Calvin (Calvin & Hobbes)

"Well, I had resolved to be less offended by human nature, but I think I blew it already."

- Hobbes in reaction to Calvin's behavior.

Calvin, named after theologian John Calvin, is the main titular protagonist of Calvin and Hobbes. He is highly intelligent, though without any self-discipline or concentration, a six-year-old boy with a vivid imagination and a habit of getting into trouble and adventure. The comic centers around Calvin's life, his troubles, and his adventures, with Hobbes alongside as his companion.

Calvin is characterized by his imagination, philosophy, extensive vocabulary, social awkwardness, and mischievous behavior. Calvin is very cynical and usually gets annoyed with Hobbes. His first piece of dialogue was the first line of the strip and his last line of dialogue was also the strip's final line.

Calvin and/or his alter egos appeared in almost every strip of the series ever printed and published, however, there are several strips he does not appear in, those being where his parents or other side characters reflect on Calvin or recent events (such as Calvin's home being broken into).

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Calvin will act like a brat a lot.
 * 2) He will often drag his imaginary friend Hobbes into stuff he doesn't want to take part in.
 * 3) Despite knowing how to make a time machine out of a box, he can't even figure out simple math equations.
 * 4) *More examples of his sometimes-limited knowledge are:
 * 5) **The time he thought that putting fake feathers on him would make him fly and ended up getting injured badly while falling off a cliff.
 * 6) **The time he found a bunch of trash on the ground and thought it was dinosaur skeletons.
 * 7) **The time he thought in his mind he was great at knowing what was going on... while being blissfully unaware he was transported to the principal's office.
 * 8) Calvin is a sexist, as shown by the times he drastically annoys his neighbor Susie just because she's a girl, and named his "secret" club "Get Rid Of Slimy girlS". In fact, sometimes he even considers doing highly dangerous things when throwing snowballs at her, such as putting a rock in a snowball.
 * 9) Calvin, despite being 6, has done some things that are too young for his age.
 * 10) *Most of Calvin's snowmen showcases involve them all being slaughtered, most of them being slaughtered, or snowmen looking at a gruesome death.
 * 11) *He has made a surprisingly haunting quote ("I'm yet another recourse-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak!").
 * 12) *He also has an existential mindset and discusses things like death, something that a 6-year-old realistically should not care about.
 * 13) Most of the time, Calvin has little to no respect for his parents and has shown signs of not being grateful for what they do for him, such as constantly insulting the food he's served.
 * 14) He does some disgusting stuff very often, such as the time when he decided to attempt giving a snowman genitals or when he tried to eat a worm for a nickel.
 * 15) He will break stuff and come up with totally unbelievable & unconvincing stories of someone or something else breaking it.
 * 16) He will do whatever it takes to torture Rosalyn, his babysitter that's just trying to get paid for college tuition, by locking her out of the house, threatening to flush her test papers down the toilet, etc all because she keeps sending him to bed at 6:30.
 * 17) He actually walks around without his clothes on the outside sometimes, which is pretty childish for someone like Calvin.
 * 18) He acts as if being good is extremely hard, and even then he's only good to get Christmas presents.
 * 19) When Hobbes cheats at a board game, he goes on a complete meltdown and flips over and outright destroys the board game, even though he himself had shown to be cheating earlier.
 * 20) *Additionally, he thinks that the point of entering a competition is to win, not to have fun, as one time he entered a safety sign competition and lost, and told his dad he thought he was from another planet just because he had enough common sense to know winning and losing doesn't matter much.
 * 21) He refuses to accept change or change himself, as Hobbes once mentioned that he threw a fit just because his mom put less jelly on his toast than the day before, and whenever Hobbes asks him what his New Years’ resolution is, he goes on a rant on how he shouldn’t change and everyone else should.
 * 22) He acts up in school a lot, sometimes to the point of leaving school. In fact, he misbehaves in school so much that his principal has an entire overstuffed folder containing his actions.
 * 23) *This isn't even the worst of it. In an early strip, he did something so bad that sirens were called to the school.
 * 24) He can be quite egotistical at times. For example, one time he entered a school road safety sign contest and thought his inappropriate and vulgar poster would win so much that it would become the state motto and get him a statue visible in several counties.

Good Qualities

 * 1) Calvin can be nice most of the time and sometimes has common sense.
 * 2) * Despite generally being anti-social, Calvin can be quite loving, for example, in the story arc with the dying raccoon.
 * 3) He can be relatable in some comics.
 * 4) He can also be quite sympathetic at times.
 * 5) Calvin & Hobbes' charm would be non-existent without him.
 * 6) His alter-egos (Stupendous Man, Spaceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet, etc.) always make for a fun story.
 * 7) He's not really a bad character; he's just flawed.
 * 8) He gets his comeuppance plenty of times throughout the comic series.
 * 9) He has a lot of memorable quotes, most notably "Sometimes I think that the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." and "THAT MEANS YOU'RE SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR NIGHT, YOU NINCOMPOOP!".
 * 10) He does have a point about global pollution being a disgusting and terrible thing.
 * 11) He's an accurate representation of how children his age can act.
 * 12) His character design is good, like everyone else.
 * 13) He does have some well-meaning intentions, such as a time when he flooded the house trying to fix the bathroom faucet.
 * 14) It’s implied that due to his overactive imagination, he’s not fully aware that his actions are hurting people when he does something wrong, so he likely doesn’t mean it when he does bad.
 * 15) He does apologize for his actions sometimes.

Trivia

 * Aside from English, Calvin has briefly spoken German, Latin, and some phrase-book Spanish.
 * Calvin sometimes is shown having a watch, but it disappears between panels.
 * Calvin is creeped out by somnambulists, or sleepwalkers.
 * It's been implied that Calvin is a music fan, considering he and Hobbes dance to it all the time. He takes a liking to classical music, and presumably rock music as well.
 * Calvin writes with both hands, but he's commonly shown to be right-handed. During the baseball strips, Calvin noticeably can be seen wearing a glove on a different hand in each panel.
 * Calvin appears as a cameo in the sixth issue of the comic book series and both Episode 8 and Episode 9 of the TV cartoon The Maxx.
 * Calvin also appears in several 2013 newspaper strips of Pearls Before Swine.
 * In the early developments of the strip, Calvin was going to be named Marvin.
 * He is the only character to appear in both the first and last panel of the comics. He shared his first panel with his dad and last panel with Hobbes.

Comments


‏