white snails

I've been reading  Garfield Minus Garfield plus Garfield for a year or so now and sometimes it makes a great statement, and other times it's just weird or dull.

I found the Calvin Minus Hobbes on the community weblog I participate in www.metafilter.com and the following comment was made by another member. It raises a number of ideas that I think is relevant when looking at this type of retroactive post-modern rewriting of comic strips and story-telling. Read it and feel free to comment, cheers.

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So, as mediocre as I thought it was, 'Calvin Without Hobbes' actually got me thinking. Like, I thought the remix was pretty much garbage, but garbage in a very specific way.

Okay, so, what's going on in Calvin and Hobbes, if you really want to take away everything that makes the comic special and relatable and reduce to its bare core, is the story of a boy with a very active imagination --- to the point where he finds his fantasies more 'real' than reality. On its face, this is not a terrible idea for a comic, but still, not very good. I mean, "this is a comic about the magical power of imagination." BARF. There are probably (definitely) worse things you could write about, but really, nobody wants to read that comic.

What elevates Calvin & Hobbes out of that ghetto of whimsy, however, is also the same thing that confuses people into thinking that maybe Hobbes is a magical transforming being: namely, the strip's utter commitment to Calvin's view of the world. It is so committed to showing us his inner life and bringing us into his world that it treats even the most outlandish of his imaginations as absolute fact.

Whenever Calvin is alone with Hobbes, there is never any ironic winking at the reader about Hobbes' nature, or any comment on the improbability of the fantasies that Calvin has worked up; all of this is presented to the reader as straight up fact, and people buy into this as straight up fact because that's how narrative conventions work --- the author goes, "this is the world we're dealing with," and everyone is like, "yup, okay!" At no point is the reader asked or even allowed to consider that any of this might be 'fake'; when Calvin and Hobbes are alone together, it is absolutely just a boy and a tiger, flying through space in a cardboard box, and nothing else.

The only time Hobbes' plush-toy nature is ever acknowledged is when some other character who Calvin interacts with makes some comment about it --- Suzie talking about how adorable the stuffed tiger is, or Calvin's mom rolling her eyes, or whatever. This is the only time the reader is pulled out of Calvin's world and presented with the world at large, and even then, it's only for a second, because usually Calvin just barrels through everybody's logic with whatever madness he's got going on at the moment. These rare moments when we get to see Calvin from the outside really reinforce what kind of kid he is and how strong his imagination is; whenever anybody says anything about Hobbes not being a real tiger, Calvin seems truly, genuinely bewildered, like, honestly non-comprehending (that is, if he even bothers to acknowledge the other character's point). So you get these kind of 'worlds colliding' moments scattered throughout the strip, but Watterson is a very smart man who knows what he's doing, so he uses these moments sparingly and never makes too big a deal out of them, tempering them all with humour and wit and insight, so that you barely notice what's happening.

True to form, very, very, very rarely, there will be two characters --- neither of whom is Calvin --- talking about him when he's not around, and this is the only time where Hobbes is treated as completely 'fake.' Off the top of my head, the only example i can think of this is the storyline where Hobbes gets lost in the woods and Calvin's father has to go out at night looking for Hobbes (there are others, I'm sure,) and it's these very, very rare moments when we are pulled all the way out of Calvin's imagination that causes the problem for some people. This is what I always assumed Watterson meant when he talked about a manufactured Hobbes doll 'solving the mystery': that Hobbes existing as a plush toy would put him firmly in this camp, reducing the vitality of Calvin's imagination --- that the strip went to such lengths to affirm --- to the mere delusions of a child, forever removing the tension inherent in the strip's central paradox.

And that's just it: because the comic has this cool thing going on, where the reader is aware that, yeah, Calvin isn't really talking to an anthropomorphic tiger while travelling through time or whatever, but at the same time, the strip (and by extension, the reader) is so committed to Calvin's viewpoint and imagination that a talking, anthropomorphic tiger is treated as part of de facto reality. So the reader spends 90% of the time in Calvin-land (which is treated as the strip's reality), but then every now and then Calvin interacts with someone who refers to Calvin's hijinx and Hobbes' 'fakeness' (which is also treated as the strip's reality)...

...so it's really no surprise that some people skip over this delicious tension (BARF, again) and go, "Well, Calvin is obviously talking to Hobbes in this one scene, but then in the next, Suzie says that Hobbes is a stuffed animal...soooooo, Hobbes MUST be MAGIC!" I'm not going off on these people, because I absolutely see how somebody could see the strip that way, but I think you miss a bit of the strip's power and richness if you can't embrace the central tension between Calvin's world and the rest of the world; you miss out if you can't accept the paradox to the strip and life, that Calvin (and our) inner life is to Calvin (and us) more nuanced and vital than the supposed "real world" outside, that ultimately, the two are both different and indistinguishable (BAAAAAAARRRFFFF)

So, I guess what I'm saying is, Calvin Without Hobbes makes this same mistake..or, not 'mistake' really, but just generally completely and utterly bypasses the point --- it's not 'wrong', exactly, but it cuts out all the magic, wit, and subtlety from the original strip. So why would you even make this? It's like if some guy made a fan tribute to 'the Matrix' where Neo decides to take the blue pill...and then the rest of the movie is like, him waking up in the morning, going to work, buying lunch, going about his day. Who would want to watch that? That's pretty much a worthless, garbage movie. And so 'Calvin Without Hobbes' is similarly, like, the lifeless husk of a much better comic; it really only exists because it occurred to someone to make it, and really only serves to throw into stark relief how good the original actually was.

Actually, I never even thought about this stuff until I read the remix and tried to put my finger on what was so wrong about it. So, it has a point? I guess? Also, THESE BEANS SURE ARE GONNA TASTE GOOD ONCE I'M DONE THINKING ABOUT THEM.