Was Hobbes real?

Was Hobbes real?

No. But that doesn't stop the magic of the strip. My favorites are when the parents interact with the stuffed animal

Real in the sense that he was Calvin's stuffed tiger. He was only a living, sentient being in Calvin's imagination, but perhaps that makes him real. These are fictional characters after all. They exist to us, but they themselves are not real in the sense that we usually think of the word. It really depends on your definition and perception of reality, though.

it was a metaphor for molestation

Was Calvin real?
While I'm speaking pipe-dream philosophizing bullshit due to being tired, does it really matter if Calvin was imagining Hobbes was speaking to him?
He recognized Hobbes as a person, so that sort of makes him one, in a way. Like how people talk about a national identity as a concept, but it really means something. Or 'humanity'. Just because you can't talk to America doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or whether you can tell if something's American or not.

Yes, his parents just had their brains scrambled by one of the super villains they fought.

The best evidence there is for Hobbes being real is that Calvin somehow got tied to a chair, which is impossible without outside help. Even his father wondered how he did it.

Life itself is but a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space and you
and you
are but a thought.

Autism, many such cases

That's the wrong question to be asking.

It was shown in a few strips Calvin's mother talking to hobbes.

So the tiger doll magically comes alive and goes back to being a doll?

If Hobbes replied then Calvin's mother may have been suffering a low key psychotic episode. Or her imagination is just as vivid as Calvin's

Watterson said the comic is about points of view. Hobbes is real to Calvin so he sees him as real. If you think about it beyond that you're putting more thought into the question than Watterson did. Not everything has to be complicated or "deepest lore."

the real question is, was Mr.Bun real?

I don't think it's possible to tie yourself to a chair like how Calvin did, so I'm going to say yes.

no, it's possessed by the spirit of an English philosopher that randomly brings it to life

Was Bil Watterson real? Do we even have any pictures of him take after 1995?

>it take one to know one

He drew a poster for a documentary a few years ago and submitted fresh audio commentary for it while staying off-camera. Does that count?

This is actually somewhat close - nothing exists in the way that we suppose that it does or that we perceive it as 'existing.'

>Was Calvin real?

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Nah.

I read C&H as a kid, and always though, that Hobbes was an actual tiger, who was just pretending to be a toy near everyone else.

I liked when Watterson touched on the logic of Hobbes being a toy. I like pretty much everything Watterson did.

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He paints pictures of himself daily which he then burns at sunset.

Pretty much this, though personally I *never* for a minute assumed Hobbes wasn't real when I was a kid, reading the strips, and always felt the comic strip worked better that way.

It gains too many shades of depression to think that this is all in Calvin's psyche rather than paint it (pun not intended) as this unique way to view the world, even if Calvin's perspective is that of a problematic child.

>Calvin threw holbes into the house and took the picture to make it seem like it was actually jumping towards him
He could get hired by cnn

im gonna dump calvin and hobbes sunday strips until this is the most replied thread or something

Spoiler because lewd shota

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I still maintain the theory that Calvin grew up to become Frazz.

Possibly the best out of them all

or maybe it's this one

>Show my friend this comic
>He's slow to get the joke
>When he finally gets it, thinks its the funniest thing ever
>Quotes it constantly

Fucker nearly ruined calvin and hobbes for me.

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I think the Spaceman Spiff comics are my favorites. Watterson was great at drawing alien worlds and creatures

Imagine if they made C&H animated series. How would they keep the ambiguity? Never showing Calvin and Hobbes together in the same frame as anyone else?

Are newspaper comics a small enough pool with a low enough par of quality that it's totally reasonable to say that Calvin and Hobbes is objectively, no argument or opinion to the contrary, the absolute best one?

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You gotta love it when artists make drawing style-based jokes

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well "tyrannosaur" literally means "king of lizards" IIRC

This one is really dark

What did he mean by this?

Another one of my favorites. I like the arrow pointing to the binder holes labeling as bullet holes

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I bet there's furry porn of Hobbes
one thing Watterson couldn't prevent

dude theres 34 of calvin and hobbes dping the mom

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Where the fuck is "Let's hope it's a divorce," sundayposter?

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An argument can be made for Peanuts too, but I like C&H better.

So Calvin and Hobbes is basically Garfield without Garfield except the main character is a child rather than a grown man. Which actually shows that all you have to do is change the characters age to change something from being cute and funny to depressing.

You're the sort of sop who argued over the top in Inception, aren't you?

It doesn't matter.

Tyrant Lizard King.

you're right, I completely forgot about the Soap Opera strips

Garfield didn't have complicated stories, or long-spanning arcs. Or callbacks to previous strips. Or philosophical questions.

and I dunno WHAT the fuck this nigga is talking about

I was just thinking of this one the other day, and how impressive it is that a newspaper strip about a character falling down is so engaging.

How can Hobbes be real when our eyes aren't real?

sorry never watched Gurren Lagann pretend I had a really clever reference to it here

Well, and with artistic talent, which is what really sets the strip apart in my eyes. It is a very witty strip with a lot else going for it, but the talent and effort that Watterson poured into the comic are what really elevate it.

C O M F Y

O

M

F

Y

It did all those things at one time or another.

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most of the strips are:
>Calvin imagines some shit once again but it's actually a trivial thing lol so funny
>Calvin and Hobbes discuss some philosphical shit wow so deep
and people say Garfield's monotonous.

You couldn't animate something like this without losing so much of the detail that it becomes inferior

>he doesn't know about the school shooting subplot

Your shit opinion is only due to ignorance of the thing you're talking about

Once or twice, but never with any frequency. The point still stands.

And as pointed out, there's a clear demarcation of artistic effort between Calvin and Garfield.

>and I dunno WHAT the fuck this nigga is talking about

Just ignore the namefags.

(you)

>or long-spanning arcs
Garfield actually had quite a lot of these back in the day. some even lasted more than two weeks, like the one where Garfield tries to get home, I think it was even adapted into an animated movie. today, they barely do these, and a week is their maximum length, and they're not really "arcs" but "a bunch of comics with one theme like Garfield squashing spiders"

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It used to have story arcs, but that stopped sometime in the 90s.

>deinonychus
wow he got it right
I'm imressed
was this made before Jurassic Park featured deinonychuses but called them velociraptors?

>school shooting subplot

Wait, what?

Watterson is actually kind of embarrassed of some of his early dinosaur strips, and made a point to be anatomically correct to the latest scientific information

More like
>Calvin has an explanation for his behavior and its crazy
>Calvin's dad tries to make him do something to build his character and neither of them enjoy it
>Calvin and Susie get into conflicts over gender
>Calvinball
>Calvin is forced into a situation by an authority figure and ends up making it as awful as possible for both parties
>Horrible snowmen

>Horrible snowmen

;_;

>Calvin's dad tries to make him do something to build his character and neither of them enjoy it
there also were quite a lot of strips where Calvin would inform his dad about "poll results" and criticize his "politics"

Those were great, and led to this great strip.

Hobbes once physically stopped Calvin from running after a car out unto the street.

Consciously slagging off Fred Hoyle. I love it.

A big -yellow- ship, huh?

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errr, this comic strip came out a loooong time before Gurren Lagann was ever even conceived as an idea.

yea, no motherfucking cocksucking shit dummy

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I know that feel

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Another really dark one

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Maybe Calvin is just *that* good.

Calvin is exceptionally bright and capable, look at all the insane snow sculptures he builds, some of them are enormous so he must have a really strong amateur grasp of engineering, tying himself to a chair isn't entirely out of the question.