Calvin And Hobbes / Tropes D to I

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• Dads Can't Cook: There's a story arc where Calvin's mother was sick, so Calvin's father cooked, reassuring Calvin that he lived off his own cooking for 3 years before he married Calvin's mother. Calvin says that his mother claimed that his father lived off of canned soup and frozen waffles 3 meals a day; Calvin's father's response (while holding a can of soup) was "Your mother wasn't living with me at the time, so she wouldn't know. Get the syrup out, will you?" Interestingly enough, other strips showed Calvin's father cooking in their backyard grill quite competently (though Calvin complains in one strip that his burgers are "charred on the outside," "raw on the inside," and taste like lighter fluid).
• Dame with a Case: There is a "dame" in each of the three story arcs featuring "Tracer Bullet", Calvin's imagined private eye alter ego. In one, she turns out to be an Imagine Spot stand-in for Susie Derkins, who won't give him the answers to a test in Real Life; in the two others, she is described as a "brunette" and is a stand-in for Calvin's mother.
• Damned By a Fool's Praise: Rather often, Watterson would throw an obvious Take That! towards some subject he had a strong stance about (like his hatred of television, comic books, modern art, commercialism, technology, or sports) by having Calvin loudly espouse his love and devotion for its stupidest qualities. Then, he usually throws in a sensible snark from Hobbes or Calvin's dad at the end, just to drive it home.
• David vs. Goliath:
  • One strip has Calvin saying to Moe, "You're so dumb you probably never thought about how a sparrow's smaller size and greater maneuverability is an advantage in fighting off big crows." Calvin is then punched by Moe.
    Calvin: Those TV nature programs will be the death of me yet.
  • One Sunday strip begins with an Imagine Spot of an Allosaurus attacking a thirty-ton Brontosaurus. The narration asks "What induces an Allosaurus to attack a monster more than twice his own size?". The last panel shows Calvin clambering over his dad getting impatient about the hamburgers being grilled.
• Daydream Surprise:
  • Calvin enters a traffic safety poster contest, and is certain that his poster, "Be Careful Or Be Roadkill", is a shoo-in. One strip begins with several newspaper headlines about Calvin winning the contest, and praising him for his greatness. The last panel then has Susie excitedly going up to Calvin, telling him that her poster won.
  • One strip has Mom waking Calvin up to get ready for school, so he gets up, goes through his morning routine, and as he's out the door, he hears Mom say, "Calvin, it's time to wake up." It's then revealed Calvin dreamed up the whole morning as Mom tries to get him out of bed. He complains that his dreams are getting too literal.
• A Day in the Limelight: Calvin's Dad occasionally got the spotlight and was often used to voice Watterson's concerns about consumerism and the rat race. The arc about the house getting robbed also had a few strips devoted to Dad's anxieties and trauma response. Calvin's Mom didn't get these as much, although she sometimes went through the frustrations of everyday life, such as poor customer service and long lineups.
• The Dead Can Dance: One strip that invokes this by way of Woolseyism. In the original, Calvin and Hobbes play cowboys, and when Hobbes "shoots" Calvin, he gives him a "Death Rattle." In French, the translator changed it to, "It's the Danse Maraca-bre!" Feel free to groan, or gémir.
• Deadline News: Happens in one of Calvin's fantasies where he's a T-rex rampaging through a crowded city, devouring people left and right.
  A camera crew from Channel 3
  Arrived in town to give
  A live report. At this they failed,
  Because they didn't live.
• A Deadly Affair: Referenced in a 1985 strip when Calvin is unwell at home and watching a daytime soap opera.
  "Darling": I've got to have you! Let's murder our spouses!
  Mary: Murder?! You sick animal! I love it when you talk that way! Come here!
  Calvin: [smiling] Sometimes I think I learn more when I stay home from school.
• Deadpan Snarker: Calvin's dad and Hobbes, though virtually every character has their moments.
  • Hobbes especially. Calvin's dad doesn't seem to be sarcastic as frequently.
    Calvin: Here's another ad with attitude. This guy didn't like his job, so he quit, and now he climbs rocks! See, he's his own man! He grabs life by the throat and lives on his own terms!
    Hobbes: If he quit his job, I wonder how he affords those expensive athletic shoes he's advertising.
    Calvin: Maybe his mom bought them for him.
    Hobbes: I hope she'll pay his medical bills when he falls off that rock.
  • Nearly everyone gets some snark now and then. Even a freakin' Ouija Board gets its moment.
    Calvin: Oh, great Ouija Board, will I grow up to be President?
    Ouija Board: G-O-D-F-O-R-B-I-D.
    Calvin: When I want an editorial, I'll ask for it, you stupid board!!
• Death by Looking Up: Invoked by Hobbes in one strip, where he's sitting in a tree with a bucket of snowballs. When Calvin walks underneath, he drops one snowball next to Calvin so that he will look up and have just enough time to realize what's about to happen, and then dumps the whole bucket right on his face.
  Hobbes: It's that moment of dawning comprehension I live for.
• Death by Newbery Medal: An early storyline where Calvin finds a wounded baby raccoon. His parents put in a box with a blanket and food in hopes of helping it, but it dies by the next morning. Calvin is left to come to terms with its death. According to Watterson, this storyline was based on his wife finding a dead kitten. He also said that this story was the moment where he felt his strip was ready to handle more emotionally heavy topics.
• Death Glare: Calvin can get this reaction from basically everyone, such as in one strip where he decides to not do his homework and play outside, his dad gives him a glare so angry, Calvin imagines him as just one giant, bloodshot, snarling eyeball.
  Hobbes: Nobody gives the evil eye like your dad.
  Calvin: Did you see how his veins throbbed?
• Death Is a Sad Thing: Calvin finds an injured raccoon and tries to nurse it back to health with his mother's help. Calvin cries as the raccoon dies and becomes indignant about why this raccoon had to die when he didn't do anything wrong. Even the father breaks out of his sardonic routine to comfort Calvin over this.
• Death World: Plenty of the worlds Spaceman Spiff crash-lands on, with poisonous atmospheres, dangerous predatory wildlife, hostile natives, corrosive rain, or perpetually scorched by twin suns.
• Declarative Finger: Used frequently by at least Calvin and his dad, and by Hobbes, who provides the page image.
• Deep-Fried Whatever: In one strip, Calvin tries to give his mother a list of recipes to help improve her cooking. As Hobbes looks over the recipes, he notices they all involve deep-fat frying.
  Calvin: I'm adding a chocolate syrup section now.
• Deer in the Headlights: One story arc had Calvin making a traffic safety poster for a contest at school. When asking Hobbes for advice on a slogan, Hobbes suggest, "Don't look into car headlights and freeze, because you'll either get run over or shot!" Calvin points out that doesn't happen to most people, to which Hobbes responds that there's more to this world than people.
• Deface of the Moon: Calvin imagines himself doing this at one point, writing "Calvin is great" on its surface with a moon buggy.
• Defiant Strip: In one Sunday strip, Calvin is disgusted by society after finding some garbage someone littered in the forest. Hobbes says that sometimes it's good to not be human, and Calvin, after a moment's pause, agrees, taking off his clothes and wandering through the forest naked.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: Calvin and Susie are comparing test scores, and Calvin tells Susie his 'C' is better than her 'A'. When Susie asks how a 'C' could possibly be better than an 'A', Calvin replies that his life is a lot easier when people's expectations of him are kept low.
• Delivery Stork:
  • One strip features Calvin hearing about and asking his father specifically about the stork. His father's response was that, yes, most babies were delivered by a stork, but Calvin was "unceremoniously dumped down the chimney by a big, hairy pterodactyl." Calvin is, needless to say, thrilled (to his father's lack of surprise).
  • In another comic, Calvin's dad informs him that kids come in kits (some assembly required) from Sears. Calvin is upset by this, but his father tells him not to worry as he was "a blue light special at K-mart. Almost as good, and a lot cheaper." Calvin is less than thrilled.
• Delusions of Doghood: In two story arcs, Calvin uses the transmogrifier to turn himself into an animal. However, when we see from his parents' perspective, he still looks like his normal human self. Whether this is actually Calvin playing pretend or his parents just can't comprehend the magic is never made clear however.
• Denied Food as Punishment:
  • In one early strip, Calvin's dad sends Calvin to his room without dinner after he says the food smells like bat barf. Calvin's mother asks if this is fair, and Calvin's dad answers that he has to learn manners and missing one meal won't kill him. Cut to upstairs where we see Calvin's on the phone ordering a pizza.
  • In another strip, Calvin keeps insulting his dad's hamburgers while they're being cooked, ending with a question about when the family can eat. Cut to Calvin on his bed, asking loudly what his dad means by "tomorrow".
• Department of Redundancy Department: In the arc during which Calvin renounces his status as a human and tries to live like a tiger, he learns that tigers are very secretive. Hobbes confirms, and won't tell Calvin any secrets he has because, in Hobbes' words, they're "secret secrets."
• Depth Deception:
  • Calvin used this to surprise his father once; by making the top half of a snowman's head and a few "fingers", he made it look like a giant snowman was peering over a hill at him.
  • Calvin's dad himself once used some Little Known Facts, "proving" to Calvin that the sun is actually about the size of a coin. After all, hold a coin up to the sun, and they're about the same size.
  • In one arc, Calvin and Hobbes use the time machine and accidentally end up in prehistory with dinosaurs. Though they barely escape with their lives, Calvin is pleased that they got some good pictures, which will surely rock the scientific world. When he shows his dad the pictures though, his dad assumes that he just took pictures of his dinosaur toys with the camera really close. Which he may or may not have.
• Derailed Fairy Tale: When Dad is especially annoyed by Calvin's story-time demands, he'll alter the story. One notable example is when the cute Hamster Huey is unexpectedly decapitated.
  Calvin: Wow, the story was different that time!
  Hobbes: Do you think the townsfolk will ever find Hamster Huey's head?
• Description Cut:
  • Happens between Susie and Calvin here
    Susie: (thinking) I wasn't doing anything wrong, but I'm the one who got in trouble! I sure hope Calvin feels terrible about this!
    (next panel depicts Calvin writing the following)
    "Hey Susie,
    How's the view way up there? Ha! Ha!
    Calvin
    P.S. Try to steal a chalkboard eraser for me."
  • Also here.
    Mom: Ugh, it's so creepy knowing these goons have been in our house. I don't feel safe at all.
    Dad: I know, and this must REALLY be scary for a little kid like Calvin.
    (meanwhile, in Calvin's room)
    Calvin: Gosh, I can't wait to tell everyone at school how our house got robbed!
    Hobbes: Be sure to say who scared the burglars away after they took the TV and jewelry.
• Derailed Train of Thought: Calvin on occasion; Watterson has stated some of Calvin's meandering tirades are based on ones his wife makes, but comically exaggerated.
  Calvin: You know why birds don't write their memoirs? Because birds don't lead epic lives, that's why! Who'd want to read what a bird does? Nobody, that's who! [Beat Panel] This is changing the subject, but have you ever noticed how somebody can say something totally loony and not be aware of it? What are you supposed to do, just let it slide??
  Hobbes: Sometimes if you wait, he'll top himself.
  Calvin: I say just punch 'im then and there!
• Designer Babies: Parodied in one strip when Calvin asked his dad where babies come from and was told that hopeful parents just buy a kit from Sears and assemble them. Calvin, on the other hand, was a marked-down knock-off brand from K-Mart. This is yet another lie Calvin's dad says to torment his son.
• Despite the Plan:
  • In an attempt to get out of cleaning his room, Calvin decides to build a robot to do it for him. Despite his attempt to invoke Smart People Build Robots, it turns out that a six-year-old who has never studied robotics can't actually do that. At the end of the day, he heads to bed, disappointed that he failed... until he realizes that by spending all day faffing around with his robot idea, he indeed managed to avoid cleaning his room.
  • In another story arc, Calvin attempts to get out of having to do a writing assignment for school by travelling to the future to pick it up when it was already done. Unfortunately, he failed to realize that for the assignment to exist in the future, had to have done it in the past. While 6:30 Calvin and 8:30 Calvin go to 7:30 PM to beat up that Calvin for not doing the assignment, 6:30 and 8:30 Hobbes realizes that the assignment is never going to get done and decide to write the assignment themselves. The Calvins are thrilled that they still managed to get out of having to write the assignment themselves... until the next day when Calvin presents the assignment to find it's an insulting account of their time travelling adventure that paints Calvin as a bratty idiot.
• Detective Patsy: In one of the Tracer Bullet story arcs, Calvin's mom demands to know who knocked over the cabinet and broke the table lamp. He leads Calvin over to explain what happened; Calvin realizes he'll be blamed for it, and in the Tracer Bullet Imagine Spot, it's depicted as him being set up to take the fall for the crime.
  Tracer Bullet: The click of a hammer being cocked behind my head focused my thoughts like only a loaded .38 can. The dame had set me up! She didn't want me to solve the case at all! She just wanted a patsy to pin the crime on!
• Determinator: Combined with a Running Gag. No matter how big a jerk he can be or how weird and offbeat his hobbies are, Susie keeps wanting (or at least trying) to hang out with Calvin.
• Didn't Think This Through: Calvin almost always forgets parts of his plans that should be obvious.
• Did You Get a New Haircut?: When Calvin transmogrifies himself into a tiger, he asks his dad if he notices anything different. His dad asks if it's a new haircut. Of course, Calvin's transmogrification is only in Calvin's mind, therefore his father couldn't see it even if he wanted to.
  Calvin: Geez, did you go blind?! I'm a tiger!
  Calvin's Dad: Oh, I thought you meant besides that.
• Differently Dressed Duplicates:
  • In the second duplicator story arc, Calvin's Morally Superior Copy is differentiated physically from the original Calvin by being well-groomed and having neat, combed-down hair.
  • During the last time machine story arc, there are no less than three Calvins together at once, but they're differentiated by the 6:30 PM Calvin wearing the time travel goggles and the 8:30 PM Calvin being in his pajamas, while the 7:30 PM Calvin has an unchanged appearance.
• Digging to China: In one strip, Calvin is mad his dad told him to go outside, so he decided he's going to dig to China and live as far from his dad as possible.
  Hobbes: You don't think your Dad will get mad about us digging up the driveway?
