous phrase, from Leviathan, is that human life in the state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"—a description that can be applied to Calvin in the comic strip. CalvinCalvin is an impulsive, imaginative, energetic, curious, intelligent, and often selfish six-year-old. Watterson has described Calvin thus:
The strips do not disclose Calvin's last name. HobbesHobbes is Calvin's tiger who, from Calvin's perspective, is as alive and real as anyone else in the strip. Everyone else, however, perceives him as a small, inanimate stuffed tiger. Hobbes is much more rational and aware of consequences than Calvin, but seldom interferes with Calvin's troublemaking beyond a few oblique warnings—after all, Calvin will be the one to get in trouble for it, not Hobbes. For the most part, Calvin and Hobbes converse and play together, reveling in what is ultimately a deep friendship. They also frequently argue or even fight with each other, though their disagreements are generally short-lived. Often Hobbes ambushes Calvin with an energetic pounce-and-tackle attack, which leaves Calvin bruised and scraped up but not seriously harmed. Hobbes takes great pleasure in his demonstrations of feline prowess, while Calvin expresses keen frustration at his inability to stop the attacks or explain his injuries to his skeptical parents. Watterson based some of Hobbes's characteristics, especially his playfulness and attack instinct, on his own pet cat, Sprite. Hobbes takes great pride in being a feline and frequently makes wry or even disparaging comments about human nature, declaring his good fortune to lead a tiger's life. In the first strip, Calvin meets Hobbes when he catches him with a rope noose baited with a tuna fish sandwich. Watterson later wrote that this initial explanation of Hobbes's origins becomes unnecessary and moot as the series progresses. At one point, Calvin described him as, "On the quiet side. A bit peculiar. A good companion, in a weird sort of way." Hobbes' realityFrom the point of view of everyone but Calvin, Hobbes is a stuffed toy tiger. But when the panel's perspective is shifted to Calvin, in or out of the presence of other characters, Hobbes is seen as vividly alive. Watterson has stated:
From Calvin's perspective, Hobbes' reality carries over even to recorded images. In one strip, Calvin has taken several photographs of Hobbes making funny faces: Calvin sees each photo as he took it, but his father sees an ordinary stuffed tiger in each picture. Many readers assume that Hobbes is either a product of Calvin's imagination, or a doll that comes to life when Calvin is the only one around. However, both of these theories are incorrect. As Watterson explains in the Tenth Anniversary Book, "Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality than dolls coming to life": thus there is no concrete definition of Hobbes' reality. Sometimes Hobbes breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the reader, such as when Calvin tries to parachute from his house's roof ("His mom's going to have a fit about those rose bushes"). On other occasions, it is difficult to imagine how the "stuffed toy" interpretation of Hobbes is consistent with what the characters see. For example, he "assists" Calvin's attempt to become a Houdini-style escape artist by tying Calvin to a chair. Calvin, however, cannot escape, and his irritated father must undo the knots, all the while asking Calvin how he could do this to himself. In a rare interview, Watterson explained his approach to this situation:
Similarly, Hobbes once cuts Calvin's hair, creating a "look" so remarkable that Watterson laughed aloud while drawing it. ("Would that I could write like this more often," he lamented.) In addition, Hobbes can walk out and keep Calvin company as he waits for the bus. When another character such as Susie stands at the bus stop, Hobbes appears as the stuffed toy. What happens to Hobbes when the bus arrives is seldom shown, although a Sunday strip did portray Calvin's mother running out into the rain to retrieve him. One strange strip, given Calvin's view of Hobbes being "real", is during a story where Calvin enters a poster in a school road safety contest. (His slogan: "Be careful, or be roadkill!") Presuming he's going to win, Calvin imagines the front-page headlines which newspapers will carry: "Town Hall demolished, statue of Calvin commissioned for site", and so forth. One of the pictures on the front page of one of the newspapers shows Calvin and Hobbes together, but Hobbes is shown in his "normal stuffed toy" way—even though the newspaper front pages are products of Calvin's imagination. Many people feel that the blurred reality between the two of Hobbes' forms is both amusing and philosophical. Hobbes is occasionally the voice of reason, contrasting Calvin's manic impulsiveness, but is this rationality in Hobbes a distinct personality, or Calvin as a kind of conscience? Supporting charactersRecurring characters
Calvin's dad is a middle-aged patent attorney who is portrayed as an upstanding middle class father as his son might see him. When Calvin asks him questions, he often makes up outlandish answers:
An outdoor man, he enjoys bike rides and camping trips, and insists that they, like Calvin's chores, "build character." Calvin, in turn, regularly updates his father with "polls" showing his unpopularity among the six-year-old demographic of the household, and suggests ways that his father might improve his chances of re-election as Dad. Like Calvin's mom, he goes through the entire strip unnamed. The character is closely based on Watterson's own father, who was also a patent attorney. Watterson has said that he identifies more with this character than with Calvin.
