Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

Infobox comic strip character
character= Hobbes


caption= According to Calvin, "Hobbes is always a little loopy when he comes out of the dryer."
comic= "Calvin and Hobbes"
species= Sumatran Tiger
creator= Bill Watterson
first= November 18, 1985

Hobbes is a character in the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes" by Bill Watterson. He is one of only two characters within Watterson's strip who has multiple identities. Unlike the other character (Calvin), Hobbes only has one alternate identity.

Twin identities

From his owner Calvin's perspective he is alive, a real individual with thoughts, feelings and ideas just as every other character. From everyone else's perspective, Hobbes is seen as Calvin's stuffed tiger, given personality and action only by Calvin's active (sometimes overactive) imagination. He is named after 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had what Watterson described as "a dim view of human nature." [cite web | url=http://ignatz.brinkster.net/cfaq.html | title=Calvin and Hobbes FAQ | publisher=C&H Magic on Paper | accessdate=2006-05-25] (Thomas Hobbes is famous for his claim that humans' natural state is a state of war, where "the life of man [is] , solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." [Hobbes, "Leviathan", chapter 13.] ) 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.

Relationship with Calvin

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. Hobbes is proud to be an animal and seems to have a low opinion of humans in general (when Calvin is wondering why people exist, Hobbes simply responds "Tiger food."), and Calvin claimed that he once ate a kid in his school, named "Tommy Chestnutt". Hobbes is willing to attack Calvin without fear of hurting him, and had twice mouthed Calvin's whole head to be left alone.

Hobbes almost never calls Calvin by his name. Instead, he simply uses pronouns when speaking to his human counterpart. This is not easily noticeable since Hobbes rarely speaks in panels including any other characters besides Calvin and himself.

Hobbes is shown to be an enthusiastic, if not particularly talented, artist, a trait which he shares with Calvin, though to a lesser degree, sometimes supplying the (unnecessary) artwork for Calvin's school projects, such as letterhead featuring a "Calvin shield" surrounded by "lance-toting tigers". Despite this, he is shown to be fairly skilled at using clay, creating a realistic-looking sabre-toothed tiger (in contrast to Calvin's clay shrunken-head collection).

Hobbes is almost always willing to submit to finishing Calvin's homework when Calvin gets lazy. Hobbes' motives for doing so is usually only to boast of the academic knowledge and skill of tigers in solving the problems (according to Hobbes tigers need to learn physics, biology and artistic expression to hunt). While he explains the homework to Calvin in a seemingly scientific and advanced method, the answer that comes up is usually completely incorrect, even though most times the problem only involves simple mathematic addition or subtraction. He once told Calvin that 7 plus 3 is 73. When Hobbes is not trying to explain the homework to him, Calvin is usually reading comics or otherwise doing anything but work.

While Calvin fears girls, particularly their "cooties," Hobbes is susceptible to females, and especially loves "smooches", habitually bringing up the term of "muchas smooches".

Calvin often yells, "I'M HOME!" when he gets home, making him an easy target for Hobbes. Sometimes, though, Calvin realizes that this is not a good idea, and manages to thwart his tiger, although this sometimes leads to more trouble. Once, he slipped into the house and frightened Hobbes by yelling "I'M HOME!" loudly, but this led to a fight. Another time, Calvin yelled "I'M HOME" without opening the door while Hobbes crashes into the closed door. Another time, he decided to sneak into the house and called, "I'M HOME!" and slammed the door after Hobbes ran outside. When he heard a knocking on the door, he refused to let Hobbes in. Little did he know that it was not Hobbes knocking, but his mother. Once Calvin even paid Susie Derkins twenty-five cents to stand at the door and yell "I'M HOME!" However Hobbes didn't fall for the trick, because he can identify Calvin by his "bad smell."

Origins and development

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 (his love affair with tuna borders on addiction) and frequently makes wry or even disparaging comments about human nature, declaring his good fortune to lead a tiger's life. Reflecting upon his work in the introduction he wrote to "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes," Watterson observed that his two protagonists revealed different facets of his own personality. Calvin generally voices what Watterson considered his immature side, often echoing the sentiments Watterson saw prevalent in modern America. ("The consumer is always right"; "There "has" to be a way to cram more violence into ninety minutes"; "Hold on, I need to inflate my basketball shoes.") By contrast, Hobbes offers a voice of ironic maturity — though he is himself far from immune to silliness.

