Calvin and Hobbes Halloween Strip Remains Controversial 31 Years After Publication

Daily newspaper comics tend to follow the calendar. A gag-a-day strip that skips Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas is rare. When a cartoonist has to produce a joke every day, holidays are an easy source of material.

A Halloween reread of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes shows how little it bothers with that habit. The strip’s nine-year run has a few seasonal strips and arcs, and Calvin’s yearly struggle to stay good before Christmas is a tradition. Overall, though, C&H cares less about the holiday calendar than you might expect, especially in its late era after the sabbatical.

Halloween is notable mostly for its absence. The full run has fewer than a dozen Halloween strips, and all of them are done-in-ones. Calvin already spends much of the strip in fantasy scenarios or costumes, such as his alter ego Stupendous Man, so a Halloween story has fewer obvious hooks. Like an adult horror fan, Calvin lives as if it will never stop being Oct. 31.

Still, a couple of the Halloween jokes work well. I’m particularly fond of the Oct. 31, 1995 strip, in which Calvin’s “costume” is a kind of baby-boomer terror archetype.

“I’m yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood,” Calvin cheerfully tells an unnamed adult, “poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you’re old and weak!”

It’s a good joke, even if it sounds like something your oldest and most cynical uncle would say. It also seems to have inspired half the editorials in the Wall Street Journal over the last 30 years. It still earns a laugh.

If you want the scariest Calvin and Hobbes strip, though, one stands out to me.

Rob Liefeld’s Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin’s love of superhero comics isn’t one of the strip’s most common running jokes, but it’s there. His favorite is the often-cited, never-seen Captain Napalm, and a whole universe of costumed characters lurks just off-panel.

In the last couple of years of the original run, Watterson used Calvin’s comics to poke fun at the American comics industry, which was going through an awkward phase. The early to mid-1990s brought the Death of Superman, the Age of Apocalypse, Bane breaking Batman’s back and the debut of Carnage. It also brought blood-drenched early Image books like Spawn and Shadowhawk.

The result was one of the more controversial Calvin and Hobbes strips, from February 20, 1994. It’s a straightforward parody of ’90s American comics, and it’s shockingly violent for something in the Sunday funnies.

A nameless superhero punches his “Amazon” rival. She responds by pulling out a “hyper-phase distortion blaster” and blowing a hole straight through his chest. There’s no blood, but you get a good look at the hero’s vertebrae.

“I could feel my spine shatter,” he muses, in the manner of Frank Miller. “It hurt. A lot.”

Calvin, understandably shell-shocked, puts the comic down and goes to watch TV. His mom tells him that “there’s too much violence on TV. Why don’t you go read something?”

One of the best things about the later Sunday strips was Watterson’s ability to copy a wide range of art styles, from surreal landscapes to pastiches of other comics. Here he doesn’t seem to target a specific creator. He still builds a pitch-perfect satire of the decade’s violent excess.

The strip has stuck with me because, as a kid in the ’90s, I had Calvin’s reaction to a comic at least twice that I can remember offhand. Both times were with Marvel UK books. The 2/20/1994 strip isn’t necessarily scary, but it has a horror-movie level of shocking gore. That’s as close to spooky as Calvin and Hobbes ever really got.

Source: Polygon