A Calvin & Hobbes Essay by Mathew Klickstein
Whenever we have the opportunity to share a 'Dear Mr. Watterson' letter or an essay about the impact of Calvin & Hobbes, we like to do it. Here's an essay by author Mathew Klickstein, who discovered Calvin & Hobbes as a kid, when....well, just read his essay.
Finding myself in a cardboard labyrinth, I felt nothing of fear.
I was young, alone, and in the garage of the last house I lived in while my parents were still married. So, I must have been about four or five. A kid curious and seeking out whatever you’d like. The fear was absent thanks to my not even considering the consequences. Except for those involving random success. Success at what? At finding Anything. Anything had a very peculiar excitement about it back then. It was before Everything, and as far away from Nothing as you’d please.
Nowadays, I think back on my burly, identical bear of a father who probably wouldn’t have been too mad at me but surely wouldn’t have appreciated my being in said garage. This is true due to most of the cardboard boxes being filled with his effects.
My mom was my mom and always will be. But, it’s my dad’s having had one particular box that has cast an uncharacteristic amount of light on him this time round. The box, filled to the brim with collections of Calvin and Hobbes books, would require no such light cast upon it any memory of mine.
The pictures of messily toe-headed Calvin in his signature red-white striped shirt and his equally manic-depressive, wide-eyed tiger as imaginary friend tugged on me then as they always would. Deep inside I dove into this very universal, stark environment of black-and-white cells bursting with adventures. Then there were the staggeringly imaginative environments rendered in brilliant color. Surrealistic dreamscapes and heavenly landscapes of verdant plains, meadows, forests, and gold-grassed fields.
It was oftentimes Fall in that world. So many oranges, yellows, and browns popping up everywhere in the truest fashion of real-life Autumn blasting out of the actual land outside my window.
There was snow. So much snow. Snow I never really got to experience myself until quite recently, well into my twenties. Snowmen, snow angels, fights with Susie Derkins, Calvin’s: would-be girlfriend, sometimes pretend wife, and partner par excellence in the finest of verbal and physical S&M.
How the two do taunt each other in those pages. Those days of Susie crying in the morning and then pelting Calvin with a snowball later in the day—YAAHHHH!!!—afterwards calling him a “poophead.” So much more fire and passion there than Lucy and one Mister Brown. The only more profound moments than times in which Susie made Calvin pained to the point of tears were those in which he made her feel like total crap.
All would still be a playful dreamworld so full of vibrant color and possibility. It would be long before I’d learn just how much protection against the likes of Susie Derkins and her ilk can be found in treehouse forts and exclusionary clubs of supposedly fully dedicated friends.
That Calvin’s best friend freely boasts of his own affections toward Susie with such stentorian zeal only fuels the fire. That Calvin’s stuffed tiger—donning a tie round his neck stolen from Calvin’s father’s bureau—so brashly refers to his lust for the girl is, of course, nothing in comparison to the fact that she seems to flirt just as openly with the fake friggin’ tiger!
These days, I understand that the previously needed protection from Susie Derkins is now moot. She’s only a little girl and can no longer hurt me in this lush forest of maturing life blossoming around me. And I do navigate this forest so much better than I otherwise would thanks in part to my political instruction—I do not say indoctrination—by the pragmatic cultural theories of Calvin and his stuffed animal Hobbes.
I learned of Marx (Karl, not Brothers; though C&H did pave the way for my later enjoyment of such puerile humor of Groucho and his brood). I was gaining and have indeed gained an education on the Media from C&H that is one part Noam Chomsky, one part Aldous Huxley. There were whole dissertations on: classical music, quantum physics, ethics, ecology, eschatology, and epistemology. All permitted a young inquisitive mind such as mine to at least acknowledge the possibility of future interest.
There were many, many polysyllabic words. Including “polysyllabic” itself. My mom finally felt compelled to suggest my taking a break from my “comics,” but when I pointed in the book to shining examples of the language sophistication involved, she relented almost immediately. Clearly, I could learn here; maybe would learn here. She let it go along with episodes of Peewee’s Playhouse.
Beavis and Butt-head would answer the question posed by The Ren & Stimpy Show, but for now, at around age seven or eight, I was given free reign to dive further into Calvin & Hobbes.
Calvin himself seemed to grow slightly. Or, rather, he lived in a world seemingly maturing, changing. Slower than the cartooniverse of Bart Simpson and his family, but apparent to an eye as attentive and persistent as mine. It was a beautiful world, much like ours, and much like ours, it had to end. That was one question no one needed to ask. But we never really considered one that I’m surprised hadn’t been brought up: “When?”
The snow of Calvin and Hobbes’ intimate world always fascinated me, as I earlier noted. It made everything so fantastical and majestic. It perhaps single-handedly instilled a sense of child-like wonder in me that would never fade. And so, on one particular Sunday morning, it seemed rather fitting to me that Calvin and his best and only friend aside from me would leave, off on their own, deep into the sloping snow-covered forest from which they’d never return. No “goodbye” was necessary. I’d see them both again real soon…
Hey: there’s a version of Calvin I see whenever I look in the mirror. Particularly when it comes to his hairstyle.
--Mathew Klickstein, author of SLIMED! An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age
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