Among comic strips depicting children at odds with school, Peanuts features Sally Brown and Peppermint Patty while early Bloom County placed teachers against the Michael Binkley experience. On the opposite end sits Jason Fox, who is so skilled that he wrecks things for everyone else.
Calvin and Hobbes took a different approach. What set Calvin apart from most of his funny-pages peers—save for Huey and Riley Freeman—was that school was arguably the most uncomplicated villain in the strip’s canon. At best, Calvin wrestled with boredom; at worst, he felt academia as an institution was actively out to get him.
Calvin and Hobbes became an instant classic during its original newspaper run partly because of Bill Watterson’s love of vocabulary. Calvin was always shown as much smarter than the average six-year-old, even if it was funny to put graduate-level verbiage in a first-grader’s mouth. He was simply a poor fit for public school.
School is a big focus of Calvin and Hobbes, so a full rundown of every strip on the subject would take up a book by itself. Instead, here are five chosen as some of the highlights of Calvin’s ongoing struggles with the traditional education system.
June 8, 1986
In retrospect, some of the older Sunday strips can be seen as 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 more flexible panel structure shared by every other strip, in order to allow local newspapers to change their page layouts as required.
The April 8, 1986 strip is a simple set-up for a basic punchline: Calvin’s bored enough in class to imagine he’s warped outside of basic space-time. It’s not as free with its art style as later strips would get, but it still has a few good panels—Spiff’s heroic grimace fun, along with the strange blur of the sixth panel as he blurs into hyperspeed.
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April 10, 1987
This is 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 won’t let it lie.
“Do the words ‘complete pandemonium’ strike terror in your heart?”
Calvin
The next and final strip in the arc is about 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, as teachers are completely unable to calm the students back down.
May 23, 1990
One of the more elaborate Spaceman Spiff fantasy sequences in the strip’s history 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. Still, Spaceman Spiff’s escape from the “sacrificial pit” (math class) is one of the better alter-ego scenes in the weekly black-and-white strips.
January 19, 1992
In the back half of the run, Watterson won the ability from his syndicate to submit “unbreakable” strips on Sundays, which didn’t necessarily adhere to the aforementioned flexible panel format. That let him create more and crazier action sequences and fantasy scenes.
This is one of several Sunday strips that shows a day in Calvin’s life, but it’s more deeply metaphorical—showing school as a cattle drive, a prison gang, and a hamster wheel, among other degradations. It might be the best single strip in the full run that most effectively delivers on the feeling of a rough day at school.
March 30, 1992
It’s important to remember that as dehumanizing as school is depicted to be, Calvin himself makes most of his own problems. This mid-week one-off 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—which is surprisingly solid advice—”What you get out of school depends on what you put into it.”
“Then forget it.”
Calvin
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