  Calvin: Oh, you know Dad. He'll get mad no matter where we dig.
• Dirty Communists: Parodied when Calvin calls his parents Communists for making him go to bed early, and when he had Hobbes play the part of the "Godless communist oppressor" in a game of war. After all, the strip first ran during the Cold War.
• Dirty Kid: Downplayed with Calvin. He expresses some interest in a sitcom with raunchy dialogue, but he doesn't seem attracted to anyone.
• Discreet Dining Disposal: Calvin has repeatedly attempted to get rid of his dinner, such as spitting it up on the carpet under the table, shovelling it on his mom's plate while her head is turned, or giving it to Hobbes.
• Disgusting Vegetarian Food: In one early strip, Calvin is not particularly pleased when his mom serves him a vegetarian dinner. Of course, he regularly has this reaction to any food she serves her, even stuff he actually likes to eat, just on impulse.
  Calvin: I'm not a vegetarian! I'm a dessertarian.
• Dismotivation: Calvin's character is consistently portrayed as rejecting any signs of change or character development, including intentionally failing his assignments and tests to set everyone's expectations of him lower.
• Dispense with the Pleasantries: In one Spaceman Spiff strip, Calvin is brought before the Zorg Despot, who tells Spiff that if he gives them the information they want, he'll be killed relatively painlessly. Spiff tells the twisted space crustacean to dispense with the pleasantries, just tell him what they want from him.
  Zorg Despot: A summary of Lewis and Clark's expedition to the Pacific!
  (Cutting Back to Reality)
  Calvin: Ha! Wild zontars couldn't drag that information out of me! Do your worst!
  Miss Wormwood: You didn't read the assignment, did you Calvin?
• Disproportionate Celebration:
  • In one comic, Calvin gets an A on an assignment. He pictures the entire city celebrating his achievement with a parade, with the mayor even presenting the key to the city to him. Justified, as Calvin usually performs horribly in school in subjects other than writing.
  • In another strip, he sees the first robin of spring and excitedly tells his mom to call the paper while running around in circles, expecting a front page write up, a civic ceremony, and enough prize money for a trust fund. Unfortunately, not only does his mom tell him that it doesn't work that way, it turns out Hobbes already saw a robin the previous day!
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • In an early strip, Calvin's dad sends Calvin to his room simply for complaining that his meal smells like bat barf. Even mom thought that was harsh.
  • Hobbes has mauled Calvin for very petty reasons. Like playing "catch a tiger by the toe".
  • An arc where Rosalyn babysits Calvin has both characters inflicting this on each other. First, Rosalyn puts Calvin to bed early because she overheard him laughing about their last babysitting adventure. Second, Calvin locks Rosalyn out of the house as revenge for the early bedtime.
• D.I.Y. Disaster:
  • Done in two strips: One where Calvin floods the kitchen, the other getting bad enough to where it floods the entire house. The next strip after even makes a Continuity Nod saying Calvin's dad didn't give him dessert because he flooded the house.
  • There's also a story of Calvin's attempt to fix a dripping faucet in the bathroom.
• Do a Barrel Roll: A common feature of Calvin's fantasies involving airplanes, such as one where he races another passenger jet and barrel rolls to get ahead. Another time, he walked through the snow to make the message "do a barrel roll" visible to airplanes, although he's unsuccessful.
  Hobbes: Any luck?
  Calvin: I'm so disappointed.
• Dodgeball Is Hell: In one strip Calvin as Spaceman Spiff frantically dodges alien blaster fire, while in the real world Calvin is playing dodgeball in gym class and Moe and another bully are deliberately trying to knock him over with the ball. As a comic exaggeration, craters can be seen in the concrete wall behind Calvin.
• Doing It for the Art: In-Universe. In one story arc, Calvin and Hobbes are making things out of modelling clay. Calvin is obsessed with marketability and commercialism in his creation, but Hobbes just makes what makes him happy: a tiger. Calvin lambasts it for being bland and unmarketable, but Calvin's mom likes it far more than Calvin's creations, a hundred shrunken heads of popular cartoon characters.
  Calvin: How will this ever appeal to the lowest common denominator?! It's completely unadaptable to merchandising tie-ins!
  Hobbes: Who cares? I just wanted to make it.
  Calvin: What?! Is this some snobby, elitist, aesthetic thing?!?
• Do-It-Yourself Plumbing Project:
  • One strip has Calvin's dad trying to fix the sink, but at least he has the good sense to consult a manual. "Check the following list of handy expletives, and see that you know how to use them."
  • One arc has Calvin attempt to fix a leaky faucet, only to break it open and spray water everywhere. Hilarity Ensues.
    Calvin: La da dee dee da / I think I'll get a bucket... Dum de doo... / Nothing's wrong... Da dee doo ba... / I just want a bucket to hold some... stuff. / Ta tum ta tum / Let's see, how many buckets do we have? Dum de doo... / No cause for alarm ... No need to panic ... / I just want a few buckets. La la.
    Calvin's parents: (simultaneously) "Your turn."
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Every Christmas, Calvin debates with Hobbes about the spirituality and reality of Santa Claus and how he judges children from some unseen location above with ambiguous promises of a grand reward for being without sin. One strip makes the comparison more explicit when Calvin says he has the same questions about God.
• Dogs Love Fire Hydrants: In one strip, Calvin builds a snow dog with one its legs raised in front of a fire hydrant as a reference to this trope. In the last panel, one of Calvin's parents can be heard yelling at him, clearly unamused.
• A Dog Named "Dog": Calvin attends an elementary school named... Elementary School. This is most likely because the name of Calvin's hometown is never revealed.
• Domino Mask:
  • The only permanent rule of Calvinball is that you have to wear one of these masks, and you're not allowed to question why.
  • The first time Stupendous Man appeared, he was wearing one of these masks, rather than the full cowl he had in all later appearances.
• Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off!: Calvin's been spanked by his parents a few times, although it's never shown happening onscreen, only implied by pain stars and Calvin rubbing his sore behind.
• Doomed Moral Victor: Referenced at the end of the last Stupendous Man story arc, when Hobbes asks Calvin if Stupendous Man has ever won a fight. Calvin says that they're all "moral victories".
• Doomed Supermarket Display:
  • Referenced in one strip as a Noodle Incident, where Calvin's dad wants him to wait in the car while the former goes shopping in the supermarket.
    Calvin: Sheesh. Knock over one lousy display stand, and pay for it for the rest of your life.
  • Shown in another strip where Calvin imagines himself as a Tyrannosaurus loose in the grocery store, knocking all the products off the shelves and creating a huge mess, to his mom's endless frustration.
    Calvin's Mom: Oh, no! Calvin, can't I take you anywhere?!
    Calvin: Now the Tyrannosaurus wants cookies!
• Doom It Yourself: In one story arc, Calvin attempts to fix a leaky bathroom sink by himself and, rather predictably, causes a huge mess when the faucet pops off and floods the bathroom because Calvin didn't think to shut off the water pipe first.
• Door Judo: Calvin did this once to avoid Hobbes' Attack Hello, by sneaking through a window, and then locking Hobbes outside after tricking him into pouncing the open door. Of course, his mom was also outside after just coming back from the supermarket...
• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: This was done in one strip where they're playing football. Then they try to justify why the other didn't score (I'm actually a double agent, triple agent, your goal is on top of mine so anytime you score it's a point for me, I'm actually a badminton player disguised as a football player, etc.) until it turns into a game of Calvinball.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: While Calvin is obnoxious and belligerent toward Susie, whenever it comes to violence more serious than the odd snowball, she always gets the upper hand. Though he does usually initiate the physical confrontation in relatively harmless areas like snowball or water balloon fights (and wind up getting plastered so severely it looks a lot less harmless), it's also quite common for him to just say something insulting to her and wind up with black eyes, bloody noses, or laying in a bruised heap on the ground.
• Downer Ending:
  • Some of Calvin's Spaceman Spiff fantasies ended with Spiff being captured or killed by aliens. The original inspiration for Spiff, a sci-fi comic that Watterson drew for a high school German class, also ended with the protagonist getting eaten by a monster. He's always back in the fray without explanation soon enough though.
  • Several of the arcs end rather disappointingly for Calvin, but go on for a little longer to allow him and the audience to reflect upon it. This includes the baby raccoon arc (where the raccoon ends up dying) and the baseball arc (where Calvin is peer pressured to join a baseball team at school, hates it, gets treated like an idiot, and quits).
• Dragons Versus Knights: In one of Calvin's many fantasies, he imagines himself as a fierce, fire-breathing dragon that utterly destroys a knight foolish enough to challenge him in his lair with his powerful flames (in reality, his bad breath).
  The knight is fried to a crunchy crisp... his armor fused into a solid piece! The dragon circles overhead, daring other fools to come after him!
• Drama Queen: Calvin, very often, because he likes complaining solely for its own sake.
  • Throwing a falling-down, physically draining temper tantrum when Hobbes beats him at checkers. When Hobbes tells him it's just a game, Calvin says his tantrum is nothing compared to how he behaves when loses in real life.
  • Getting a shot at the doctor and screaming as if the doctor was stabbing him to death, threatening a malpractice lawsuit.
  • Threatening to become a psychopath when he grows up because his parents make him go to bed at eight o'clock.
  • Endlessly complaining during a family walk around the neighborhood through the snow, ranting about how he's going to freeze to death, not even noticing when they actually arrive home - at which point he immediately cheers up and goes outside to play with Hobbes.
  • One strip has Calvin skin his knee and cry out loudly in pain, until he sees no one around to pay attention to him. He then calmly walks back to his house and resumes his overblown performance in front of his mother.
• Dramatic Irony: The only time Calvin's parents are actually nervous about him getting into trouble while they're out having dinner, Calvin's behaving himself at home with Rosalyn for once.
• Dramatic Spine Injury: In one strip, Calvin reads a comic book in which the superhero Amazon Girl uses a Ray Gun to blast a hole clean through her opponent, shattering his spine. Calvin is left traumatized by the extreme show of violence and tries to get away from it by watching TV, but his mom turns it off, ironically telling him there's too much violence on TV and he should read something instead.
• The Dreaded Pretend Tea-Party:
  • After Calvin stole Susie's doll Mr. Bun, Susie retaliated by taking Hobbes. When Calvin came to Susie's house to return Mr. Bun in exchange for Hobbes, Susie was having a tea party with Hobbes. Calvin was furious that Hobbes seemed to be enjoying himself.
  • On another occasion, Susie invites both Calvin and Hobbes to a tea party, which Calvin rudely refuses. After realizing that Susie is genuinely upset at having nobody to play with, Calvin has second thoughts and goes to join her, claiming that he never accepts invitations because it's more fun to crash a party uninvited. The fact that she had cookies may also have been a factor.
  • An early strip had Susie invite Calvin to a tea party with her various plushies, which he rudely turned down (of course) due to not wanting to play with a girl and because he was looking for Hobbes, who had previously been stolen by a dog. However, when he notices Hobbes is among Susie's guests, Calvin thanks her for finding him and kisses her hand in gratitude, though not before all the cookies are stolen. Due to the Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane nature of the comic, it's left ambiguous if the thief was Calvin or Hobbes.
• The Dreaded "Thank You" Letter: In one strip, Calvin writes a thank you letter for Christmas to his grandma rather quickly, but only because she snarkily sent their house an empty box with a note attached saying that she was checking to see if the postal service was still working.
• Dream Reality Check: One story arc has Calvin falling from a great height after being lifted into the atmosphere by a helium balloon that popped. He figures it's just a dream, and that all he has to do is look down and gasp, and then he will wake up. Doesn't work.
• Dream Sue: Many of Calvin's fantasies have him as some powerful character like a Tyrannosaurus, a dragon, a Flying Brick superhero, or a famed ace space explorer, because he has very little power over anything in his real life. It's often subverted when reality reflects on his fantasies, such as the fact that Stupendous Man has never managed to win a single battle and that Spaceman Spiff is always on the brink of death in a hopeless situation.
• Dream Within a Dream:
  • Calvin dreams that he walks out of the house, trips over a rock and then find himself free-falling off a cliff several miles in the air, only to wake up, get out of bed, and find out too late that his house is several miles in the air. After falling again, he then wakes up for real, except by that point he's too scared to get out of bed.
  • There's also the Reality Within a Dream, where he's woken up by his mother and gets ready for school and actually GETS OUT THE DOOR before being woken up again. He lampshades this by saying "My dreams are getting way too literal."
• Dreary Half-Lidded Eyes: Calvin's eyes always droop to half-mast when he's watching TV. Apparently, he doesn't use any muscles at all to keep his eyes open (in one strip, he tells Hobbes "I can feel my neural transmitters shutting down").
• Dress Code: Discussed in one strip about a restaurant's "no shirt, no shoes, no service" notice.
  Calvin: I saw a sign on a restaurant door that said "No shirt, no shoes, no service." But it didn't say anything about pants! If I went in wearing shoes and a shirt but no pants, they'd have to serve me!
  Hobbes: They'd probably serve you with a court summons.
  Calvin: [taking off his pants] C'mon, let's see if Mom will take us out for dinner!
• Dress-O-Matic: In one Sunday strip, Calvin imagines a futuristic version of his house where Calvin is thrown into a machine to get him ready for school that washes, feeds, and dresses him on an assembly line and spits him out physically ready.
• Drives Like Crazy: Calvin on his sled (or wagon). He seems to enjoy hitting "every obstacle" on the hill, as Hobbes put it. He also prefers to have philosophical discussions during the ride, and therefore isn't paying attention to where he is going in the first place. These strips usually end with Calvin and Hobbes either crashing into something or going off a cliff, although sometimes even more ludicrous things have happened like the sled catching fire or flying into the sky.

  Calvin: We avoided the tree, didn't we?
  Hobbes: By going down the gulley and into the pond, yes.

• *Drool* Hello: "A Nauseous Nocturne", from the beginning of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes.
  From the darkness, by the closet,
  Comes a noise much like a faucet
  Makes: a madd'ning drip-drip-dripping sound.
  It seems some ill-proportioned beast,
  Anticipating me deceased,
  Is drooling poison puddles on the ground.
• Drugs Causing Slow-Motion: Parodied with Calvin's sugar intake causing this effect. A strip opens with Calvin's mom moving in jittery slow motion, telling him "That's enough" very slowly. Cut to Calvin vibrating and stuttering rapidly, while Hobbes reflects that she may be right about the issues of adding sugar to his already over-sugared cereal.
