Calvin And Hobbes Analysis

Calvin and Hobbes is a serialized comic strip by American author Bill Watterson, initially published from 1985-1995. From the perspective of literary and cultural studies, it is a valuable postmodern text in terms of both its form and content. It pokes fun at the postmodern condition and the seemingly high-brow nonsensical expression (or babble) associated with it. It is itself presented as postmodern nonsense/babble or pomobabble (a portmanteau word) with its roots in American suburbia and the value –systems associated with the ‘Land of Stars and Stripes’. With one foot in predestination and lofty ideals as embodied by the protagonist Calvin; and the other in the ruthless reality of competition as embodied by his stuffed toy Hobbes- Calvin and Hobbes is a pastiche of what it means to be really human in an increasingly artificial world. By dissecting Calvin and Hobbes on one hand and looking at it from a wide perspective on the other, it becomes possible to gain an insight into why the cartoon has been

Similarly daunting is the range of the postmodern text Calvin and Hobbes. Therefore, to juxtapose static images with the postmodern dynamics of Calvin and Hobbes has been an audacious enterprise. But what this enterprise speaks to, among other things, is a process of historical mutation and de-sublimation, which involves a kind of social difference which does not mix well with the increasingly totalitarian marriage of rational technology with corporate agendas. The genius of Bill Watterson has given form to this pending collision via the figure of Calvin and his extreme imagination, which is presented as so intense and active as to conjure up the figure of Hobbes, as a stunningly sophisticated feline companion. Watterson has thereby been able to create parallel worlds that are richly textured and represent the postmodern fragmentation of the society and