Posts Tagged ‘Calvin and Hobbes’
“Life’s a lot more fun when you aren’t responsible for your actions”*…
Josh Millard has created “Calvin and Markov,” a “machine” that generates scrambled variations on Bill Watterson’s classic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, using a Markov chain process.
Just land here, then keep hitting refresh to experience a steady stream of random, but somehow still inspired, silliness.
And if (as your correspondent hopes and expects) you like it, try Millard’s other wonders: Garkov, Previously, On The X-Files, The Big Markovski, and Jesus Markoving Christ.
* Calvin, in The Complete Calvin and Hobbes
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As we mix it up, we might send Kryptonite-free birthday greetings to Joseph “Joe” Shuster; he was born on this date in 1914. A comic book artist, he is best remembered for creating (with his high school best friend, writer Jerry Siegel), the DC Comics character Superman, who debuted in Action Comics No. 1 (June, 1938).
“Adults are only kids grown up”*…
Childhood distorts your memories in strange ways — everything seems bigger, more extensive, more dramatic. Take the seminal comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, for example. Much of its 1985 – 1995 run lined up with my own childhood; I eagerly waited for the newspaper (yes, comics in the newspaper!) every day from about 1989 on. When I started reading, I was only a year or two older than Calvin himself, thus making the strip eminently relatable in a way that few other pieces of art have ever been for me. (And make no mistake, Calvin and Hobbes is art.)
Of course, it was an exaggerated version of being a kid — in particular the amount of destruction that Calvin heaped on his poor, unwitting parents. My memories tell me that nary a week went by without some incredible amount of damage caused to Calvin’s home. An article and chart published to the ridiculously-named PNIS (Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science, which claims to be a “part-serious, part-satirical journal publishing science-related articles”) backs up those assumptions, and even puts a dollar figure on it. According to these calculations, Calvin’s destructive tendencies cost his parents approximately $15,955.50 over the course of the strip’s 10 years…
Read more at Nathan Ingraham‘s “Calvin and Hobbes were even more destructive than you think.” (and read the full scientific paper here.)
* Walt Disney
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As we find humor in the hyperbole, we might recall that it was on this date in 1916 that Margaret Sanger, her sister, Ethel Byrne, both nurses, and an associate, Fania Mindell opened the Brownsville Clinic in Brooklyn– the first family planning and birth control clinic in the United States. (The first such clinic in the world opened in Amsterdam in 1885.) The police quickly closed the facility; Sanger served 30 days in jail. But she and her colleagues gamely re-opened; and in 1917, Sanger helped organize the National Birth Control League, which would later become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger (center) at the Brownsville Clinic
The Word of Muad’Dib…
What happens when you mash up Bill Watterson‘s Calvin and Hobbes with Frank Herbert’s Dune? It gets even more philosophically resonant…
Embark on the adventure at Calvin & Muad’Dib. [Muad’Dib? click here.]
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As we chuckle contemplatively, we might recall that it was on this date in 1960 that Cuban President Fidel Castro gave his debut speech at the U.N.– at four and a half hours, the longest ever in the General Assembly. Castro had taken a friendlier tone on his first U.S. visit, a year earlier; but by 1960, he had moved firmly into the Soviet Camp, He used his maiden U.N. address to blast U.S. imperialism and to insult John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the presidential candidates at the time.
Were Kennedy not a millionaire, illiterate, and ignorant, then he would obviously understand that you cannot revolt against the peasants.
I may not know art, but…
The good folks at Metaphilm (“enjoying the late-night conversation about—you know—what the movie ‘really’ means”) invoke the spirit of their patron saint Robert Bresson to serve up an on-going series of essays that decode (“we don’t review, we interpret”).
Your correspondent has enjoyed entries ranging from…
Sympathy for the Devil
Dorothy Sayers and the American Faust Film
How a British Detective Novelist Can Help Us Understand an American Film Obsession
to…
Knight and Day vs. Inception
More Than This
Knight and Day delivers all the profundity that Inception only promises
But perhaps no one entry has been as impactful as Galvin P. Chow’s (in)famous reinterpretation of David Fincher’s martial masterpiece…
Fight Club
The Return of Hobbes
Hobbes is reborn as Tyler to save “Jack” (a grown-up Calvin) from the slough of un-comic despair
And lest readers think that criticism is an empty exercise, with no meaningful influence on the field that it surveys, consider GorillaMask’s illustration of Chow’s thesis: I am Jack’s Calvin and Hobbes…
(Special Calvin and Hobbes bonus: Michael “Bing” Yingling’s Calvin and Hobbes, the Search Engine… tres cool!)
As we renew our subscriptions to Cahiers du Cinéma, we might recall that it was on this date in 1536 that monk, physician, humanist scholar, and writer Francois Rabelais was absolved by Pope Paul III of apostasy and allowed to get on with his work, both medical and literary. Rabelais’ influential (and oft-imitated) satiric masterpiece, Gargantua and Pantagruel (five books, 1532-52) is a mock-quest… with the emphasis decidedly on the “mock”: the “prize” sought being at times the ideal toilet paper, at times the wisdom of the Holy Bottle.
B.C. (and H.)…
Readers will recall that before the exquisite Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson drew political cartoons…
Before that, he drew for his college newspaper, The Kenyon Collegian…
These and more, from every stage of Watterson’s wonderful career, at Rare Bill Watterson Art.
As we remember that this was why we used to subscribe to newspapers, we might send birthday smiles to another Ohioan, humorist and cartoonist James Thurber; he was born (in Columbus) on this date in 1894.
Q. No one has been able to tell us what kind of dog we have. I am enclosing a sketch of one of his two postures. He only has two. The other one is the same as this except he faces in the opposite direction. – Mrs EUGENIA BLACK
A. I think that what you have is a cast-iron lawn dog. The expressionless eye and the rigid pose are characteristic of metal lawn animals. And that certainly is a cast-iron ear. You could, however, remove all doubt by means of a simple test with a hammer and a cold chisel, or an acetylene torch. If the animal chips, or melts, my diagnosis is correct.
– The Thurber Carnival (1945)
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