• Dub Species Change: The Danish translation is rewritten a bit so that the series takes place in Denmark instead of the US. This means that in the arc where Calvin finds a dying raccoon baby, it's changed to a squirrel instead since raccoons are not native to Denmark. The Dutch version also changes it, but into a rabbit. It works because the raccoon is never actually shown to the readers.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • When Calvin first sees his pediatrician, he keeps asking if the doctor's tools hurt. The doctor calls one of them a cattle prod and says it will hurt a little less than a branding iron. Calvin faints upon hearing this and the doctor says that "little kids have no sense of humor".
  • Calvin shows Hobbes an antelope...an ant coming down the ladder into her boyfriend's car. Hobbes tells him it isn't funny. Less a case of the joke being offensive and more just being lame.
  • One one occasion where Rosalyn babysits, she jokes that she brought a cattle prod. His parents laugh but Calvin, not amused in the slightest, reacts by deciding to run away. Later on in the same arc, Rosalyn grabs Calvin's shirt after he gave her a Nazi salute.
• Dumb Dinos: In the dinosaur strips, the carnivores are savage, violent monsters while the herbivores are dim, helpless victims. Justified in that the strips reflect Calvin's imagination, not real life, and this is how he imagines dinosaurs to be.
  • One memorable strip has Calvin imagining Tyrannosaurs that are apparently smart enough to pilot fighter jets, although Hobbes finds the very idea "so stupid".
• Dunce Cap: Calvin is sometimes punished at school by being forced to sit in the corner with a dunce cap, such as when he suggested the class start a discussion whether cannibals should get leniency in being charged with murder because it's less wasteful, or that he wrote the United States was founded two-hundred years "Before Calvin".
• Dysfunctional Family: Calvin's family qualifies as one. Dad gets enjoyment out of mundane activities, Mom is constantly driven to her wit's end by both her son and her husband, and let's not get started on Calvin. This does, however, make the occasional Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other moment all the more touching.
• E = MC Hammer: In one strip, Calvin is called up to the blackboard by the teacher to answer a math equation (eleven minus three), but Calvin is ridiculously bad at math, so he just stalls by writing random nonsense symbols until the school bell rings so he doesn't have to actually try and solve the question.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Enough to get its own page.
• Earthquakes Cause Fissures: One of Calvin's Imagine Spots involves a tectonic fissure moving with uncanny accuracy toward an unsuspecting man's house, coinciding with a derailed train, plummeting airplane, and gas leak.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • In one strip, Calvin steals a doll from Susie while playing G.R.O.S.S. with intent to hold it for ransom. In retaliation, she steals Hobbes. After Calvin apologizes and pays up 25 cents for Hobbes's return, he bombards Hobbes with demerits for not devouring Susie while he was captive. Hobbes claims he read Susie's diary.
    Calvin: "You get 15 demerits for besmirching the club's reputation, plus 5 more for conduct unbecoming of an officer, and a censure in the club book for not devouring Susie when you had the chance.
    ...
    Hobbes: "I read an open page of Susie's diary, it said 'Calvin is a pig-faced smelly fat-head!'"
    Calvin: "Brilliant work Hobbes! Promotions for everyone! Welcome back!"
  • Zigzagged in another strip. Calvin, feeling bad for hurting Susie's feelings with the same sort of offhand insult he'd toss casually with Hobbes, apologizes to her. Susie says that she forgives him, and Calvin sprints off, the weight of guilt lifted. Realizing that she suffered much more than he did, Susie is suddenly less inclined to be forgiving.
    Susie: ON THE OTHER HAND, LET'S SEE YOU GROVEL A LITTLE!
• Easter Egg: Watterson occasionally slips some into the comics; for example, on at least two occasions he altered his signature to fit an Art Shift. This page lists a few of them.
• Eat That: In one story arc, Calvin bets Susie a nickel for him to eat an earthworm. Calvin clearly expected Susie to just get grossed out and run away, but Susie demands that Calvin eat five worms to make it worth a nickel. Calvin ends up stuck in a situation where he's forced to eat worms to save face because Susie didn't run away or give some of the money up front like he hoped, at least until his mom arrives and saves him, much to his relief.
  Calvin: Man, you'd think that the guy eating the worms would be calling the shots!
  Susie: Usually, if you're calling any shots at all, you're not eating worms.
• Eat the Evidence: In an early Spaceman Spiff strip, Spiff is about to be tortured for the formula of his atomic napalm neutralizer, so he decides to eat the formula to prevent them from getting it. Cutting Back to Reality shows he's just been taken to the principal's office, and the formula he's eating...
  Principal Spittle: Why is he eating his hall pass?
• The Echoer: In the April 9, 1995 comic, a shapeshifting alien copies Calvin's appearance. Since it doesn't know English, it just copies the few phrases it heard Calvin say: "Grittings. Ma nam is Kahlfin. Heeryor lunboks. Hoffa gud tay askool." But by the end of the day, it's learned enough English to form new sentences.
• The '80s: The strip began in this era, as you can guess by the occasional nods to the Cold War. It ran for a whole decade, and you'll occasionally see references to contemporary technology and social issues. Calvin often expresses frustration with his parents being behind the times.
• Eldritch Abomination: Some of those snowmen would be head trips if they weren't made of snow.
• Elephants Never Forget: In a story included in the beginning of The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin turns himself into an elephant with the transmogrifier to make learning his English homework easier, reasoning that, since elephants never forget, he can just look through it once and remember it perfectly afterward. Sure enough, it works, as Calvin's new memory is just as strong as he expected... until he has to turn back, at which point his memory is no better than usual, and he forgets most of what he memorized, forcing him to go through it again once his dad quizzes him and finds him unprepared.
• Eleventy Zillion:
  • When Calvin is having trouble with his homework, Hobbes tells him that the problem requires calculus and imaginary numbers, such as "eleventeen" and "thirty-twelve." (Imaginary numbers are a real mathematical concept, but this isn't how they work.) And just to put the cherry on top, the question is eleven plus seven.
  • In one strip, Calvin and Hobbes are discussing the value of nature and wildlife. When Hobbes suggests that "we need to start putting prices on the priceless," Calvin replies, "Yeah. If our woods are worth a zillion jillion bagillion, think what Alaska is worth."
• Elopement: Subject of a gag in one strip, where Calvin offers to show Hobbes an "antelope".. and leads to him a nearby ant hill, where he points out the ladder being leaned against the female ant's window. Hobbes, clearly excited to see a real antelope, does not find it funny.
• Embarrassing Old Photo: Occurs in two back-to-back strips where Calvin is looking through his parents' college yearbook photographs. Watterson states in the tenth anniversary collection that there should be a statute of limitations on old yearbook photos for just this reason.
  Calvin: Who's the bimbo with you in this old prom picture?
  Calvin's Dad: That "bimbo" is your mother!
  Calvin's Mom: (offscreen) WHO'S A BIMBO??
  Calvin: Pretty funky hairdo, mom!
• Embarrassing Password: Hobbes gets to the treehouse first and refuses to lower the ladder until Calvin recites the password, a multi-verse ode to how awesome tigers are. In another, Calvin argues for a while, but finally gives in... just as Susie walks by.
  Susie: I was going to ask him to come over and play house, but I think you'd be a weird example for our children.
  Calvin: (yelling up) One of these days I'm going to make you into a rug! Do you hear me?? A rug!
• Emergency Broadcast: Calvin parodies one of these, with his attention signal being a loud, panel-filling scream.
  Calvin: Had this been a real emergency, the scream you just heard would have been followed by lots more just like it.
• Encouraged Regifting:
  • Susie invites Hobbes (and Calvin, "if you must") to her birthday party. While Hobbes is brainstorming gift ideas, he suggests a can of tuna. When Calvin objects that it's not a good gift, Hobbes says they could always take it back and borrow a little mayo... They end up gifting her a bicycle horn though.
  • One Christmas, Hobbes gives Calvin some cans of tuna. Calvin feels guilty about not getting Hobbes a present, and the tiger cheerfully says that he planned that into the gift. If Calvin gave him his present back, it would be a great present for Hobbes. Calvin happily does so (particularly since Calvin doesn't even like tuna to begin with).
• The End Is Nigh: Calvin had one strip with melting snowmen doing this to signal the arrival of spring.
  Calvin: They're snowmen prophets of doom.
  Calvin's Mom: You certainly take the pleasure out of waiting for daffodils.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Parodied.
  Calvin: Do you ever think about the end of the world as we know it?
  Hobbes: You mean a nuclear war?
  Calvin: I think Mom was referring to if she ever catches me letting the air out of the car tires again.
• Enemies Equals Greatness: Calvin certainly thinks so, because obviously the only reason anyone would hate him is that they're jealous of his vast intellect and moral superiority. Of course, Calvin also laments in other strips he doesn't have many enemies to fight against...
• Enemies List: In one strip, Calvin made snowman effigies of every person he hates, so he can watch them melt into nothing. Hobbes is surprised Calvin even knows that many people.
  Calvin: The ones I really hate are small, so they'll go faster.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: In one Sunday strip, Calvin is eating his lunch when Hobbes attacks him, beats him up, and then eats his lunch.
• Enemy Without / Evil Twin: Subverted and inverted. In one arc, Calvin creates a duplicate of himself to do his chores, but the duplicate is too much like him and refuses to help. Then it gets him in a bunch of trouble, not because it's more evil than him, but because it knows it can have fun and the original Calvin will get all the blame. In a later arc, Calvin manages to duplicate only the good side of his personality, who then masquerades as Calvin while the real article gets to slack off. (Running Gag: "If you're Calvin's good side, you ought to be a lot smaller.") This goes better, until the good duplicate tries writing romantic poetry for Susie, to the original's horror. The good duplicate eventually gets so frustrated with the original that it stops being good and just self-destructs.
• Enfant Terrible: Calvin, though nowhere near as evil as some others, is still a terror.
• Entertainment Above Their Age:
  • Six-year-old Calvin frequently tries to watch adult movies (such as the time he and Hobbes attempt the Totem Pole Trench trick so they can watch Vampire Sorority Babes in a theater), though most of his attempts to watch them are unsuccessful. One time he actually succeeds in doing so is during one arc; after he locks Rosalyn out of the house, he and Hobbes watch movies that they're not allowed to watch^note The only movie that is named is Venusian Vampire Vixens. until his parents and Rosalyn burst in.
  • In one strip, Calvin watches a show while he's sick in bed. Judging by the dialogue (a man and a woman admit they're cheating on their spouses and agree to murder them so that they can be together), it's pretty mature, and Calvin comments that he sometimes feels like he learns more when he stays home from school.
  • One strip has Calvin order an album from a band called Scrambled Debutante. In his words, their songs focus on "depraved violence, mindless sex, and the deliberate abuse of dangerous drugs." Hobbes lampshades this by pointing out that his mother would flip out if she saw it laying around. Calvin then reveals (as he's throwing away the actual record) that he bought it specifically for her reaction.
  • In a later strip, Calvin asks his mother if he can purchase "a Satan-worshiping, suicide-advocating heavy metal album." Rather than get upset, she points out that it's all an act—"The fact that these bands haven't killed themselves in ritual self-sacrifice shows that they're just in it for the money like everyone else"—and encourages him to seek out genuinely subversive art rather than buy into what Calvin dubs "mainstream commercial nihilism."
• Epic Fail: Calvin's report on bats, which he thought was excellently and professionally worked on, turned out to be this. As a matter of fact, the story arc ends with this exchange:
  Hobbes: What did your parents have to say?
  Calvin: Nothing. And if you'll give me a hand here,^note He's digging a hole with a shovel it will stay that way.
• Escalating War: In one early Sunday strip, Calvin squirts Hobbes with a water pistol, and Hobbes retaliates by soaking Calvin with a water balloon. Calvin decides to get him back by spraying him with the garden hose, but in the last panel we see Hobbes round the corner dragging a whole swimming pool...
• Escapism: It is implied that this is the reason Calvin is Mr. Imagination, which is why more than half the time, he's in his own little world trying to escape the harshness and boredom of reality.
• "Eureka!" Moment: When Rosalyn plays Calvinball with Calvin in her last appearance, she complains that the game makes no sense and it's like Calvin's just making it up as he goes. And then Calvin panics that she stumbled into the Perimeter of Wisdom, and it all falls into place.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Calvin is playing with one of his toy cars, imagining a scenario where the vehicle falls into the Grand Canyon and explodes, while still in midair. Apparently, Mercedes are even more combustable than Pintos.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite the rather minuscule nature of Calvin's good side, he rarely tries to actually hurt someone beyond thrown snowballs or water balloons, ^note  He tried to throw a pine cone at Susie once, and tried to wrestle Rosalyn as Stupendous Man and is always remorseful over any harm resulting.
  • When the clones he created for himself keep getting into trouble at school, he's exasperated, noting even he doesn't get sent to the principal's office every day.
• Every Man Has His Price: Discussed by the duo during one wagon ride. Calvin claims his price is: "Two bucks cold cash up front."
  Hobbes: I don't know which is worse: That everyone has their price, or that the price is always so low.
  Calvin: I'd make mine higher, but it's hard enough to find buyers as it is.
• Everytown, America: Calvin lives in a rather nondescript town that's never named, but fan consensus considers it to be Bill Watterson's hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio (just outside of Cleveland).
• Evil Feels Good: In one Sunday strip, Hobbes stops Calvin from smacking Susie in the head with a snowball and counsels him that true happiness comes from a life of virtue. Calvin spends the day being a model son, but upon reflection finds himself deeply unsatisfied, so he completes his original task of pasting Susie with that snowball, then laughs his head off. "Virtue needs more cheap thrills," observes Hobbes.
• Exact Words:
  • After Calvin comes into the house dirty, his mom demands he get into the bathtub. Calvin lies clothed in an empty bathtub, saying "I obey the letter of the law, if not the spirit." But then his mom yells that she wants to hear water running. Calvin realizes he's caught and gets ready to really take a bath.
  • Calvin thinks a bee landed on his back and asks Hobbes to check. Hobbes says "That's not a bee," and Calvin is relieved. Hobbes meant that the insect was actually a hornet; Calvin soon gets stung.
