Anyone who’s into comics, has heard of “Calvin & Hobbes” at some point. It’s a series that is published daily in the newspapers, about an overly imaginative boy named Calvin, and his anthropomorphic sarcastic tiger named Hobbes. And yes, both are intentionally named after the great philosophers.
A recurring question with the series, however, is Hobbes’ true nature. In some panels he’s a living, breathing and sentient tiger, while in others, when there are other people in the panels, he’s just a stuffed (or cuddly) animal. As mentioned before, Calvin is very imaginative, so it is assumed that Hobbes is only a living creature in Calvin’s mind, but not to everyone else. I’d believe that, except that the comics aren’t very consistent about this. There have been times when Calvin climbed a tree, but needed Hobbes’ help to do so. A recurring gag is when Hobbes (being a tiger) can naturally climb up into their tree house, but does not lower the rope-ladder to let Calvin in. There are many more examples, but what I’m getting at is the following: how are some of these events possible if Hobbes is just a cuddly animal?
Here’s my theory: what if Hobbes isn’t a cuddly toy? What if he really is a living, breathing, sentient being?
I know, Calving is known for his uncanny imagination, so it makes sense if Hobbes were just another one of his little fantasies. On the other hand, it also makes sense that, because he has such an imagination, he’s more accepting of seeing an anthropomorphic tiger. Which is unlike the rest of the world, who isn’t as imaginative as Calvin. Other people can’t accept something like Hobbes, even if they see it for themselves their minds can’t wrap their heads around it, so they’d try to rationalize it. In their minds, humanoid tigers are not real, such things just do not (nay, cannot) exist, so what they’re looking at has to be just a toy. Right? Sure, they’ll see it move, but it has to be Calvin just making it move. Or if they hear Hobbes’ voice, they’ll either assume it’s Calvin doing the talking, or Hobbes would talk really quietly, almost inaudibly next to Calvin’s loud voice, making it easier for people to think they’re just imagining it.
One thing that gives credence to this theory is the time that Calvin and Hobbes traveled into the cretaceous period, where he took pictures of dinosaurs, which he hoped to show to scientists, and get rich instantly. He shows the pictures to his father first. At first he says “Dinosaurs?” genuinely surprised to see them, but in the next panel he says “I didn’t realize dinosaurs looked so small and plastic.” This always seemed odd to me. The implication is that Calvin just put his dinosaur toys in the backyard, and made pictures of them, pretending to be photographing real dinosaurs (which he actually did, if you knew what plastic is made of, but one paradox at a time). I’d accept that, except that his father seemed genuinely surprised when he first saw the pictures. If those were pictures of toys, he would have said something along the lines of “you made pictures of your toys”, but no, he was convinced they were real at first, but knowing that that can’t be true, he told himself that they must be just pictures of Calvin’s toys.
And there’s my point. If these people can’t accept the truth if it stares them right in the face, then it doesn’t seem very far fetched to me if they do the same thing with Hobbes.
Which isn’t to say that all of Calvin’s adventures are real too, though. When it comes to time traveling, duplication, or transmogrifying, the science that allows such things to work are already made up, so for the sake of the comics I can accept that all of those are actually happening. But his trip to Mars from “Weirdos From Another Planet” probably wasn’t real. I mean, getting to Mars just by using his buggy? Not very likely. At best, they probably just traveled very far, into an unknown territory, where they see things which they had never seen before, which they just mistake for things you might find on Mars. And for those of you who doubt that, because that would imply that Hobbes is imagining the same thing as Calvin, why should that surprise you? In the same book, we see the two digging up old garbage, which they both mistakenly believe to be the fossil remains of a dinosaur. In other words, they are at the same wavelength, they are both very imaginative, and they were both in unfamiliar territory at the time. So of course they’d both believe themselves to be on Mars, and they’d both think they saw alien life-forms.
Some of you might be wondering, if there is any credence to my theory, then how do I explain the comic that I use as illustration for this article? First of all, I don’t think Bill Waterson (the creator of the duo) drew this. Not just because I’ve read every single one of the comics, and don’t remember seeing this one anywhere, but also because I know that Waterson deliberately wanted to leave Hobbes’ true nature ambiguous, so it’s up to the audience to decide for themselves what is and what isn’t real. If Waterson drew this, then that implies that he wanted to break his own illusion, and outright say that Hobbes is just a figment of Calvin’s imagination. Which I don’t think he’d want to do.
But in the highly unlikely event that the comic is genuine… I have to say that the following is based on hearsay, not on my own experiences, but here’s what I think. I happen to know somebody who used to take pills when she was younger (maybe still does, I did not ask). While it pretty much stopped her from dreaming, it also made her more focused. As such, if Calvin would take such pills himself, it made him more focused on doing his homework, and therefor ends up ignoring Hobbes. This comic doesn’t even show how Calvin gradually stops thinking of Hobbes as alive, it just shows how he’s too focused on his work, he doesn’t notice anything else. An ambulance with blearing sirens could pass by and he wouldn’t even notice. The comic’s implication seems to be that Hobbes is still a sentient being, but since Calvin is ignoring him, he might as well just be a stuffed animal to Calvin.
(It should be noted, though, that the same person I brought up about these pills, told me that because of those pills, she had a hard time imagining things, which can be a problem when your school assignment is to write a story, fiction or otherwise. This comic’s story is that Calvin is writing a report on something. It’s not explicitly said what he’s reporting, but in order to write any sort of report, you have to imagine what it is that happened in order to write about it. So whoever drew this comic said more than he/she intended)
Desmond Scheerlinck writes... 