Calvin And Hobbes was never about hyperactivity and Hobbes himself was never a manifestation of undiagnosed mania: He was manifestation of pure, unadulterated loneliness.
Loneliness is funny thing because generally it has less to do with being alone and more to do with no having other people around. That sounds paradoxical, but being alone and being isolated from your people are two different things.The former is a choice, the latter a decree. In truth, it is even more complicated than that, as loneliness can strike at any time, even when surrounded by people. That niggling sense that maybe you don’t belong is all it needs to gain a foothold.
For as much as brain of child is growing and changing and maturing, for as many distractions as the world provides to develping minds, kids aren’t stupid., particularly children as highly sensitive and attuned to the world around them as Calvin. Dissappearing into his world is coping mechanism for dealing with wprld that seems to have little patience or place for him. His isolation breeds fantasy, which breeds isolation, which does him no favors at school or at home. To be lonely child in the world means creating your own fun, your own friends, your own magic.
Calvin and Hobbes and their Spaceman Spiff fantasies were well known. He uses his imagination that way and he create a new best world for himself. Calvin actually didn’t have trouble focusing on the world around him, he had a trouble reconciling himself to he fact that the world aroumd him was such a dissappointment. Calvin made it okay to be disheartened and disappointed by life and normalized the inherent loneliness that childhood can bring. He was there for us to show how we grew up and how we learned that things we were capable of getting so much better or so much worse. Calvin was a lot of things, just like every child. He was budding inventor, a gifted artist, enterprising entrepreneur and a self- taught pundit. He was a good friend, an annoying neighbor, clever and conniving, lonely and maybe a little hyperactive. But whatever he was, he taught an entire generation of children that thougt sadness and dissapointment and loneliness may come prepackaged in life, that all could be weathered, so long as you had hope and a really good friend to see you through.
Additionally to all of these, it is a quite thing to sit down and reread comics of Calvin and Hobbes as an adult after 30 years makes us feel wierdly nostagic with warm and familiar intelligent humour and jokes. We all wish to grow up and have more friends, afraid of being wierd and to mesh with world and people We all see a thrillingly obnoxious little helion having wild and enviable escapades with a wisecracking tiger, you see a kid who is allby himself. And he is incredibly lonely like all of us.
Honestly creator of Calvin and Hobbes Bill Watterson has a point, The value of Calvin and Hobbesis in it’s intricately constructed explosively creative and unique world,free from the corrosive influence of advertising and merchandising. Maybe it wasn’t preserved so rigorously, it would’nt remain so whimsical and pure.
As Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes one of the quotes tells us ;
“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.”
There are more important things than age, social statuses, money; your soul is ageless, it doesn’t care for how important you think you are nor how much money you’ve got. Your soul cares for love and that’s all that should matter.
GREENSEA
GREENSEA 