  • Calvin brags to Hobbes about his juggling skills, saying he can keep a dozen eggs in the air at once. He tosses the eggs up in the air; a second or so later, Calvin and the carpet are both covered in egg yolk and broken shells. Calvin says, "Notice I didn't say I could do it very long."
  • One of Calvin's attempts to thwart Hobbes' daily "Calvin is home from school" pounces involves yelling "I'M HOME!" before he opens the front door.
    Calvin: [as Hobbes holds his head in pain] You'll notice I didn't say I was inside.
  • In the middle of class, Calvin lets the teacher know that he has "to go," and is allowed to leave. However, Calvin didn't specify that he had to go to the restroom, and so walks all the way back home, to his mother's shock.
  • Defied in the story arc where Calvin's teacher assigns her class to each collect fifty leaves. Calvin was clearly planning on just collecting fifty random leaves until she specified it had to be fifty different leaves.
  • One arc has Calvin's dad try to take a decent picture of Calvin without wasting an entire roll of film due to Calvin making weird faces. At one point he asks Calvin to "give (him) a smile and hold it for two seconds"; Calvin makes a dopey-looking grimace that's Technically a Smile, although his dad isn't amused.
    Calvin: THAT WAS A SMILE! I SMILED!
  • A test question asks Calvin to explain Newton's First Law of Motion "in your own words". Calvin then proceeds to write down gibberish nonsense, and telling the audience that he loves loopholes.
  • During one of the instances of Hobbes mentioning the Noodle Incident to Calvin, Calvin furiously exclaims that "no one can prove I did that". Notice Calvin didn't say that he didn't do it, he said no one can prove he did it...
  • Calvin is daydreaming in class when his teacher calls on him to answer what state they live in. When Calvin says "denial", she realizes with exasperation that she can't really argue with that answer and lets him go back to his daydreams.
  • Calvin insists to Susie that he didn't get a frowny face sticker on an assignment, only for the next panel to show his silent amazement at the existence of barfing face stickers.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: In one strip, Calvin notices a snowball whizzing over his head. He turns around and sees Hobbes, and razzes him for being a lousy shot, only to get another snowball right in the face. Turns out Hobbes only threw the first snowball to get him to turn around.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: When Calvin gets assigned to give a report on a newspaper article, he chooses: "Space alien weds two-headed Elvis clone."
  Calvin: Actually, there's not much left to explain.
• Excuse Boomerang: Similar to the Zeno of Citium story, Calvin explains he's decided to be a fatalist, because that way he can't be held accountable for his actions because he was fated to do them. Hobbes trips him, claiming Calvin was fated to fall.
• The Exit Is That Way: Calvin announces his secession from the family and heads outside to strike out for the Yukon. His mother calls after him... but only to sardonically inform him, "You're heading southeast. North is that way."
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!:
  • Calvin defeats a carnivorous leaf pile by attacking it with a rake and spreading it across the whole yard. Back in the house, Mom tells Dad that she thought he was going to rake the yard today.
    Dad: I did rake the yard. I spent all afternoo... where's Calvin?!
  • Calvin becomes separated from his parents at the zoo. Dad thinks he might be at the tiger pit and then jokes to himself that he's in the tiger pit. Cue Dad breaking into a sprint in the final panel.
  • After Calvin and Hobbes accidentally push the family car into a ditch, Calvin's mom eventually notices a car in a ditch outside and gradually comes to the realization that it's their car.
    Mom: What's going on, I wonder. Why are all those cars slowing down as they go by? Gosh, did someone have an accident? It looks like there's a car in the ditch! ...But I don't see anyone by it. And how on earth did they go straight in backward? To do that, the car would've had to come... right... out... our... driveway!
  • Calvin notes that Mom is taking a shower early in the afternoon, which means she and Dad are going out tonight. Since Mom didn't make Calvin take a bath, that means he's not going with them. And if his parents are leaving him at home, they've probably gotten Rosalyn to babysit him.
    Mom: Brilliant, Holmes.
    Calvin: AAAAAAHHHHHH!
• Exploding Closet: In one story arc Calvin's mom makes him clean his room. After a bit, Calvin tells her he's finished, but his mom is suspicious because of how fast it took. She opens the closet and...
  Calvin's Mom: [buried in junk] Back to work, kiddo.
  Calvin: YOU made THIS mess! YOU clean it up!
• Expospeak Gag: Calvin sometimes uses Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness to summarize his childish ideas (although he also uses childish terms to describe more complex ideas). Probably the most famous example is his explanation to Hobbes for why he's wading in a creek looking for frogs: "I must obey the inscrutable exhortations of my soul."
• Expressive Mask: Spaceman Spiff, interplanetary explorer extraordinaire, wears a space visor that is more like a small square black screen perched on his nose, which somehow conveys all of his eyes' expressions. The standard expression is two squares, but he uses circles for alarm, a thin line for when he's squinting, and triangular shapes for when he's angrily blasting stuff. For that matter, the Calvinball masks and Stupendous Man's mask are very expressive for pieces of cloth (the Stupendous Man hood, however, does white out Calvin's eyes in his daydreams).
• Extreme Close-Up: This is given a Take That! in one strip, where Calvin's dad so thoroughly disgusted by the overuse of this trope that he feels the need to watch his show from the other side of the room.
  Calvin's Dad: Yikes! Not another extreme close-up on somebody's anguish and grief! Why do TV cameras zoom in so close to people's faces that you can't even see their entire heads?! Do they think we can't read the person's expression from more that two inches away?! What a violation of personal space! What a shameless intrusion! What a heartless assault on human dignity!
• Eye Shock: Usually with several extra pairs of eyes jumping out of shocked characters' heads.
• Eye Twitch: Farmer Brown experiences one◊ when he sees a train, an airliner, and a massive fissure all headed for his house — right as he (unknowingly) tries lighting a match right next to a gas leak.
• Eyes Out of Sight: Moe's eyes are constantly covered by his hair. Calvin himself was originally designed with this sort of hairstyle (back when he was still called Marvin), but it was pointed out to Watterson that this made it difficult for the character to emote.
• F--:
  • In one comic, Susie is happy with the smiley face sticker she got on her test. Calvin, however, is less than thrilled. When she asks what he got, he refuses to tell her, leading her to accuse him of getting a frowny face sticker. Calvin denies it, then comments to himself that he never knew they even made barfing face stickers.
  • In the bug collection assignment arc, Calvin is trying to do the aforementioned project on the day it's due. He gets 4 bugs (out of the 50 he needs; also, one of them is actually a ball of lint) before he has to go to class. Susie snarks that if he labels them scientifically in the next 30 seconds, he might get an F-Plus. At the end of the arc, Calvin tells Hobbes that he got an D-Minus-Minus on the assignment.
• The Faceless:
  • Susie's mom physically appeared in one strip (she was referred to in a few other strips and had an offscreen speaking role in one other strip), but only from the knees down.
  • The sick baby raccoon. It's kept just out of frame for nearly all of its arc, except in two panels where part of it can just barely be glimpsed as a fuzzy outline.
  • The monsters under Calvin's bed. We only see glimpses of tentacles, claws, and eyes in the darkness, but never get a good look at any of them.
• Face Palm: A common reaction to Calvin's shenanigans.
  • At the end of a Horrible Camping Trip where it rained all week, Calvin's dad has just packed everything up when the rain stops. Cue whap.
  • Calvin does it himself in another strip. After hurting Susie's feelings by calling her names, he makes a hesitant attempt at apology. Irritated and not understanding his stammering, Susie snaps at him and stalks off. Calvin shouts "I'm trying to apologize, you dumb noodleloaf!" Realizing he just called her a name while trying to apologize for calling her names, he facepalms.
• Fake Rabies: Calvin (Oct. 28, 1986) made an attempt to fool his mom into thinking he was rabid using toothpaste foam. She didn't fall for it; he leaves considering the possibility that "Maybe Dad will fall for it if I bite him first."
• Faking Amnesia: Calvin does this (unsuccessfully) in one story arc as an excuse for his bad grades:
  Calvin: Gee, it was awfully nice of you strangers to have me over for dinner.
  Dad: Calvin, knock it off.
  Calvin: You mean me? Is my name Calvin?
  Dad: You're not fooling anyone, young man. You do not have amnesia.
  Calvin: This all seems vaguely familiar... And yet... And yet...
  Dad: You're asking for an early bedtime, kid.
  Mom: Well, he seems to remember he likes dessert anyway.
  Calvin: This is "dessert" you say? Hmm... Perhaps my memory would return if I had some more.
  Dad: That's it — bed!
• Family-Friendly "Mature" Content: Sometimes played straight, sometimes discussed:
  • While looking for a movie to watch:
  Calvin: The TV listings say this movie has "adult situations". What are adult situations?
  Hobbes: Probably things like going to work, paying bills and taxes, taking responsibilities...
  Calvin: Wow! They don't kid around when they say "For mature audiences."
  Hobbes: I've never understood how those movies make any money.
  • One Running Gag involves Calving trying to watch movies which, going by the title, are very low-budget horror porn like "Vampire Sorority Babes", "Cannibal Stewardess Vixens Unchained", "Attack of the Coed Cannibals", or "Venusian Vampire Vixens".
  • Calvin's comics come straight from The Dark Age of Comic Books, and so are full of edgy content like exaggerated violence and improbable anatomy (indirectly naming Most Common Superpower).
  • For one show-and-tell, Calvin claims his mother fights crime in "a patriotic leotard, a cape, and knee-high, high-heeled boots". Calvin's mom wonders what they should do about it, Calvin's dad asks to see that outfit sometime.
• Fan Myopia: In-Universe. Calvin shows Susie some of his "Captain Napalm" bubblegum cards and offers to trade with her.
  Susie: I don't collect Captain Napalm bubblegum cards. (Leaves)
  Calvin: It must be difficult going through life with no sense of purpose.
• Fancy Camping:
  • One early Sunday strip ends with the duo retreating to their tent surrounded by dozens of lights to keep them safe from ravenous monsters they know from campfire stories.
    Hobbes: You were right. I'm glad we carried a generator all this distance.
  • Another early cub scout strip has Calvin bemoaning the fact he carried a microwave all the way out into the forest because he didn't know they were cooking their food on the campfire.
• Fang Thpeak: In a trip to the museum, Calvin mentions that saber-toothed tigers probably talked like this and says they went most definitely extinct because they couldn't understand what they were saying. Hobbes is not amused with him disrespecting his ancestors like this.
• Fantastic Aesop: "Snow goons are bad news." Hobbes lampshades how that moral is rather inapplicable in real life.
• Fantastic Racism: Hobbes seems very proud of a perceived superiority of tigers over the rest of Earth's species.
• Fantastic Time Management: Calvin travels two hours into the future to get his completed homework from his future self. Of course, it isn't done yet because two hours ago he went back in time to get it. The 6:30 Calvin and 8:30 Calvin then decide to gang up on the 7:30 Calvin and make him do the homework, but run into the same problem. Meanwhile, the 6:30 and 8:30 Hobbeses write about the mess the Calvins are getting into. Hobbes's story ends up getting an A+, though it does make Calvin look rightfully ridiculous.
• Fantasy Keepsake: Calvin tells the class during show-and-tell that he literally died of boredom doing his homework and went to heaven, bringing back a yo-yo with him once he returned to life. His teacher doesn't exactly believe him...
  Calvin: Eventually, my heart started again and I came back to life... but not before bringing this back!
  Classmate: A yo-yo?
  Calvin: It was pretty boring there, too.
  Miss Wormwood: Let's have a look at that homework.
• Fantasy Sequence: One of the foremost elements of the comic strip. Calvin is constantly living in his own world(s), but the use of this trope is actually pretty complicated. In summary, there are a lot of clear-cut fantasy sequences and also a lot of deliberately ambiguous scenes.
  • In the clear-cut cases, Calvin imagines riding dinosaurs or being a heroic space pilot (or an endless number of other things), and it can typically be clearly seen that the real world exists around him as he imagines things. Even Hobbes doesn't see these as real. For whatever reason, he also almost never appears in them, absolutely never as himself, whereas other characters may appear as aliens or something else.
  • But then there are the events where Hobbes is present as a real if somewhat anthropomorphic tiger, and these also involve fantastic things like time travel or aliens. Hobbes turns into a toy tiger when adults or even other children are present, but by Word of God (in the anniversary book) neither the idea that Hobbes is Calvin's imagination or that he's real is more true than the other.
  • Sometimes others also can't see things that are real to Calvin and Hobbes, such as Calvin having turned into an owl, but usually these are also left ambiguous, like Calvin's clones of himself just never happening to show themselves to his parents more than one at a time, or the question of how Calvin managed to tie himself to a chair if Hobbes didn't do it.
• Fashion Hurts: When Calvin complains about a choking necktie (which an Imagine Spot compares to a hangman's noose), his father reminds him that some people have to wear ties everyday.
• The Fatalist: Calvin once proclaims himself to be a fatalist, so he could blame the bad things he does on fate. Hobbes promptly trips him into a mudhole, saying: "Too bad you were fated to do that."
• Faux Horrific:
  Calvin: Trick or treat!
  Adult: Where's your costume? What are you supposed to be?
  Calvin: I'm yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak! (after getting a bunch of candy) Am I scary or what?
• Faux Final Line: In the January 23, 1989 strip, Calvin is ordering power tools over the phone. When his mom passes by, he pretends he's calling Susie about homework ("So, the assignment is pages two through four?") until she leaves.
• Fear Is the Appropriate Response: Discussed in one strip where Calvin asks Hobbes what to do if Moe threatens to beat him up. Hobbes tells him that when a rhino charges, tigers "scramble like maniacs for the nearest tree". Calvin is not convinced by this.
  Calvin: That's your advice?? To sit in a tree all day?!?
  Hobbes: It doesn't impress the girls, of course, but there's no sense in impressing them and then getting killed, my dad used to say...
• Feather Fingers: In one story arc, Calvin and Hobbes start repeatedly zapping each other with a transmogrifier pistol for revenge. No matter what form each is in, he's still able to work the trigger — the most extreme case being when Calvin is a flower, apparently having prehensile leaves.