Stay-at-home mother who is frequently exasperated by Calvin's antics and frowns upon her husband's occasional tom-foolery when dealing with their son. She seems to enjoy quiet activities (gardening, reading) but the reader rarely sees her engaging in them without violent interruption from Calvin. Both she and her husband often seem frustrated and unable to deal with the dynamo that is their son, although it's hinted in one strip that she was as big a hellion as Calvin when she was his age. She is much more likely to agree with Calvin than his father, especially on issues like camping. Sometimes when Calvin is disguised as Stupendous Man (see below), he sees her as arch-villain Mom-Lady. There have been instances in the strip where Watterson takes the time to flesh out the two parental characters. One example is a series of weekday strips following the time that the family returns from a wedding to find their house broken into. Over the next couple of strips, Calvin's mom and dad reflect on the impact of the event, and all other characters are absent from the strip. These examples are rare, however.
Calvin's classmate who lives in his neighborhood. She is Calvin's principal rival, and their relationship is a constant source of tension. In contrast to Calvin, she is polite and diligent in her studies, and her personal reality (or imagination) is always mild-mannered and civilized. She is also one of the few characters besides Calvin to consistently treat Hobbes as a living being, although strips drawn from her point of view still show him in stuffed-animal form. An early strip shows her discovering the "toy" Hobbes in a field, after he had been stolen by a dog, and later giving a tea party for him and her own stuffed animal, a rabbit named "Mr. Bun." Unlike Hobbes, Mr. Bun seldom appears in a life-like form, probably because these strips are seen from Calvin's perspective, and he chooses not to include a live rabbit in his reality. The one instance in which Calvin sees Mr. Bun as a live rabbit occurs when Susie and Calvin play "house" (a full-color Sunday strip drawn in "soap opera" style). Interestingly, Susie indicates that in her reality, (in that strip) Mr. Bun is a human infant. Susie is one of only a few characters to hold their own in a strip in which Calvin does not personally appear. (Calvin's parents, as well as Hobbes, have had a few strips to themselves.) Despite her good nature, she can be just as plotting and mischievous as Calvin if sufficiently provoked, which generally happens when Calvin invokes his and Hobbes' secret club, G.R.O.S.S. (Get Rid of Slimy Girls). Hobbes, who does not share Calvin's six-year-old mentality towards the opposite sex, participates in the club's activities rather skeptically, and between his frequent "defections to the enemy" and Susie's innate craftiness, Calvin frequently finds himself defeated and disgraced—though, of course, only temporarily. As Stupendous Man, Calvin calls her Annoying-girl. Watterson admits that Calvin and Susie might have a bit of a nascent crush on each other, and that Susie is inspired by the type of women he finds attractive. Her relationship with Calvin, though, is frequently conflicted and never really sorted out. The closest it gets is an early Valentine's Day strip in which Susie seems to appreciate the (rather juvenile and insulting) gifts Calvin gives her, and he rejoices in her noticing them. In the Tenth Anniversary Book, Watterson commented that he'd overplayed the love-hate relationship between them and resolved to simply let the characters bounce off each other in the future.
