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What is Watterson's worst-ever "Calvin and Hobbes"?

Or, the kids give the rabbit the cereal and then the ASPCA accuses them of animal cruelty for trying to "poison" the white hare. :lol:

Sincerely,

Bill
 
I enjoy Lio, and found that strip to be a hoot. Let's not forget that sick humor (cannibalistic snowmen, people-crushing dinosaurs) is just as integral to C&H as the fuzzy sentimentality, so I don't see that gag as anything other than a loving homage.
Watterson didn't need to steal, um, I mean create "a loving homage to" others' characters by having them die a painful death that was completely antithetical to the spirit of the original.
Considering the massive sled falls and crashes Watterson repeatedly inflicted upon his duo, I don't necessarily agree with your interpretation of the demise as horribly painful. I think an equally valid reading would suggest that, when Watterson stopped drawing the strips, the characters were inadvertently "unplugged", as it were, and simply ceased to function mid-ride. In any case, there's only so much one can fit into modern Sunday newspaper strips, so Lio's brief if somewhat gruesome joke doesn't disturb me, though I do find the non-time-limited Robot Chicken sequence, which is unambiguously vicious, to be both unclever and gross. And if I still haven't swayed your opinion on the matter, I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree. :)


Slightly closer to topic:

future.jpg

Now that I take another look at this, I think that it, too, gets Hobbes massively wrong. Why wouldn't Hobbes be eager to play with a daughter of Calvin's? A more appropriate picture would be of adult Calvin smiling as he watches the new duo running joyfully off on an adventure.
 
Why wouldn't Hobbes be eager to play with a daughter of Calvin's?

Of course he would, but he also looks fondly on his time with Calvin and will miss that.

BTW, I totally love the fact that Calvin's daughter is named "Bacon". :lol:


I don't get it. Is there a strip that explains the joke? :confused:

Calvin, Hobbes, and Bacon all refer to famous philosophers:

John Calvin
Thomas Hobbes
Francis Bacon
 
BTW, I totally love the fact that Calvin's daughter is named "Bacon". :lol:


I don't get it. Is there a strip that explains the joke? :confused:

Calvin and Hobbes are named after two noted philosophers, John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes. Francis Bacon was another philosopher from the same era.

But where is it stated that the daughter is named Bacon? There's nothing in the linked image to indicate that.
 
But where is it stated that the daughter is named Bacon? There's nothing in the linked image to indicate that.

The links were posted earlier in the thread:


I would have liked to see the last strip being about Calvin as a somewhat frustrated overworked father (much like his dad), coming home one day and passing on Hobbes to his bright eyed son.
Pssst. Or daughter... :)

Try Hobbes and Bacon. And then this one.
 
My least favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip would probably be the Pair of Pathetic Paripatetics one. It just felt to me as though Watterson was low on ideas one day so he took a clever rhyme he had previously thought up and forced it into a strip. Of course, the fact that even my least favorite of his strips has a bit of cleverness in it goes to show how much I really, really admire Watterson's work.

Oh, and count me as one who thought Calvin and Hobbes' ending was perfectly appropriate.

And I always wanted the rabbit to get some Trix, too.
 
Calvin and Hobbes are named after two noted philosophers, John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes. Francis Bacon was another philosopher from the same era.

But where is it stated that the daughter is named Bacon? There's nothing in the linked image to indicate that.
The little girl in the Motivational poster image that you linked wouldn't be Bacon, since that image predates Hobbes & Bacon by several years. Though perhaps Dan and Tom Heyerman were inspired by that piece of fan art when they did the four Hobbes & Bacon strips for their webcomic, "Pants are Overrated," because the little girl does resemble Bacon.
 
My least favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip would probably be the Pair of Pathetic Paripatetics one. It just felt to me as though Watterson was low on ideas one day so he took a clever rhyme he had previously thought up and forced it into a strip. Of course, the fact that even my least favorite of his strips has a bit of cleverness in it goes to show how much I really, really admire Watterson's work.
Aw, I like that one! It's always fun to see Calvin displaying far more knowledge than any six-year-old has any right to do (i.e., knowing what "peripatetics" are. And the punchline, where he acknowledges his own ridiculous, but clings to it anyways - nope, sorry, there have just got to be worse ones than that. :p
 
It's always fun to see Calvin displaying far more knowledge than any six-year-old has any right to do...

Which is just Watterson following in the footsteps of Charles Schulz. The Peanuts kids could also be quite precocious, and it was in strips like those that Watterson's debt to Schulz as an inspiration was clearest.
 
Aw, I like that one! It's always fun to see Calvin displaying far more knowledge than any six-year-old has any right to do (i.e., knowing what "peripatetics" are. And the punchline, where he acknowledges his own ridiculous, but clings to it anyways - nope, sorry, there have just got to be worse ones than that. :p

You're not alone. When I was googling an image of that strip so I could link to it, I saw this blog explaining how clever that joke apparently is. To be fair, I don't dislike that strip. I just like the other C&H strips more.

I just want to add that Tyrannosaurs in 14s should be a slang for anything that is dumb but still really cool.
 
It certainly has a place for me. I was a out 10 or 11 I think when I started reading Calvin and Hobbes. Now I have a 5-year-old daughter. That piece of fan art really speaks to me, even if it is cutesy and an obvious sentiment.

Me too.
 
I like the "pair o' pathetic peripatetics" strip. It's funny in its own right. But thinking of it in terms of the Peripatetic philosophical movement is interesting. Calvin and Hobbes essentially are Peripatetics -- they philosophize while wandering around (though as often while sledding as while walking).
 
One could argue, I suppose, that the first few strips that "introduce" Hobbes are in retrospect utterly unnecessary and therefore possibly the "worst", but I kind of like them, too. The handful of early Calvin-as-Boy-Scout strips, on the other hand, don't seem quite as memorable, though they are interesting as limited experiments in enlarging Calvin's life/surroundings.
 
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