• Feed It with Fire: In the snow goon story arc, Calvin and Hobbes first attack the living snowman with snowballs. They simply stick to the monster, inspiring it to add more snow and features to make itself bigger and more grotesque, quickly becoming the first of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Expulsion from G.R.O.S.S. can be done for such things as cavorting with the enemy (Susie)... or singing the anthem ahead of schedule.
  Hobbes: OHHOHH GRO-HOSS, BEST CLUB IN THE COSMOS...
  Calvin: Stop that, you anarchist!
• Fence Painting: In one strip, Calvin's mother wouldn't let him pass the vacuum cleaner, until he's "old enough", prompting Calvin's protests until she "lets" him clean the living room.
  Calvin: That suppressed smile worries me.
• Fictional Document: Calvin's favourite storybook, Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey, as well as his favourite magazine, Chewing, a hobby magazine about chewing gum. Commander Coriander Salamander And 'Er Singlehander Bellyander, the sequel to Hamster Huey, is mentioned once.
• Fiction Isn't Fair: when it comes to schoolwork, Calvin's bad luck frequently outmatches his good luck. Mrs. Wormwood assigns her students projects that would be more appropriate for a high-school class (or at least a junior high-school one) than a first grade one. Then again, Rule of Funny. Sometimes he also makes it hard for himself. Case in point, the leaf project:
  Hobbes: Don't worry, Calvin, it's not that hard. You just need to collect three or four leaves a day.
  Calvin: I'm not working on weekends.
  Hobbes: All right, so you'll need five leaves a day.
  Calvin: And my weekdays are booked solid until Thursday 7:00 P.M.
  Hobbes: So you'll need 50 leaves an hour.
  Calvin: See? It's impossible!
• Filibuster Freefall: Downplayed. Although they were always present to a degree, the strips dedicated to lambasting consumerism, comic books, television, modern technology, mainstream culture, and modern art greatly increased in both number and transparency in the comic strip's later years. Perhaps not coincidentally, Watterson was getting increasingly exhausted and frustrated by the constant pressures of deadlines and dealing with his publishing syndication, including their continuous attempts to have him commercialize his work.
• Fille Fatale: A humorous variant occurs when Susie "charms" Hobbes into betraying Calvin during their water balloon fight. Hilarity Ensues. More generally, Hobbes's crush on Susie is the in-story explanation of why he never hurts her despite Calvin's urging, if you go for the Hobbes-is-real explanation. It also seems Calvin has a suppressed crush on her as well (which he may project onto Hobbes, if he's imaginary).
• Film Noir: Tracer Bullet's adventures are parodies of stock noir plots.
• Finger in the Mail: When Calvin captures Susie's doll, he threatens to do this.
• Filthy Fun: In one strip, Calvin and Hobbes are playing in the mud and Calvin calls themselves "asthetes". In another, Calvin sees a mud puddle and gets some on his face and fingers, all while saying, "Ewww" but smiling. In yet another strip, Calvin churns up the soil, soaks it with a hose, and then leaps into it, before coming home to his mom completely covered in mud and telling her "it couldn't be avoided".
• Fire of Comfort: A few winter strips have Calvin and Hobbes relaxing in front of the fireplace, although on more than one occasion it's been subverted for laughs, such as Calvin's dad filling the living room with smoke trying to get the fire to start, or Hobbes being startled by the sparks crackling.
  Calvin: (running with a fire extinguisher) Dad says there's nothing cozier than a fire, but I dunno...
• First-World Problems:
  • Calvin lives a very cushy life and rarely encounters any real problems. Despite this, Calvin causes trouble and slips into a fantasy world to escape dreaded boredom. Calvin chronically rants, whines, and complains about things that don't really matter, and is occasionally put into place by the other characters. For example, here, when Calvin yells at his dad about the toaster.
    Calvin: Look at what this dumb toaster did to my toast! It didn't cook it enough the FIRST time, so I pushed it down AGAIN and now ONE side's BURNED and the OTHER'S hardly singed! That toaster ruined my toast!
    Calvin's Dad: And yet... somehow... life goes on.
    Calvin: Beneath that larger perspective is a guy who doesn't want to spring for a new toaster.
  • Calvin has the same "it's just a first world problem" retort to people's overwrought reactions to his rather mild antics, "I haven't KILLED anybody. See, that's good, right? I haven't committed any felonies. I didn't start any wars. I don't practice cannibalism. Wouldn't you say that's pretty good?"
  • Hobbes was on this end once. While reading about world hunger, Calvin laments that some people never get enough to eat:
    Hobbes: Boy, I know what that's like...
    Calvin: No, you don't.
• Flexing Those Non-Biceps: Calvin is often drawn in this way, flexing his arms, and the upper arms are drawn with two parallel lines with no curvature whatsoever, for example on the cover of the Tenth Anniversary Book. All of the main characters are drawn like this unless camouflaged by Calvin's imagination.
• Floating in a Bubble: One strip has Calvin floating to the ceiling in one of these during a bath. It then pops, and his fall displaces the tub's water and fills the rest of the bathroom knee-high, to mom's confused consternation.
  Calvin: Oh no! Too much bubble bath!
• Flowery Elizabethan English: Calvin begins imagining people talking like this after being forced to watch some Shakespeare on TV.
  Calvin: Holy schla-moly, isn't there a cop show on where they talk like real people?
  Mom: Shh.
• Flowery Insults: Calvin randomly blurted out a hypothetical situation where someone would call him and Hobbes a "pair o' pathetic peripatetics".
  Hobbes: I've never heard of anybody taking the trouble to rhyme weird insults.
  Calvin: But shouldn't we have a ready retort?
• Fluffy Dry Cat: Happens to Hobbes after Calvin's mom throws him into the dryer and he comes out with his fur sticking up in every direction.
  Calvin: Goodness, you're a fright.
  Hobbes: Tell your mom to put some conditioner in the wash next time.
• Flushing Toilet, Screaming Shower: In a one-off sketch in one of the annual collections, Calvin's mom (dressed in towels and dripping wet) is once seen heading for Calvin with a furious look, while his hand is still on the water shutoff valve...
• Fly Crazy: In one strip, Calvin destroys the living room with a baseball bat trying to take out a fly. He's promptly hurled out the door by his mom.
  Calvin: Apparently I rate just below bugs with her!
  Hobbes: And she complains you don't help out around the house.
• Flying Car: In one Sunday comic, Calvin daydreams that his parents let him drive the family car. He then makes the car fly simply by driving so fast that the speedometer breaks and he achieves liftoff.
• Flying Saucer: Spaceman Spiff's spaceship is a little red saucer with a glass domed cockpit. Many aliens in Calvin's Imagine Spots also travel in saucer-shaped ships.
• Follow the Leader:invoked Two strips satirized this idea with Calvin's snowmen. Hobbes finds Calvin building a snowman. Not one of his usual grotesque snowmen, but a mundane snowman that a normal kid would make. Calvin says that he would only be successful if he stopped trying to be original and just copied what everyone else did. An earlier strip also had Hobbes praising Calvin putting his artistic integrity before marketability with his monstrous snow being, which prompts Calvin to just make a normal snowman.
• Food Eats You: The strip has had this at least once — or at least, Calvin getting into a fight with his food. This actually happens in one comic that features an Imagine Spot where Calvin's supper gobbles him up and spit up his skull, to the delight of his parents. Cut to Calvin accusing his mother of trying to kill him with her cooking.
• A Fool for a Client: Referenced in one strip: after Calvin nearly hits Susie with a snowball, he defends himself by saying "I didn't do it! I never threw that! You can't prove I threw it! Besides, I missed, didn't I?" Cut to Calvin face down in the snow after Susie clobbers him with him saying "The defendant petitions the court for a new trial on the grounds that his lawyer is incompetent" (with Calvin, of course, having been his own "lawyer").
• Fooled by the Sound: One arc has Susie stay at Calvin's house for the afternoon, to Calvin's horror (Susie isn't thrilled about it either). Calvin makes a recording of himself stuck in a closet, plays it to get Susie to go look, and slams the door on her. It doesn't last long as his mother comes to see what all the noise is.
• Footnote Fever: In one strip, Calvin writes a letter to Santa saying: "I have been extremely good* this year." Hobbes reads it and says: "Obviously, you're hoping Santa won't read the long, fine-print disclosure in the footnote," to which Calvin replies: "I got the idea from car ads."
• Footprints of Muck:
  • Crosses with A Lesson Learned Too Well in one strip:
    Calvin (on the doorstep): MOMM! HEY, MOM!
    Calvin's Mom: Calvin, stop yelling across the house! If you want to talk to me, walk over to the living room, where I am!
    Calvin (having walked there): I stepped in dog doo. Where's the hose?
  • A few strips have Calvin tracking mud in the house, such as one where he wanders through the halls trying to find his galoshes, or one where he's wearing his (clean) galoshes through the house, but his mom tells him not to walk with boots through the house. Calvin complies, takes them off, and then starts walking with his muddy shoes through the house instead.
    Calvin: Considering where my shoes have been, I thought she'd be happy.
• Forced into Their Sunday Best: This happens several times to Calvin, such as in one story arc where his dad wants to take some pictures of him for Christmas cards, but Calvin makes it harder by continuously making goofy faces. If he's not happy about it, nobody gets to be happy about it.
• Forced Meme: One strip has Calvin come up with own personal rallying cry, and settles on "So what?!"
  Hobbes: That's a tough cry to rally around.
  Calvin: SO WHAT?!
• Foreshadowing: The Duplicator arc opens with Calvin saying the Duplicator used to be the Transmogrifier, but the cardboard box is now on its side as opposed to being upside down. Eventually, the duplicates get out of hand and Calvin hides them from his mom underneath the box. While they're there, Hobbes realizes the box is in its Transmogrifier configuration and whispers to Calvin that they can get rid of the duplicates by turning them into something small.
• Forged Message:
  • Calvin attempts to leave school using a forged note (written on lined paper) signed by the President ("P.S.: Really."). Naturally, this fails.
    Calvin: I gotta learn how to write in cursive.
  • In a wintertime Sunday Strip, Hobbes delivers Calvin a letter apparently written by Santa Claus. It begins by calling Calvin a "rotten little kid" and tells him he has seven days to put himself back on the "good boy" list. Calvin, terrified, reads through the suggestion that he start by being kind to animals, giving them snacks and letting them read his comic books. However, his trust in the letter turns to incredulity and then rage when he sees that it's signed "Santa Claws," and he suddenly recognizes the handwriting as that of the tiger standing next to him all too smugly.
    Hobbes (sticking out his tongue): Well, it's what Santa would've written if he wasn't so busy now.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: The transmogrifier, transmogrifier gun, time machine and duplicator only made one or two appearances after their initial debuts, despite how they could easily get Calvin out of his many situations. The Cerebral Enhance-O-Tron never appeared again after its debut, as well.
  • Briefly averted in the case of the transmogrifier gun, which returns to resolve another, unrelated story arc involving a helium balloon and the Earth's upper atmosphere.
• Forgot to Pay the Bill: At one point, Calvin claims he didn't do his homework because his parents forgot to pay the gravity bill.
• Fork Fencing: Calvin magnificently won a fork duel with a greenish, seemingly gelatinous glob of something that was supposed to be food, before the thing cheated and used a spoon to run him off by lobbing pieces of itself at him. In his further defense, he was the one who said they should call out for pizza to begin with.
• Formally-Named Pet: Susie's stuffed rabbit Mr. Bun.
• Former Teen Rebel: Calvin's dad. ("Is this you with the keg and the "Party Naked" T-shirt?")
• Foul Cafeteria Food: Usually discussed by Calvin whenever he tries to gross Susie out at lunch. Played straight in a strip that depicts Calvin's cafeteria food as a gooey, revolting pile of tapioca that makes Calvin imagine it being a blob monster that eats Spaceman Spiff alive.
• Foul First Drink: A cigarette variation of this trope, where Calvin's mom allows him to smoke a cigarette his grandfather had left behind. Calvin promptly reacts horribly to the taste and starts gagging.
• Foul Medicine: In one strip, Calvin catches a cold on purpose by leaving the window open. His mother overhears him coughing and goes to get medicine for him, but he tries to claim that Hobbes is the one who coughed to get out of having to take the medicine. His mother doesn't buy it and stuffs a spoonful of it into his mouth while he's protesting, and he gags in disgust before lying to Hobbes that he liked it.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Everybody has these sorts of hands, although some early strips did inconsistently depict some character with five-fingered hands.
• Fourth-Wall Portrait: In very early strips, Calvin's imaginary excursions were often drawn in a cartoonish style basically the same as the main strip's art. Later on though, the artist experimented with different styles in different fantasy worlds. When Calvin played "house" or "doctor" with Susie, the art was in a style a lot like soap opera strips: normal human proportions, angular lines on characters, etc. The commentary in one Calvin and Hobbes collection revealed that it unintentionally showed Watterson's true talent. Whereas the usual Soap Opera Comic is drawn on a much larger paper and scaled-down, Watterson's parody of it was drawn at normal scale without losing any quality of detail.
• Fourth Wall Psych:
  • There is a strip drawn through the eyes of Hobbes. At the start, Calvin looks at the fourth wall and asks "Are you ready?", but is actually talking to Hobbes.
  • There's also the time he talks about a little boy living in an oppressed country who dreams of coming to America and learning about freedom. He says he wants to meet that little boy — and the camera cuts to reveal he's sitting at the dinner table with his family — "and tell him the awful truth about this place!" Dad tells him to pipe down and eat his lima beans.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In one Sunday strip, Calvin's Dad does this by his intention to read Calvin a bedtime story about a severed hand that strangles people. Calvin faints around the point Calvin's dad sticks a hand through the neck hole of his own shirt and grabs his own throat, screaming. This proves to be the most effective way of getting Calvin quiet and into bed.
• Fractured Fairy Tale:
  • Played with — Hobbes is a predatory animal and Calvin often sees things from a tiger's point of view, so inverting the ending makes it happier than they would have found the original version.
  • Calvin (and Hobbes) wrote their own called "Goldilocks and the Three Tigers and Calvin requested that his dad read it. His dad was disgusted by the story and quit halfway through, disappointing both Calvin (who lamented that his dad didn't even look at the illustrations) and Hobbes (who complaint was "Now I'm all hungry"). Ironically, that version of Little Red Riding Hood is actually closer to the original version that the standard version, seeing as there was no hunter in the original story, and the wolf just plain ate her in the end.