Calvin's teacher (named after the apprentice devil in C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters). Never sympathetic to Calvin's difficulties in remaining in the classroom for even one class period at a time (whether physically or mentally), she is quick to send him to the principal's office at the first sign of trouble. In the Spaceman Spiff strips, she usually appears as an alien holding Calvin hostage.
Rosalyn is a high school senior who occasionally finds herself babysitting Calvin. Rosalyn is the only babysitter capable of tolerating Calvin's antics more than once, and Calvin's parents most often end up paying her extra in order to ensure that she will continue accepting the job subsequently. She has a boyfriend, Charlie, who is never shown in the comic but to whom Rosalyn (and sometimes Calvin) speaks over the phone. Rosalyn's idea of babysitting Calvin is to put him to bed at 6:30. Calvin is highly phobic of her, and as such babysitting sessions tend to degenerate into war zones as Calvin short-sightedly attempts to cause trouble for her. Watterson said he thinks she is the only person Calvin truly fears, and, like Susie, she is certainly Calvin's equal in deviousness, frequently able to turn his plots against him—assuming brute force doesn't do the job. Near the end of the strip's run relations showed signs of improving as Rosalyn became the only person other than Calvin and Hobbes to play 'Calvinball' (and, more importantly, figure out how to play Calvinball) in a trouble-free evening—leniently assuming that a game of Calvinball doesn't count as trouble.
The six-year-old class bully who shaves, Moe is the only character to speak in crude, lower-case letters. Watterson described him as "every jerk I've ever known." Moe seems to be the only character capable of frustrating Calvin to the point of resignation. In contrast to Hobbes' playfighting and Rosalyn's (never-fulfilled) threats, Moe is the only character (aside from Suzie retaliating after being hit by a snowball) to physically hurt Calvin on purpose. Infrequent or background characters
Recurring themesCalvin's Alter-EgosCalvin's hyperactive imagination leads him to imagine himself as other characters with different powers and goals. It is important to note that Hobbes is not seen taking part in the fantasies involving Calvin's alter-egos, other than criticizing his choice of alter-egos.
G.R.O.S.S.G.R.O.S.S. is the acronym for a club that stands for Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS. Based in a treehouse, the main objective of G.R.O.S.S. is to exclude girls, mostly Calvin's neighbour Susie. Calvin and Hobbes spend most of their time in the club reworking its constitution and arguing about their excessively bureaucratic roles. As Calvin is too short to climb up to the treehouse when the rope ladder is pulled up, Hobbes often takes advantage of the situation and requires Calvin to sing a long ode on the greatness of tigers for the password. (This aspect was dropped in later years.) Officers of the club wear newspaper hats. Calvin and Hobbes are its only members and all of its officers; their missions frequently involve the invention of new positions, such as cartographer and cryptographer. Its bylaws are supposed to be fixed in the club charter, but they are actually quite arbitrary. Hobbes often uses them to outwit Calvin, much as he invents new rules in Calvinball. MealtimesLunchtime and dinnertime find Calvin eager to share his thoughts about the food he or others are eating. Those eating with him—Mom and Dad at dinnertime, Susie at lunch in the school cafeteria—are generally repulsed by his colorful descriptions of the meal, which usually make reference to vomit, nasal secretions, eyeballs, bugs, worms, rodents, or anything else guaranteed to make anyone other than a six-year-old boy lose their appetite. Calvin's mother occasionally coaxes him to eat his dinner by informing him that they are serving some outlandish or stomach-turning dish, which he then eats with relish. This has the unfortunate side effect of putting Calvin's Dad off of his food. Calvin's meals at home are generally depicted as a pile of unidentifiable green goop, which will occasionally come to life and sing, recite Shakespeare, attempt to escape, or attack Calvin. At other times, Calvin tries to find a way to surreptitiously deposit the food on the carpet or on someone else's plate so he doesn't have to eat it. The Cardboard BoxCalvin has a corrugated cardboard box which he adapts for many fantastic uses, usually by simply turning it on its side or upside-down and relabeling it. The Transmogrifier is a device designed by Calvin that can transmogrify any object into another object. He even transmogrifies himself into various animal forms, including a tiger (like Hobbes) and an elephant. He later develops an improved, portable transmogrifier, incorporated into his water pistol. Calvin makes improvements upon the transmogrifier "technology," turning the box into a duplicator which he uses