Cartoons, Chaos and Calvin

In the middle ages the kings employed court jesters who mocked on anything and everything. They were entertainers but more importantly critics of the policies in autocracy. They countered sycophancy with legitimacy.

Why can’t we call comic strips the new generation court jesters? In a society where wit and sarcasm are comfortably misused, the comic strip ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ has propagated the virtues of loyalty and love. In a world where humans are divided on the basis of colour, caste and creed they offered us two friends that are not even the same species. But how, being so different, they still manage to maintain a fierce friendship?

Calvin, the main character is six or eight year old boy, lives with his parents, dashes into troubles very soon, breaking any thing remotely breakable. At the same time he is extremely smart, but his imagination and immaturity make success impossible. He represents the piece in all of us that wants to stay a kid for ever – any complaints??

Hobbes, Calvin’s stuffed tiger, whom he believes real, will have life only when Calvin is around. He is the voice of reason, maturity and usually tries to talk Calvin out of nasty ideas. They fight often, but he is perfect best friend and companion.

When differences are too jarring, man cannot accept them as final, so either he wipes them out with blood or coerces them in some kind of homogeneity or a deeper unity. All comic characters are social statements. But Calvin is more than a social statement. He portrays what we think as a kid and how the surroundings react. He is there in all of us, at some point of time or other, whether we accept it or not. Calvin feels alienated from parents, other kids at school, from the little girl down the street, and from the institutional education. To cope with this he retreats into games of his imagination. His behaviour is weird, but this is what most mammals have done for millions of years. For any individual compressed and crowded times has its use when dealing with material things and there he tries for escape. There reality is represented by nightmare, disease by frank, honest revelation of the normal, lowest, crude fact.

Playing is the most primitive method used for training and learning both by animals and humans and Calvin’s escapism too employs play. He develops his own magic circle where games’ rules have nothing to do with the larger universe outside. There he decides the rule, the formalities, the laws and everything is based on his fantasies and interpersonal issues. It is rounded which starts from Calvin and ends at him. He prefer the game of imagination than the game of competition, it’s a game of imitation than limitation. Every time Calvin plays a game with Hobbes they bend the rules in ridiculous ways simply degrade into an argument and disperse.

These two reveal the different facets of human personality. Calvin voices our immature face, echoing the sentiments; on the contrast Hobbes offers voice of ironic maturity, though immune to silliness at times. For Calvin, Hobbes is a walking and talking tiger, full of his own attitude and ideas but for outside world he is a stuffed tiger alone. He is more or less a subjective nature of reality than a doll coming to life.

Let us all revive the Calvin in us and search out for the Hobbes, for a better meaning and understanding of our chaos and ultimately the escape from them.

Foot Note:
Calvin: Sometimes when I talk, my words can’t keep up with my thoughts; I wonder why we think faster than we talk.

Hobbes: Probably, so you can think twice.