Calvin captures Hobbes in a "tiger trap" during the first strip of the comic. Watterson initially believed that it was important to establish how his two main characters first met, but by the time he wrote the "Tenth Anniversary Book," he had changed his opinion, saying it was unnecessary and even detrimental to the feel of the strip. Much later, it is apparent in several strips that Hobbes and Calvin have known each other their whole lives, including when Calvin was an infant. This contradicted the first two strips, which show Calvin and Hobbes' first meeting. One strip especially shows Calvin claiming that he didn't remember much of his infancy. While Calvin starts going on and on about how he suspects he was being brainwashed when he was very, very young, and asking nobody in particular what he remembered that someone wanted him to forget, Hobbes says "I seem to recall that you spent most of the time burping up." Also, in an earlier strip, Hobbes once muses about some advice his father gave him. The reality of this comment is open to debate.

Hobbes' appearance changed over the strip's run; in the beginning he was slightly shorter, and his tufts of fur less defined and shorter. His eyes also had more of a round shape, as opposed to the oval shape of later years. The most notable change, however, were the pads on Hobbes's hands. In earlier years, Watterson drew the pads on Hobbes' hands as a reminder that they were really paws, but later removed them on the grounds that he found them to be visually distracting.

Hobbes' name was revealed in the third strip when Calvin claimed that Hobbes was making a lot of noise by jumping on the bed.

Hobbes' reality

From Calvin's point of view, Hobbes is a walking, talking, sometimes bipedal tiger, larger than Calvin and full of his own attitudes and ideas. But when the perspective shifts to any other character, readers see merely a stuffed tiger (there are some occasions in which Calvin's perspective of Hobbes is visible in the same panel as a parent, but the parent was not looking at the time). This is, of course, an odd dichotomy, and Watterson explains it thus:

Many readers assume that Hobbes is either a product of Calvin's imagination, or a stuffed animal that comes to life when Calvin is the only one around, or when nobody else but him is looking. However, Watterson rejects both of these interpretations, saying, "Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality than dolls coming to life": thus there is no concrete definition of Hobbes' reality.cite book | title=The Calvin and Hobbes tenth anniversary book | last=Watterson | first=Bill | authorlink=Bill Watterson | year=1995 | id=ISBN 0-8362-0438-7 | publisher=Andrews and McMeel] Watterson explained: "Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way." Hobbes' reality is in the eye of the beholder. The so-called 'gimmick' of Hobbes is the juxtaposition of Calvin and Hobbes' reality and everyone else's, with the two rarely agreeing.

Despite this, in the world of the comic the other characters often speak of Hobbes as Calvin's "imaginary friend." As well, it is sometimes difficult to imagine how the "stuffed toy" interpretation of Hobbes is consistent with what the characters see. For example, when Hobbes pounces on Calvin, the next panel shows Calvin lying on the ground, covered with dirt, with Hobbes lying on top of him. In another example, Hobbes "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:

In response to the journalist's assumption that Hobbes was a figment of Calvin's imagination, Watterson responded,

There are also interesting depth psychological interpretations, since Hobbes' ironic sense of humor, facial expressions, and point of view closely resemble the character of Calvin's father. Hobbes is often the voice of reason, contrasting Calvin's manic impulsiveness. Readers are left to wonder if this rationality is in Hobbes as a distinct personality, or in Calvin as a kind of conscience. In the end, the question becomes less about absolute truth and more about different versions of reality: the nature of Hobbes' existence was never a puzzle to be solved, but rather a subtle comment on the power of imagination, and on the similar power of a lack thereof.

Susie Derkins also comments about Hobbes. She says that, when Calvin refuses to play house with her because she brings home a rabbit from the "Hospital", she calls after him, "I don't see why you'll play with your dumb ol' tiger but not Mr. Bun (her stuffed rabbit)!" Afterwards, Hobbes comments that "Mr. Bun seems comatose, did you notice?"

Calvin sometimes threatens to wound Hobbes, like when Hobbes declares that Calvin and Susie are going to be married and asks whether he should wear spats. Calvin replies "In a minute you'll be wearing a body cast!"

In popular culture

* In Stephen Colbert's book "I Am America (And So Can You!)", Colbert refers to "That tiger-philosopher, Hobbes" while discussing Thomas Hobbes's views on human nature.

References

External links

* [http://www.ucomics.com/calvinandhobbes The Official site of "Calvin and Hobbes"]
* [http://www.andrewsmcmeel.com/calvinandhobbes Official "Calvin and Hobbes" Publicity site] at Andrews McMeel Publishing