to duplicate himself to spread the stockpile of chores awaiting him. Naturally, his duplicates are as ill-natured as he is, and the plot backfires on him. Later he adds an "ethicator" to produce an all-good duplicate of himself, who promptly launches an embarrassing, unrequited love affair with Susie Derkins. Calvin's box has yet another purpose: as a time machine. Fortunately the box can also fly when engaging in this role. He usually uses it to travel backwards in time and interact with dinosaurs, although in a few strips he is also seen travelling a few hours forward and meeting himself. In a few strips Calvin combines his box with a colander and creates the "Atomic Cerebral Enhance-o-tron". Calvin uses this to make his brain more powerful so that he can finish a school project on time. Despite the fact that Calvin amplifies his intelligence, his project still manages to fail Mrs. Wormwood's standards. Occasionally Calvin uses a cardboard box as a disguise, with the necessary features artfully depicted on the side with felt tip pen. These endeavours, however, do not seem to capture Calvin's imagination in the same way as his scientific inventions and don't last more than a couple of strips. He makes a convincing robot, except that the red shoes peeking from under the flaps give him away. He also uses it to make himself appear to be a Jovian probe and "the world's most powerful computer". SnowmenA recurring feature in winter strips is Calvin's snowmen, whose grotesque nature often gets him into trouble. Watterson often uses Calvin's snowmen as a vehicle for Calvin's artistic theories, and to ridicule less-than-rigorous ideas about art. The title of the Snow Goons volume comes from a story in which Calvin calls upon the "snow demons" to animate a snowman he has built. True to the Frankenstein tradition, the snowman turns against its creator, building an army of snow goons against which Calvin must fight for his life. (His parents, of course, believe none of it.) The story is notable for its depiction of exponential growth. Wagon and SledCalvin and Hobbes often take rides in a wagon or a sled or toboggan (depending on the season) and talk about philosophy or politics as they hurtle downhill. The course of the vehicle and the obstacles that the characters negotiate as they travel frequently parallel the subject of their conversation, and the rides almost always end in a spectacular crash. Calvin's wagon has a lot of mileage on it, as it has made the trip to the planet Mars and back. The wagon has also been used as a time-travel vehicle, with less success than the cardboard box (although Calvin correctly describes the phenomenon of time dilation: "The faster we go, the slower time goes"). CalvinballCalvinball is a game played almost exclusively by Calvin and Hobbes as a rebellion against organized team sports (like baseball), although the babysitter Rosalyn plays on at least one occasion. On other occasions participants of Calvinball must wear raccoon-like masks. When asked why, Calvin replies that "no one is allowed to question the masks". The rules of the game, besides the soccer ball and wickets almost always used, are made up as they go along, but the one consistent rule is that the rules can never be the same twice. Either player may change any rule at any time, so the only way to break the rules is by using one rule twice. Scoring is also entirely arbitrary, as the point of the game is to have fun playing it: Hobbes has reported scores of "Q to 12" and "oogy to boogy". The reader first encounters the game after Calvin's horrible experience with school baseball. He registers to play baseball in order to avoid being teased by the other boys. While daydreaming in the outfield, he misses the switch and ends up making an out against his own team. His classmates mock him and, when he decides to walk away, his coach calls him a "quitter". That Saturday, Calvin and Hobbes play Calvinball, a game far removed from any organized sport. Watterson has stated that the greatest number of questions he receives concern Calvinball and how to play it. Snowball and Water Balloon FightsCalvin often engages in elaborate and malicious snowball or water balloon fights, depending on the season. Hostilities typically take place with Hobbes or Susie, or both. Calvin hatches intricate plots to trick Susie into an ideal ambush, but these usually fail and Hobbes often betrays him and switches sides. Calvin and Hobbes can often be found planning the construction of a huge snow fort from which they can invulnerably terrorise the neighborhood, but these rarely make it past the architectural stage. Calvin often imagines himself as a dinosaur when he is about to smack someone with a snowball, as seen in one Sunday strip where he is a tyrannosaurus attempting to attack a duck-billed dinosaur (Susie Derkins). As soon as he throws the snowball, Susie chases after him, which is seen by Calvin as the herbivore chasing the carnivore. Lemonade StandCalvin finds yet another use for his cardboard