• Fratbro: Calvin's Dad used to be one.
  Calvin: Hey Dad, what does it mean to give something "the old college try"?
  Dad: It means you get all your friends together, grab some cheap beer and order a pizza, and forget about tomorrow.
  Mom: That's not what it means!
  Dad: (proudly) Well where did you go to college?
  Calvin: (walking away with a miffed look on his face) Never mind.
  • Another strip has Calvin finding his dad's college yearbook.
    Calvin: Is this you with the keg and the "Party naked" T-shirt?
    Dad: *snatches the book* Give me thaaat!
• Freak Out:
  • Calvin had one of these in school when he realized he was trapped inside during a beautiful day. Miss Wormwood was surprisingly sympathetic, advising Calvin to "take a drink of water and a few deep breaths" as she took him back to his seat, alluding to a previous strip that establishes Wormwood as someone who consumes copious amounts of cigarettes in order to get through the day as she eagerly awaits retirement. Perhaps she may relate to Calvin in a shared dislike of school.
  • When the family came home from vacation, Calvin was freaked out that Hobbes might have been taken from him.
  • On one occasion when Calvin learns that Roslyn is coming to babysit, he has one ("AAAAUUUUUGH!") that stretches out over all four panels of the strip, prompting his exasperated mom to shout, "For goodness sake, Calvin! Take a breath before you pass out on the floor!".
• Freedom from Choice: Calvin's dad goes on a rant about this as he's out shopping and grows increasingly frustrated with the fact that for every item he wants to buy there are countless meaningless options. The particular focus of his rant is potato chips. "What if I want less fat and less salt? What distinguishes 'Lite' from these others?" And don't even ask about the peanut butter. It's implied this isn't the first time he's done this.
• Free Prize at the Bottom:
  • One early strip has Calvin find a secret decoder ring toy in his cereal and tells Hobbes now they can use it to send secret messages to one another their parents won't be able to understand... not that they did normally anyway...
  • One story arc has Calvin get excited when his favorite cereal has a promotional giveaway for a beanie hat with a battery-powered propeller on top. Hilarity Ensues as Calvin endeavors to eat enough cereal to get all the box tops needed. And then he's disappointed when it finally arrives and he discovers that no, it doesn't enable him to fly.
• Free-Range Children: Many strips involve Calvin literally getting tossed outside by his parents and being told to spend the whole day outside (and out of their hair/away from the television). Several strips also show or mention him walking into town by himself. This was of course an expectation of kids growing up in the '80s before societal attitudes involving children's safety started to change during the '90s.
• Friendless Background:
  • Calvin's only real friend is Hobbes, who may or may not be imaginary, but either way only appears as an inanimate stuffed animal to everyone else. Calvin's neighbour and classmate Susie occasionally tries to make friends with him, but Calvin's attitude towards girls and generally Cloudcuckoolander habits means she has mixed results. Every other kid tends to think Calvin is either a weirdo or an idiot.
  • In one discussion between Calvin's mom and his uncle Max, she asks if he had any imaginary friends as a kid like Calvin, to which he says he thinks all of his friends have been imaginary (and not in the same way as Hobbes).
  • It's implied at multiple points that Susie has few, if any, real friends, since she repeatedly asks Calvin if he wants to play with her despite him acting obnoxious or throwing things at her nine out of ten times. Or at least, Calvin's the only other kid around her age that lives in their neighbourhood.
• Friendly Tickle Torture:
  • Calvin's mom tickles Calvin in hopes of tiring him out into falling asleep, the plan backfires and only hypes him up while she gets winded and falls asleep on the floor.
  • When Calvin is stuck hanging from a tree, Hobbes removes his shoes and tickles his feet. Unfortunately for Hobbes, this ends up making Calvin loose his grip and fall on him.
• Friendly War:
  • Calvin and Hobbes are often at each other's throats, but it's usually only in good fun.
  • The comic also gives us Calvin vs. Susie Derkins. After a shouting match, Calvin Breaks the fourth wall and says: "It's shameless the way we flirt!" Could be Belligerent Sexual Tension if they weren't 6 years old (Watterson has written that Calvin likely has a mild crush on Susie which he expresses by being obnoxious toward her.)
• Fridge Horror: Invoked. Calvin tells Rosalyn's boyfriend Charlie on two separate occasions that with her Hair-Trigger Temper and her unfair punishments against him, she would make a terrible mother later on in her life.
• Fridge Logic: In-Universe when Calvin decides that he doesn't want to inherit Earth because it's polluted and is leaving. Hobbes asks him: "Really? Where to?"
  Calvin: You know, sometimes you're a real load to have around."
• Fright-Induced Bunkmate: One Sunday strip has Calvin and Hobbes fighting over the blanket on a cold night, with Hobbes deciding to leave and take the sheets with him. Calvin chases after him, but Hobbes scares him witless by using the blanket to make himself into a Bedsheet Ghost. The next panel shows Hobbes enjoying Calvin's bed all by himself, while Calvin...
  Calvin's Dad: GAAAA! Somebody's feet are like ice!
  Calvin's Mom: Calvin had another nightmare.
  Calvin: If it's too crowded, you guys are welcome to sleep downstairs.
• From the Latin "Intro Ducere": Hobbes claims "numerator" is Latin for "number eighter" while trying to help Calvin with a math problem.
• From the Mouths of Babes: For a six-year-old, Calvin is surprisingly knowledgeable about adult culture (he once asked his mom "Why would it be worth four dollars a minute to talk on the telephone to goofy ladies who wear their underwear on TV commercials?" and referenced the "It's Miller Time" commercials,) and repeatedly lectures his father on economics and society.
• Frozen Body Fluids:
  • In one strip, Calvin steps outside into the snow, looks shocked, clutches his nose and says, "Don't you hate it when your boogers freeze?" In the 10th Anniversary Book, cartoonist Bill Watterson states his hope that a historian will confirm he's the first person to use the word "boogers" in a newspaper comic.
  • In another, Calvin discusses with Hobbes the possibility of a sneeze spontaneously freezing, giving him a 3-D model of his sneeze.^note A sneeze probably wouldn't freeze as one piece, since it creates a cloud of droplets rather than a connected fluid spray.
• Frozen Face: In one short arc, Calvin's mom tells him if he keeps making weird faces, it'll get stuck like that. Calvin, of course, thinks that would be great and keeps making an ugly face until Susie sarcastically asks if he got his head stuck in a blender and tells him that it's an improvement.
• Fun with Acronyms: G.R.O.S.S.: Get Rid Of Slimy girlS, Calvin's no girls allowed club.
  Susie: "Slimy girls"?!
  Calvin: I know it's redundant, but otherwise it doesn't spell anything.
• Fun with Flushing:
  • Calvin has an elaborate strip where he flushes a toy boat down the toilet (his dad is not amused after it clogs, with a hefty bill from a plumber to fix this).
  • In another one, he and Hobbes dip the dangling paper from the roll into the toilet and flush it.
  • At one point, Calvin himself gets into the toilet bowl, flushes himself around in circles, and then informs his mother that he'd finished his "bath."
  • There was also the time he threatened to flush Rosalyn's school notes. He didn't actually do it, but he did psych her out by flushing and pretending he did.
• Funny Answering Machine: Parodied (since Calvin's dad opposes actually getting an answering machine). Calvin once picked up the phone and said, "Hello, we are unable to come to the phone right now, so please leave a message at the sound of the 'click'." and hung up.
• Funny Background Event: The story arc where our heroes push the family car into a ditch has a strip like this. The first panel features Mom reading the newspaper with her back to the window, saying that she hasn't seen Calvin for about 15 minutes now. The second panel has the car rolling down the driveway as Mom sips her coffee. The third panel has our heroes chasing it frantically, again without Mom noticing. The final panel has her frown and say that means he's probably getting in trouble.
• Furry Reminder: As part of Hobbes' Anthropomorphic Zig-Zag, he'll occasionally be shown acting like an overgrown house cat as a gag, such as sleeping in the sun, chasing his tail, and reading National Geographic to ogle the attractive tigresses.
• Future Slang:
  • Spaceman Spiff uses "Zounds!" Despite its futuristic sound, this is a very old swear word (actually used quite a bit in Shakespeare) meaning "Christ's wounds!".
  • In one strip, Calvin tells his dad how he's noticed slang's tendency to evolve over time and announces his intention to use it as a way to deliberately make it harder for their two generations to communicate. Dad simply responds "Marvy. Fab. Far out."
• Fuzz Therapy: The Trope Namer. One time when Calvin was having a bad day, he sticks his face on Hobbes's stomach (who was sleeping at the time) and walks away in a better mood.
• The Gadfly: Calvin's dad. He's told Calvin that wind is caused by trees sneezing, that electricity is magic, that the world used to be black and white and changed to color in the 1930s (but photos were ''always'' in color), that Calvin came from a Blue Light special at Kmart, and that they were going to put the Christmas tree in the garage and not decorate it (and implied that Calvin wouldn't get a present). Most of these would result in him getting threatened by Calvin's mom, especially the Christmas one (after which he complains that the season gets less jolly every year.)
• Gag Haircut:
  • In one arc, Calvin complained that barbers never got his hair the way he wanted and thought it would be a good idea to let Hobbes cut his hair. As the haircut was progressing, it became clear that Hobbes was botching the job (though Watterson did not show the progression, drawing Calvin's head the same during the cutting and leaving the final result as a surprise). In the end, Calvin's hair looked like it had been cut short with a weed eater. Neither this nor an attempt to fix the cut by drawing the hair back on amused Calvin's mom.
  • In a later comic, Calvin showed up with a cowboy hat and a bushy mustache stuck on with tape. When Hobbes asked what he had used for the hair, Calvin took off the hat to reveal that he had cut off his bangs for the purpose.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Subverted in a strip where the duo come upon an area of forest that's been felled for a new apartment complex. Calvin expresses outrage on behalf of the animals that have been displaced, and caustically wonders "how people would like it if animals demolished their homes and planted new trees". Cut to Hobbes sitting in a bulldozer, stating that unfortunately the construction workers didn't leave the keys.
• Gainax Ending: In one story arc, Calvin apparently reverses gravity while in his bedroom (not) doing his homework, then he grows so big he outgrows the Milky Way. The story ends when Calvin ends up floating through a white void and finds a door that leads him back to his bedroom. Then his mom comes in and berates him for not doing his homework after so long.
• Gambit Pileup: In one strip, Calvin and Hobbes are playing football. The center [Calvin] is secretly a quarterback for the other team, after which Calvin breaks for the goal. Hobbes yells that Calvin is now going for his own goal because Hobbes switched the goals and his is hidden. Calvin says he doesn't need to, because as a traitor, crossing his own goal will count as crossing Hobbes's. But Hobbes hid his goal on top of Calvin's goal, so the points will go to Hobbes. But Calvin is really a double agent who is on Hobbes's team after all, meaning his team will lose points if Calvin crosses his goal. Then Hobbes is a traitor too, meaning he is really on Calvin's team, and the points will go to Calvin's team, which is really Hobbes's... then they toss the football aside and play Calvinball.
• Game Night Fight: Nearly every time Calvin and Hobbes play some kind of board game like checkers, Monopoly, or Scrabble, it ends up with Calvin instigating a fight because he's a Sore Loser, or because they making up new house rules.
• Game of Chicken:
  • Two passenger jets do this trying to land on the same runway in one of Calvin's toy-inspired fantasy sequences. Calvin's plane gains a decisive advantage by doing a barrel roll.
  • In another strip, Calvin asks his mom if he can learn how to skydive. His mother responds, "Why not just play chicken on the railroad tracks? That would be an easier way to toy with death, I'm sure."
• Gas Leak Cover Up: In one story arc where Calvin comes home from school after running out of his class, he tries to claim that the school let all of the children go home early because there was a gas leak and everyone was evacuated. His mother isn't fooled and calls the school.
• Gasoline Dousing: In one strip, Miss Wormwood turns into an alien and pours gasoline on Calvin after his homework spontaneously combusts. It turns out to be All Just a Dream.
• Gave Up Too Soon: In one story arc, the family goes on a camping trip, only for it to rain the whole time. Finally, Calvin's father has enough and cuts their trip short. The moment they start packing, the rain stops and Calvin is asking Hobbes what the words his dad was yelling meant.
• Generation Xerox: Calvin's mom was apparently just as wild as he is when she was his age (according to his grandmother,) and his father clearly has a highly active imagination in his own right, and the same inclination to mess with heads, based on his parental trolling.
• Gentle Giant Sauropod: In one Sunday strip, Calvin has an Imagine Spot encountering a herd of Apatosaurus right outside his house, and one of the sauropods gives him a ride on his head. The first time the pair use the time machine, they encounter a giant sauropod, but in retrospect, Calvin says they had nothing to fear because it wasn't a carnivore. Subverted in another strip where he imagines himself as an Allosaurus being intimidated by Moe as an Ultrasaurus.
• Gentle Touch vs. Firm Hand: Just about everyone takes the old-fashioned disciplinarian approach to Calvin, admittedly not without reason, making it quite the surprise when Rosalyn finds a way to get Calvin to behave by simply agreeing to play his games.
• Getting Sick Deliberately: In one strip, Calvin remembers that there's a test in school he didn't study for, so he opens the window so that he'll catch a cold. He regrets it when his mom forces him to take the nasty-tasting cough medicine.
• Ghibli Hills: Calvin's backyard opens up into a gigantic pristine forest that Watterson compares to a national park. This serves as a backdrop for wagon strips, sledding strips, snow sculpture strips, and many strips simply have Calvin and Hobbes carrying a conversation while going for a walk through the forest without any other people around.
• The Ghost:
  • Calvin's grandparents are mentioned a few times, but never appear. From what little is known, they're apparently nearly, if not just as eccentric and snarky as Calvin and his parents.
  • Rosalyn's boyfriend Charlie, who is often calling Rosalyn while she is busy babysitting Calvin, although twice Calvin attempted to break them up over the phone. Of course, Charlie's non-presence is justified, since he has no real relevance to Calvin.
  • Susie's father is mentioned one time, but unlike her mother, who at least had a speaking role and physically appeared (from the knees down) in a strip, he didn't even get that much presence.
