Five Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strips About Hating School

There are plenty of comic strips about kids who have an adversarial relationship with school. Peanuts features both Sally Brown and Peppermint Patty, and early Bloom County was often set in a classroom where the teachers were not ready for the Michael Binkley experience. On the other end of the scale, Jason Fox is so good at school that he usually wrecks the experience for everyone else.

Calvin and Hobbes took a different approach. What set Calvin apart from most of his funny-pages peers, with the exceptions of Huey and Riley Freeman, was that school might have been the most uncomplicated villain in the canon. At best, Calvin spent his school time wrestling with boredom. At worst, he felt like academia as an institution was actively out to get him and would occasionally fantasize about its destruction.

That is arguably a big part of what made Calvin and Hobbes an instant classic during its original newspaper run. Because of Bill Watterson’s love of vocabulary, Calvin was always shown as being much smarter than the average six-year-old, even if that was just because it was funny to put graduate-level verbiage in a first-grader’s mouth. He was simply a poor fit for public school. If you remember that time in your life, it is easy to see your own school years reflected in him.

School is a big focus of Calvin and Hobbes, so a full rundown of all the strips on the subject would take up a book by itself. Instead, here are five strips chosen as some of the highlights of Calvin’s ongoing struggles with the traditional education system.

1. June 8, 1986

In retrospect, some of the older Sunday strips can be seen as Bill Watterson already chafing against the limitations of the format. He eventually got the chance to change up his style after his 1991-1992 sabbatical. Before that point, Calvin and Hobbes was restricted to the same flexible panel structure as every other strip, allowing local newspapers to change their page layouts as required.

The April 8, 1986 strip is a simple set-up for a basic punchline. Calvin is bored enough in class to imagine he has warped outside of basic space-time. It is not as free with its art style as later strips would get, but it still features a few good panels. Spiff’s heroic grimace is fun, along with the strange blur as he accelerates into hyperspeed.

2. April 10, 1987

This strip comes from relatively early in the run, as part of a week-long storyline about Calvin accidentally ripping his pants at school. After multiple attempts to find a fix or at least stay seated for the rest of the day, his teacher Mrs. Wormwood calls him to the chalkboard.

Calvin, in a rare burst of sensibility, tries to simply refuse without saying why, but Mrs. Wormwood will not let it lie.

Do the words ‘complete pandemonium’ strike terror in your heart?

Calvin asks this as one last attempt to retain some dignity.

The next and final strip in the arc shows what happened next. Calvin is forced to go up to the board to work on a math problem, and he winds up showing his special rocket-ship underpants to the entire class. That ends the school day early because the teachers are completely unable to calm the students back down.

3. May 23, 1990

One of the more elaborate Spaceman Spiff fantasy sequences in the history of the strip also marks one of Calvin’s most overt attempts to escape school. After fighting his mother tooth and nail to avoid being put on the school bus, Calvin tries to get out of doing a math problem in front of his class by pulling a rubber band and shooting his way out.

Unfortunately for Calvin, while he escapes the school, he runs straight into his mom as soon as he gets home and ends up grounded for his trouble. Still, Spaceman Spiff’s escape from the sacrificial math class pit is one of the better alter-ego scenes in the weekly black-and-white strips.

4. January 19, 1992

In the back half of the original run, Watterson won the ability from his syndicate to submit unbreakable strips on Sundays, which did not adhere to the flexible panel format. That allowed him to create crazier action sequences and fantasy scenes.

This is one of several Sunday strips that shows a day in Calvin’s life, but it is deeply metaphorical. It frames school as a cattle drive, a prison gang, and a hamster wheel, among other degradations. This might be the single best strip in the full run for delivering the authentic feeling of a rough day at school.

5. March 30, 1992

As dehumanizing as school is depicted to be in Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin himself makes most of his own problems. This strip is a mid-week one-off that pits Calvin against Mrs. Wormwood again, challenging her on whether his school is adequately preparing him for the demands of the 21st century.

As she says:

What you get out of school depends on what you put into it.

Then forget it, Calvin mutters to himself.

 

Source: Polygon