Wandering the World of Calvin and Hobbes Angus Kitchell WRIT 1733: Honors Writing Professor David Daniels If you enjoy receiving puzzled looks from strangers, take a large stack of Calvin and Hobbes
collections, go to the library, and begin to annotate them aggressively. This activity constituted a large portion of my research and was certainly the most entertaining aspect of the project. This piece was my first experience writing an interpretive essay, and it proved to be a surprisingly enjoyable process.
The goal of the assignment was to identify an artifact and explain its cultural significance, us-
ing a critical framework to reach a new understanding of the object in question. Choosing this framework was both a pleasure and a challenge, as my initial research on comics and their
related themes led me to many fascinating articles but left me with an almost limitless number
of angles from which to explore Calvin and Hobbes. Ultimately, I selected a framework that gave me the opportunity to connect a field of growing personal interest (philosophy) with an artifact
of personal value (Calvin and Hobbes), resulting in a paper that I felt was a truly unique expression and exploration of my own ideas. Using the philosophies of Thoreau and Zhuangzi as lenses, I was able to find new meaning in an artifact that I once thought I understood completely.
And perhaps most importantly, this project gave me an opportunity to sit in a comfortable chair, reread a hefty chunk of my favorite comic, and justify it all as schoolwork.
In the winding history of this nation, there is perhaps no artistic genre that so accurately and thoroughly encapsulates the American psyche as the comic strip. A lowborn conglomeration of bubbled speech and colored chaos—the bastard child of visual art and scholarly literature—the comic strip is a combination so vivacious it often defies the laws of visual presentation, bulging over the edges of its paneled confines in its eagerness to exist. It is possibility incarnate. And tellingly, its history has many parallels to that of the American people. What began as a movement of the counterculture, an artistic uprising of sorts, gradually
morphed from a peripheral art to a stronghold of cultural identity, showcasing its diversity of subject material and versatility of presentation. However, as noted by Ramzi Fawaz, professor of American Studies at George Washington University, it was not until the 1950s and beyond that the genre would reach its zenith, undergoing a fundamental transformation in response to the heightened social and political commentary that stemmed from the aftermath of World War II. With an abundance of new material and a readership that spanned a wide demographic, the comic strip became a mouthpiece for the plethora of progressive movements shaping the Volume 3
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