• Ghost in the Machine: Several strips depict the inner workings of Calvin's mind and body as being operated by a bunch of miniature doppelgängers.
• Ghost Story: Done in a couple of strips, like when Calvin tells one to Hobbes, only for both to freak out when their father comes out to see them, as they believe him to be the monster mentioned in the story.
• Giant Footprint Reveal: "Spaceman Spiff◊" exploring an alien landscape. Spiff is flying over some suspiciously formed canyons until it hits him that these are giant footprints so he hits the thrusters to get away.
• Giant Wall of Watery Doom: Done as an Imagine Spot in a Sunday strip, where the coastal city of Stupidopolis is wiped out by a gargantuan tsunami. In reality, Calvin was just building his sand castles really close to the waterline at the beach, just to watch them get wiped out.
• Gilligan Cut:
  • Happens often, especially when Calvin refuses to take a bath. The next panel will have him in the bathtub complaining.
  • This moist and delicious cookie for the win:
    Calvin's Mom: Time for your bath, Calvin.
    Calvin: Sorry, I'm in denial about baths.
    (cut to shot of Calvin in the bathtub)
    Calvin's Mom: Fine. Go ahead and deny it.
    Calvin: No one respects my denial.
  • There was also this memorable exchange:
    Calvin: I don't think I'll go to school today.
    Calvin's Mom: I think you will.
    Calvin: I think I won't.
    [cut to Calvin grudgingly waiting at the bus stop]
    Calvin: Rats.
  • Another very similar exchange occurs in a different strip:
    Calvin's Mom: C'mon, Calvin! This is the third time I've called you. Get up.
    Calvin: I don't want to get up. I don't want to go to school.
    Calvin's Mom: Well, you have to, whether you want to or not, so let's move.
    Calvin: For your information, I don't have to do anything i don't want to do.
    Calvin's Mom: Is that so?
    [cut to Calvin standing on the sidewalk waiting for the bus]
    Calvin: She sure can make someone want to do something.
• Girls Have Cooties: Why Calvin founds G.R.O.S.S. While he's verbose enough to come across as a He-Man Woman Hater, it's clear from the rest of the series that he's just acting on his six-year-old ignorance.
• Glad I Thought of It: The very last multi-day storyline involves Galaxoid and Nebular, two aliens whom Calvin sold the Earth to, complaining about the cold Earth winter and demanding Calvin do something about it. Hobbes removes their Christmas stockings from the fireplace and gives them to the aliens, to which Calvin vehemently protests, since now "Santa can't fill 'em with loot!" Hobbes reassures him that Santa knows they did a nice thing and will work something out, to which Calvin replies, "Hey yeah, I did something good!"
• Global Ignorance:
  • While waiting for the school bus, Calvin says that instead of going to school, he could hitch a ride to the Serengeti and spend the rest of his life migrating with the wildebeests. Hobbes informs him that the Serengeti is in Africa, so he couldn't really hitch a ride there. Calvin is very disappointed.
  • Likewise, the "Yukon Ho!" arc, in which Calvin attempts to hike to the Yukon, and seems to anticipate it taking no longer than a couple hours. Regardless of where exactly in the USA he lives, this is a patently ridiculous suggestion - unless he lives in Alaska, which it's pretty clear he doesn't.
  • In another story arc, Calvin and Hobbes decide to go to the North Pole to plead a case for Calvin's total innocence any time he's been naughty. They seem to think it's possible to walk there from the continental United States, and in only a few hours at that, although they never find out it's not because Calvin almost instantly gets distracted trying to throw snowballs at Susie.
  • In one story arc where Calvin accidentally pushes the family's car into a ditch, he and Hobbes decide to run away from home rather than face his parents' wrath. After fleeing for what is an hour or two at most, Calvin thinks they've definitely entered another state by now. The fact his mom manages to quickly find him indicates he barely even made it out of his backyard.
• The Glomp: It's a Running Gag that Hobbes (in Calvin's eyes, a six-foot tiger) always pounces on Calvin the moment he sets foot through the door after school. Mostly used for comedy, but one strip shows Calvin silently suffering through a terrible day, only for his mood to pick up when Hobbes pounces and very gleefully glomps him.
• God of Evil:
  • Calvin himself, in one of his fantasies.
    ...But Calvin is no kind and loving god! He's one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice! [...] Yes, Calvin is a god of the underworld! And the puny inhabitants of earth displease him! The great Calvin ignores their pleas for mercy and the doomed writhe in agony!
  • Another strip has Spaceman Spiff about to be sacrificed to the evil god "Nollij" (in this case, Calvin getting called to the blackboard).
• Godwin's Law:
  • In one strip, Rosalyn orders Calvin to go to his room, only to receive a fascist salute and "Jawohl, mein Führer!" in reply. She is not pleased.
  • In another, Calvin's mom tells him that no, he will not be spending the afternoon at the comic book store as he announced. "And you can stop goose-stepping around the house!"
• Going Commando: "The Valiant Spaceman Spiff is led by his captors to a secret dungeon to be debriefed! Little do they realize that our hero doesn't WEAR briefs!"
• Gone Horribly Right: In order to avoid doing his chores, Calvin clones himself using the newly-invented Duplicator. He succeeds in creating a perfect clone... who of course outright refuses to do the chores as well. Hilarity Ensues.
  Hobbes: He's a duplicate of you, all right.
  Calvin: What are you talking about? This guy is a complete jerk!
  • Calvin's attempts to get out of writing a story for school by traveling into the future and picking it up from there. The scheme only succeeds because the future and present-day Hobbeses team up to write the story themselves...and make the story about how Calvin tried to get out of writing the story through his time-traveling shenanigans, portraying him as a complete idiot. Calvin managed to avoid doing his homework and even got a good grade for it, but became a laughingstock when he read it aloud to the class.
  • In the second clone storyline, Calvin makes a clone of simply his good side. The good version of Calvin does indeed do all the chores cheerfully and gets excellent grades — unfortunately, he also writes poetry and makes Valentine cards for Susie. Again, the original Calvin has to face the consequences.
  • The Snow Goons story. Calvin built a snowman with the intent to bring it to life. He succeeded... and it immediately tried to kill him.
• Gone Horribly Wrong:
  • Calvin once asked Hobbes to touch up a part of his haircut he didn't like. The end result was Hobbes shaving Calvin bald in his efforts to cover up his mistakes.
  • Once, Calvin tried to fix a leaky bathroom sink by himself. Rather predictably, as a six-year old with no plumbing skills, he causes a huge mess that floods bathroom.
• Good-Times Montage: Done in two different Sunday strips, which consisted of a montage of the titular duo engaging in various summer fun activities, only for Calvin's mom to interrupt, either to drag him in for bed or tell him to take out the garbage.
  Calvin: Summer days are supposed to be longer, but they sure seem short to me.
  Hobbes: I'll say. We didn't get to do half our itinerary.
• Goofy Print Underwear: Calvin has lucky rocket ship briefs, which often do not improve his luck. He also has several pairs of underwear printed with cartoon animals.
• Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death: Parodied. Pick a movie Calvin wants to see. Any movie. Samples include Attack of the Co-Ed Cannibals, The Cuisinart Murder of Central High, and Vampire Sorority Babes.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Played for Laughs in various cartoonish cases, such as one with Calvin's attempt at William Telling with a snowman ("Ahhhh! He flinched!"), or several of the strips where Calvin is beaten up by Hobbes, cutting from the initial pounce to Calvin in a mangled lump.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: "Gosh, I've never been a vandal before!" Calvin once noted that "I'm only civil because I don't know any swear words."
• Got Me Doing It: As far as everyone besides Calvin is concerned, Hobbes is Calvin's stuffed toy. However, on two occasions Calvin's mom finds herself treating Hobbes like a person, such as calling out to him while looking for the tiger in the woods with Calvin's dad. ("I may be crazy, but I'm not as crazy as you.") and discussing the sick raccoon Calvin found. "...You can tell I'm upset when I start talking to you."
• Go to Your Room!: If Calvin isn't kicked outside or spanked, he'll be sent to his room as punishment whenever he causes trouble (which is very often).
• Go, Ye Heroes, Go and Die: Calvin would commonly say speeches like this before preparing to go sledding off some huge tree-covered hill. Hobbes would usually wisely ditch the sled soon afterward.
  Calvin: Here we are, poised on the precipice of "Suicide Slope." Below us lie the skeletal remains of hundreds of little sled riders. Searching for that ultimate adrenalin rush, we prepare to hurl ourselves over the brink! What fate awaits us? (turns to Hobbes) Ready?
  Hobbes: No.
  Calvin: Life and death hang in the balance! A fraction of a second and one wrong turn are all that separate them!
  Hobbes: This isn't helping.
• The Graph Shows the Trend: Calvin consistently presents these to his father, informing him that his "approval rating" is going down, and he'll need to let him sleep late or let him watch more TV if he wants out of the red. Of course, the only people in the house who take part in these "approval ratings" are Calvin himself and sometimes Hobbes...
• Gratuitous German:
  Calvin: People always make the mistake of thinking that art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves for their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.
  Hobbes: You misspelled "Weltanschauung."
• Gravity Is a Harsh Seamstress: In a more intentional version, Calvin fantasizes about a machine that would ready him for bed. To get him into his pajamas, it drops him head-first into his shirt, then flips him so he falls legs-first into his pants, all in one fluid arrangement. He apparently doesn't think about that last part too hard...
• Gravity Screw:
  • In one early strip, Calvin tells his teacher he couldn't do his homework because his parents forgot to play the gravity bill.
  • Another one-off strip had an Imagine Spot where the gravity in the house stopped working, allowing Calvin to walk on any surface. The last panel shows it was a Literal Metaphor of Calvin's mom telling Calvin he was "bouncing off the walls".
  • One longer story arc began with Calvin's gravity suddenly reversing as he was doing his homework, trapping him on the ceiling.
• Great White Hunter: Calvin had a one-shot imaginary personality named Safari Al who was this trope. He got captured by a gorilla (his mom) inquiring why his room hadn't been cleaned.
• Green Aesop: Probably the most of any newspaper comic. Some are good, and actually quite funny, but others (mostly from the later run of the strip) descend to almost FernGully / Captain Planet levels (see the Anvilicious entry on the YMMV page.)
  • The best such story arc started with Calvin and Hobbes surprised and enraged to learn that part of the forest they love to play in is in the process of being razed to be the site of "Shady Acres Condos." It gave us the wonderful Hobbes quote, "The only shade I see is from that bulldozer" and Calvin crying "Animals can't afford condos!" Another gem is when Calvin asks how humans would feel if animals bulldozed the condos to put in new trees... cut to Hobbes in the bulldozer, saying it's no good, as the driver didn't leave the keys.
  • Another famous line; while looking at a pile of garbage in the forest, Calvin sadly says: "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
  • Another iconic strip involves the duo encountering litter in the middle of the woods. After Calvin rails about the pointlessness of this kind of waste, Hobbes quips, "Sometimes it's a matter of personal pride not to be human." After a moment's thought, Calvin takes off his clothes, saying "I'm with you." This then leads to a second aesop when they find out tigers are an endangered species, with Calvin reflecting sadly that he's better off human after all. Hobbes on the other hand notes this may be why he doesn't meet many tigresses.
  • The entire trip to Mars was an environmental analogue, with Calvin and Hobbes choosing to remain on Earth and accept responsibility for pollution there rather than polluting Mars too.
  • In one Sunday strip, Calvin writes a poem about aliens who steal the Earth's water and air for their own planet, not because they're actively malicious, but because they prefer the extinction of humanity to the loss of their jobs. Calvin asks Hobbes if it sounds too unrealistic, but Hobbes thinks it's too realistic.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Most nobody in the strip is completely good or bad. Calvin is a bratty child who enjoys ruining people's days. Hobbes, despite being Calvin's best friend, constantly torments him, says rude things just to annoy him, and makes snarky comments. On the other hand, most of Calvin's other antagonists, such as Susie, Rosalyn, and Miss Wormwood, are just reacting out of Calvin bothering them. The only character shown without any redeemable traits is Moe, not counting imaginary foes like the bike or the monsters under Calvin's bed.
• Gretzky Has the Ball: This comes up every single time the two main characters play a sport, due to them not understanding the actual rules or because following rules bores Calvin to tears. Author commentary has stated this is because he doesn't understand the appeal of organized sports, so he lampoons the absurdity of such sports in the strip. This is also shown inversely when Calvin is peer pressured into playing baseball with actual teams and rules. He has a miserable experience, hates it, and winds up quitting.
  • It's a Running Gag with the two titular characters never understanding even the basic rules to any game they play. They once played a game of baseball with over thirty bases, randomly strewn about through their neighborhood. A game of football had them fighting, scratching and punching each other for the football, dragging themselves towards the end zone after the play was clearly dead. They even once played a game of Monopoly where Calvin tried to rob the bank when he couldn't pay, prompting the usual fight. All of this was their motivation for creating Calvinball, a game whose only permanent rule is "you can't play the same way twice."
  • When Calvin is teased into playing baseball at school, he says "Suppose they make me a halfback. Can I tackle the shortstop or not?"
  • When Calvin and Hobbes aren't playing Calvinball, they'll be making a mockery of any actual sport they try, usually baseball but also football, croquet and golf. As the boy himself puts it: "Our favourite games are ones we don't understand!" And sometimes, it's deliberate. Part of the humour is their attempt to play team sports with only two people, which has prompted arguments with each other on which team the other was on at the moment.
    Calvin: If you don't want to play with old geezers, you have to make golf a contact sport!
• Grilling Pyrotechnics: Calvin once tried to talk his dad into invoking this. Natch, he concludes that he has the most boring dad in the world.
• Grimmification:
  • In one strip, Calvin's dad gives Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie this treatment after being forced to read it to Calvin one time too many. We don't get to hear either version, but Calvin and Hobbes are too scared to sleep afterwards.
    Calvin: Wow. The story was different that time!
    Hobbes: Do you think the townsfolk will ever find Hamster Huey's head?
  • Even more of an example is a version of the tale of "Goldilocks and the Three Tigers" which Calvin claims that Hobbes wrote himself. Calvin's dad refuses to continue reading and bids him a quick "good night" at the point where the tigers divided Goldilocks into big, medium, and small pieces and dipped them in the porridge. "He didn't even look at our illustrations," Calvin complains.