box; this one is admittedly more mundane. He often operates something like a lemonade stand, but instead of selling lemonade he attempts to sell "suicide sludge" or any number of stomach-turning concoctions. He also tries simply selling ideas through this venue. In one strip, he offered "a swift kick in the pants" for 5 dollars; to his complete surprise, he had no takers. Calvin has an unhealthy lust for money, but he shares the average six-year-old's lack of understanding of the value of it when he charges exorbitant rates at his stall. Needless to say, sales are rare if they ever occur at all. One strip pessimistically, if accurately, described the Logic of Capital as being one based upon a substandard final product being sold at an exorbitantly high price in order to support the bureaucracy surrounding its production. Charging twenty-five dollars for what Susie recognizes as a lemon thrown into drainage-ditch water, Calvin explains patiently that in order to stay competitive, corners have to be cut in order to support his own position as CEO, sole shareholder, marketing and advertising director, and so forth. Camping TripsCalvin's dad sometimes takes the family on long camping trips in the summer, excursions which both Calvin and his mom revile. The trips highlight deep personality differences between Calvin and his dad, particularly their differing attitudes toward "building character" and toward modern conveniences—television, air conditioning and so forth. Watterson has said that his own father often used a character-building excuse to explain why the family was so miserable on camping trips. School and HomeworkCalvin hates school and homework. Often his mother has to force the unwilling Calvin to go up to the schoolbus. Occasionally he manages to avoid climbing on the bus and hence one of his parents has to drop him off at school. He often waits for the bus with Hobbes and explains why an intelligent boy like himself does not need school. He often visualises school as a distant planet and his teacher and principal as antagonist aliens. He is known to have run away from school enacting one of his fantasies. He is a loner at school and does not appear to share a bond with any of his classmates other than Susie. Also he lacks the company of Hobbes at school. Sometimes Hobbes does his homework and reading while Calvin watches TV or reads comic books. On one occasion, Hobbes went with Calvin to school and managed to make Moe (see Recurring characters) leave Calvin alone (though it was because of Moe's fear of getting in trouble with the teachers, rather than what Hobbes could have said or done to him). Among other means that Calvin devises to handle his homework or avoid going to school are using Stupendous Man to reverse the rotation of the earth so he gets an extra day, reducing his school to ashes using a telescope lens, and attempting to create a robot or a Calvin duplicate who will do all his homework. Calvin and Hobbes booksBooks with a "Yes" in the "Collection?" column comprise all of the regular strips that appeared in newspapers. The column shows which books are needed to form a complete collection of the newspaper strips, for those not interested in waiting for the forthcoming complete collection in hardcover, due September 2005.
Early books were printed in smaller format in black and white that were later reproduced in twos in color in the "Treasuries" ("Essential", "Authoritative", and "Indispensable"), except for the contents of Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons whose Sunday strips have never been reprinted in color [1] (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/guides/guide-display/-/3EZL4Q94QCDYY). Every book since then has been printed in a larger format with Sundays in color and weekday and Saturday strips larger than appeared in most newspapers. Remaining books do contain some additional content; for instance, The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book contains a long watercolor Spaceman Spiff epic not seen elsewhere and The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book contains much original commentary from Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 released in 2001 contains 36 Sunday strips in color alongside Watterson's original sketches, prepared for an exhibition at The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library. Around the worldCalvin and Hobbes was translated into many different languages, and a substantial portion of the newspapers that carried it ran outside of the United States. Calvin and Hobbes strips are usually distributed in a different format in different countries. For example, in many areas it is distributed in a more "traditional" comic book format, that is, in a magazine-like paperback with fewer comics per publication. In some languages Calvin and Hobbes were given different names. One of the reasons is that the name Calvin comes from the founder of Calvinism, John Calvin.
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