The first year of Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes got its start on November 18, 1985, and quickly turned into a well-known family classic. The strip covers the life of main character Calvin and his best friend Hobbes, who is a stuffed tiger. However, in most of the comics you only see a one panel glimpse of Hobbes being a stuffed animal, as the majority of the time he is anthromorphasized and running around with Calvin. The strip switches often between fantastical adventures, like Calvin’s daily life at school during which he sees himself as a space adventurer with his teachers being alien monsters, and everyday life with him interacting with his parents and friends. One of the key features about this comic is its super minimalistic style, and not that the characters are minimalistic as they are super simple, but the artistic choice that the only things drawn are the things that are directly related to the comic. Every scene drawn in the house and school, none of it is defined, leaving us as the reader to infer what it looks like. This method I feel was used to make us focus more on the character interactions, which was a good strategy since that is all I can remember about this comic as characters were the main focus. In comics like “Frank in the River” environments played a bigger part as that set the stage for all of the bizarre, randomness that happened. In Calvin and Hobbes, they set the tone, which is more of a childlike innocence and snarky story, well shown by the strip where Calvin is hammering Nails into the coffee table. I know personally that this strip was a huge influence on my sense of humor, and more than likely made for a lot of laughs amongst families.