31 Years Later, Calvin and Hobbes' Scariest Comic Is Still a Controversial Classic
The '90s are back and they're actually somewhat traumatizing
Daily newspaper comics usually make a point of being seasonal. It's a rare gag-a-day strip that doesn't make sure to touch upon all the major holidays, particularly Valentine's Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. When you've got to get a joke out there once a day, every day, you take inspiration wherever you can find it.
On a Halloween reread of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, one of its more remarkable qualities is that it usually doesn't bother with that. There are a few seasonal strips and arcs scattered across its nine-year run, sure, and Calvin's struggle with staying good before Christmas is an annual tradition. But as a whole, C&H is less concerned with the holiday calendar than one might expect, particularly in its late, post-sabbatical era.
Halloween in particular is remarkable by its absence. In the full run of Calvin and Hobbes, there are less than a dozen Halloween-themed strips, all of which are done-in-ones. Granted, Calvin already spends a big part of the strip in fantasy scenarios and/or various costumes (i.e. his alter ego Stupendous Man), which removes some of the obvious hooks for a Halloween story. Much like adult horror fans, Calvin lives his entire life like it'll never stop being Oct. 31.
Still, there are a couple of good Halloween jokes in Calvin and Hobbes. I'm particularly fond of the strip from Oct. 31, 1995, in which Calvin's "costume" is some 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 does sound like your oldest and most cynical uncle is telling it. It also appears to have inspired half the editorials in the Wall Street Journal for the last 30 years. Still, it's worth a laugh.
If you want to talk about the scariest Calvin and Hobbes strip, however, there's one in particular that sticks out to me.
Rob Liefeld's Calvin and Hobbes
It's not one of the most common running jokes in the strip, but Calvin enjoys superhero comics. His favorite is the often-cited, never-seen Captain Napalm, but there's a whole universe of costumed characters lurking just off-panel.
In the last couple of years of Calvin and Hobbes' original run, creator Bill Watterson used Calvin's comics to make a few jokes at the expense of the American comics industry, which was going through an awkward phase at the time. The early to mid-1990s was the era of the Death of Superman, the Age of Apocalypse, Bane breaking Batman’s back, the debut of Carnage, and blood-drenched early books from Image like Spawn and Shadowhawk.
That led to one of the more controversial Calvin and Hobbes strips, from February 20, 1994, which is both a straightforward parody of '90s American comics and shockingly violent for something found in the Sunday funnies.
A nameless superhero punches his "Amazon" rival, who reacts by whipping out a "hyper-phase distortion blaster" and blowing a hole straight through his chest. There's no blood, but you get a pretty good glimpse of our anonymous hero's vertebrae.
"I could feel my spine shatter," he muses, Frank Miller-ishly. "It hurt. A lot."
Calvin, understandably shell-shocked by what he's just seen, puts it down and goes to watch some TV, only for his mom to tell him that "there's too much violence on TV. Why don't you go read something?"
One of the best things about Calvin and Hobbes' later Sunday strips was Watterson's ability to replicate a wide variety of different art styles, from surreal landscapes to pastiches of other comics’ styles. Here, while he doesn't appear to be targeting any specific creator, Watterson manages to put together a pitch-perfect satire of the '90s’ violent excess.
This 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 when reading Marvel UK books.) The 2/20/1994 Calvin and Hobbes isn't necessarily scary, but it's got a certain horror-movie level of shocking gore, and that's as close to spooky as Calvin and Hobbes ever really got.