• Grossout Fakeout: In one strip, Calvin pranks Susie by stuffing pasta up his shirt, then lifting his shirt and pretending it's his intestines spilling out.
• Gross Gum Gag:
  • Calvin reaches into his school desk, and winds up with a sticky, blobby mess covering both his hands. He complains that he can't tell where his old chewing gum ends and his Silly Putty begins.
  • Another strip has Calvin's teacher catch him chewing gum in class. She sarcastically asks him if he has enough to share with the rest of the class, prompting Calvin to spit up a huge wad of chewed up gum into his hands.
    Calvin: Probably, but do you really think they'd want it??
• Guilt-Induced Nightmare: In one story arc, Calvin dreams about doing some schoolwork. His answers to jump off his paper and his paper suddenly bursts into flames. Miss Wormwood then turns into an alien and sets him alight with a jerrycan. This dream gets Calvin to remember that he forgot to do his homework.
• Guns Are Worthless: You can probably count the number of times that Spiff's "Death Ray Blaster" ^note Really toys. wasn't useless against an enemy on one hand.
• Gym Class Hell: Calvin hates gym class and for good reason, since Moe uses it as an excuse to beat the snot of him without retribution, because, according to Calvin, their gym teacher thinks violence is "aerobic".
  Moe: You're gonna taste asphalt fifth period, Twinky. Just so you know.
  Calvin: Great. I'm dead. Fifth period-"studies in contemporary state sponsored terrorism". ...also known as gym class.
• HA HA HA—No:
  • In one strip, Calvin desperately begs his mom to hire a different babysitter instead of Rosalyn. She had already tried to do just that (presumably to avoid the high fees Rosalyn commands by being the only babysitter who will accept the job):
    Calvin's Mom: You remember Amy? She just laughed when I called her.
  • In another, Calvin's parents pull it on each other for suggesting leaving Calvin unsupervised for a few hours. They end up doing so anyway and eventually regret it when they come back.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: It doesn't take much for Calvin to get on Rosalyn's nerves. In one strip, he gets sent to bed early just for firing two Nerf darts at her and in another, the mere mention of how he threatened to flush her science notes is enough to get him into trouble.
• Halfway Plot Switch: A few story arcs did this...
  • The "Yukon Ho" story arc from 1987 started out with Calvin and Hobbes attempting to secede from the family and strike out for the Yukon. But a while into the journey they fight, and Calvin heads back for home leaving Hobbes on his own. Then when it gets dark, Calvin realizes Hobbes is still out there and sets out to find him, and the plot is now about trying to find Hobbes in the woods.
  • A spring 1989 story arc had Calvin and his parents go to a wedding, accidentally leaving Hobbes behind due to Calvin putting up a fuss about going, which Calvin keeps complaining about. When they return the next day, they find that their house was robbed, and the mood and plot suddenly changes, with the parents shaken up badly by the break-in, though once Calvin finds Hobbes (he was under the bed covers), he finds the whole robbery exciting... until he learns the television was stolen.
  • The story arc after that (and the longest in the strip's run) had Calvin and Hobbes setting up their secret club G.R.O.S.S., but then when they decide to use the garage for their clubhouse, an attempt to push Calvin's mom's car out accidentally sends it rolling into ditch, and then Calvin and Hobbes attempt to run away from home after what they did to avoid getting in trouble.
  • In a late 1989 story arc, Calvin is trying to do his homework when gravity reverses, causing him to get stuck on the ceiling. Just after everything reverts to normal (halfway into the arc), he starts to grow bigger and bigger until he falls off the Milky Way Galaxy. As he puts it, "this has been a very peculiar afternoon." The 10th anniversary book has Watterson admitting that the story was "weird for weirdness' sake".
• Halloween Costume Characterization:
  • Discussed in one strip where Calvin defines a Halloween costume as the scariest thing you can think of. Proud tiger Hobbes thinks the scariest thing is himself, while Calvin, the cynically gruesome child with frequent concerns about what humans do to the planet, says his costume will be a barrel of toxic waste.
  • Double subverted in another Halloween strip where Calvin appears to not be wearing a costume, but claims he's going as "another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet" who will take over the world once the adults die out. This "costume" demonstrates his cynical but egocentric philosophy.
• Happily Married: Calvin's parents. Most of the time, anyway...
  Mom: It's your fault we don't have a sweet little girl! Your stupid chromosome! NOT MINE!
  Dad: (thinking) ...I just live here...
• Hardboiled Detective: Calvin's imaginary alter-ego, Tracer Bullet, is an Affectionate Parody of the Film Noir detective.
  "I keep two magnums in my desk. One's a gun, and I keep it loaded. The other's a bottle, and it keeps me loaded. I'm Tracer Bullet. I'm a professional snoop."
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • Life Isn't Fair. You do better when you accept you have no control over a situation than trying to micromanage everything. Calvin notes constantly that he has little control over his life — how much television he can watch, when bedtime is, why he has to go to school — but because he chafes at everything, he makes things harder. Hobbes even lampshades this at several points that Calvin would be happier if he just tried to be good once in a while. The simple fact is that Calvin is too young to make decisions for himself, so he needs his parents and teachers to do it for him both for his safety and his health, no matter how much it frustrates him to have no real say in his own life.
  • As Miss Wormwood once tells Calvin, you only do well in school if you apply yourself to evaluate the education in question. That means sucking it up when assigned boring, difficult, or complicated assignments. Calvin makes a face in response, but she's right.
  • There are no shortcuts. Every time Calvin tries to find a lazy way to solve a problem, it backfires on him. While this happens in school — he blows off a report about bats, a leaf collection, or a bug display— there are cases when he suffers this at home. Case in point: the duplicate arc where Calvin's clones only got him in trouble rather than doing homework and chores for him.
• Harmless Liquefaction:
  • One of Calvin's Imagine Spots involves it being so hot outside that he melts, leaving only his clothes behind. His melted remains then evaporate and then rain, restoring him to solid form, and a now naked Calvin runs off. The strip ends with Calvin's mother picking up his clothes off the sidewalk while muttering, "Not again!"
  • In another Imagine Spot, Calvin imagines drinking one glass of water too many, so that his body becomes 90% water and melts.
• Hates Baths: Calvin. It's an endeavour every time for Calvin's mom to get him into the bath, and even when he gets in the bath, there's a high chance he'll cause some disaster like pouring ink in the water, clogging the drain, or flooding the bathroom.
• Hating on Monday: While Calvin never directly complains about Mondays per se, he does say that he can never enjoy Sundays because, in the back of his mind, he knows he'd have to go to school the next day. "It's like trying to enjoy your last meal before execution."
• Hat of Authority:
  • When they attempt a venture to the Yukon, Calvin claims leadership by dint of his snazzy commander helmet. Hobbes decides to remedy this and takes the helmet, whereupon Calvin declares mutiny and storms off.
  • An iffy case is the duo's wearing of paper hats during meetings of club G.R.O.S.S. Because they're the only members the hats don't have unique significance, but are said to represent their holding various titles within the club.
• Hat of Flight: Calvin orders a propeller beanie expecting that it will allow him to fly. There is an Imagine Spot of him flying with it. He is quite disappointed when he gets it and finds out it doesn't actually enable flight.
  Calvin: Well, how does it look?
  Hobbes: Adjectives fail me.
  Calvin: I'm turning it on. Ready? Here goes. [Beat] I don't seem to be lifting off. This is very peculiar.
  Hobbes: That's the word I was looking for.
• Height Angst:
  • In one strip, Hobbes asks Calvin why he always wears long pants in the summer instead of shorts. Calvin instantly gets absolutely furious, to Hobbes' confusion, until Calvin shouts incredulously that he's so short that shorts are like long pants to him.
  • In another strip, Calvin realizes he only comes up to his parents' knees, so he goes outside and builds a teeny snowman for him to mock.
• Held Back in School: Calvin is often in danger of this due to his poor grades (although since Status Quo Is God, he never moves up a grade either way), but two examples especially stand out.
  • In one strip, Calvin's dad finds him not doing his schoolwork, and Calvin claims to be visualizing it. Calvin's dad then tells him to imagine being the only 40-year-old in first grade.
  • A variant comes up in another strip. Calvin says that he doesn't feel like going to school for most of the year for various reasons and concludes that there would be only two days per year he'd feel like attending. They discuss what it would be like if Calvin got his way and only had to attend for those two days, and Hobbes concludes that Calvin would be a very old man by the time he got to second grade.
• Hell of a Heaven:
  • In one strip, Calvin wonders if there are tigers in heaven, since it would be impossible to be happy if one was constantly under threat of a tiger attack, but heaven would be bland if there were no tigers at all. Finally, he guesses that maybe tigers just don't eat people in heaven, but Hobbes complains that the tigers wouldn't be happy.
  • Calvin wonders that if he managed to get into heaven (by suppressing his "true dark nature"), would he be allowed to do bad things in a place where only good is allowed because those are his true desires? Hobbes already doubts Calvin would be able to act good enough to get into heaven to begin with.
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment: After a fight over the Transmogrifier Gun, it stops working, and Calvin is stuck as an owl. Calvin's reaction comes after Hobbes comments that owls never go to school. (This doesn't last though, because when he is relieved to return to his normal self in the next strip, he realizes that now he has to get ready for school again.)
• Helpless with Laughter: In one strip, Calvin steals his dad's glasses so he can mimic him - complete with slicked-down hair and a line about how Misery Builds Character; the final panel of this strip reveals that Calvin's mom has slid out of her chair and is practically lying on the floor, howling with laughter.
• Helping Hands: One Sunday strip has Calvin's dad about to read him a bedtime story about "the Disembodied Hand That Strangled People". He ends up frightening Calvin and making him faint when he sticks his own hand through his sweater and pretends the hand has caught him.
  Calvin's Dad: I should've thought of that years ago.
• Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": Calvin's many alter-egos. They're generally far more adventurous and successful than he ever is, although how successful they are is mostly theoretical, since they reflect his own reality. Stupendous Man has never actually done anything remotely heroic and Spaceman Spiff, described as an intrepid explorer, is about to be killed in every single one of his "adventures".
• Here We Go Again!: In one G.R.O.S.S. meeting, Calvin puts Hobbes on trial for "an undisparaging comment about the possible membership of Susie Derkins". This leads to a massive argument and fight, but they eventually agree to truce. Calvin wishes they had more members, which leads to Hobbes saying they should let Susie join.
• Hero Antagonist: Just about every single character other than Calvin has their moments because Calvin is always the one who starts causing trouble to begin with (and Calvin always sees the other party as being the bad guy). Only Moe is a straight-up villain.
• Hey, Catch!: One Sunday strip involves Calvin bragging about how he has three water balloons, and Hobbes has only one. Hobbes' response is this trope, and Calvin loses his hold on all four, resulting in him being soaked by all of them.
• Hey, You!: Hobbes almost never refers to Calvin directly by name.
• Hiccup Hijinks: Drinking from the far end of a glass and eating spoonfuls of sugar didn't help. After they finally went away, Hobbes pounced on him in an attempt to cure them... and ended up bringing them back even worse.
• Hide and No Seek: One strip had Hobbes counting as the "it" for hide-and-seek. The strip cuts to Calvin hiding behind a barrel, but after a while, Hobbes never shows up. Calvin gets suspicious and runs up to his room, where he catches Hobbes reading his comic books.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: One Running Gag was Calvin's absolute hatred of taking baths. He would frequently hide in increasingly bizarre places, such as up the chimney, inside a vacuum cleaner bag, or on the roof just outside the window of his bedroom, to avoid them. However, in one instance, he decided to hide in a spot he knew his mother would never think to look for him—inside the (empty) bathtub itself.
• High-School Sweethearts: Calvin's mom and dad. According to one strip they were prom dates.
• Hilarity in Zoos: In one story arc, Calvin's family goes to the zoo and he gets lost. Surprisingly, not much actually happens beside that, in fact the reader never sees a single zoo animal, although Dad does run a little faster looking for Calvin when he imagines Calvin going into the tiger pit because he likes them so much.
• Historical In-Joke: John Calvin established the republic of Geneva, a strict religious society that still affected the childhood of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was born in the town. When grown up, he wrote his Contrat Social, inspired by Leviathan, the work of Thomas Hobbes. Rousseau also wrote Emile, a thesis on the upbringing of children, claiming that a child should have as much freedom as possible. Cue our titular character (like his namesake, he also believes in predestination-more specifically that he's destined for great things and everything revolves around him).
• Historical Longevity Joke: Calvin once asked his dad if dinosaurs were around when he was young. His dad confirms it before his mother tells him Calvin's grades are already bad enough.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Watterson torpedoed his own efforts to get rid of illegal merchandise by not allowing any legitimate products in the first place (i.e., if his relationship with his syndicate had not been so adversarial, Watterson could have called on the resources of a mighty corporate legal department to crack down on those Calvin-peeing-on-things stickers.)
  • Watterson revealed in one of the anthologies that after winning the right to lay out his Sunday strips however he wanted, he discovered that crafting the new, more artistic strips took several times longer than the old, formulaic ones.
  • In-universe: Calvin saves a snowball from winter in the freezer in order to throw it at Susie in June. Guess who ends up being hit by the snowball.
  • Another in-universe example: Calvin and Hobbes are going to have a water balloon fight. Calvin starts filling balloons, but he keeps messing them up and splashing water on himself. Hobbes comes over and decides that there's no point in throwing his balloon because Calvin is soaked from head to toe already.
  • Calvin ties a water balloon to a rope so that if he misses a throw, it'll swing back around and give him a second shot. He tries it on Susie, misses, and then Susie catches the water balloon as it swings back around, throwing it at Calvin.
• Holding in Laughter:
  • In one strip, Calvin tries writing a letter to Santa, with Hobbes reading over his shoulder. Calvin gets as far as "Dear Santa, Hi, it's me, Calvin. This year I've been extra good, so..." when Hobbes makes a "PBTBT" noise and slaps his hand/paw over his mouth and snorts. Calvin suggests with a scowl that maybe Hobbes needs a drink of water.
  • In one strip, Calvin's father tells Calvin to be quiet while he's in the car. Hobbes and Calvin then start making funny faces at each other and let out stifled giggles until Calvin's father screams at Calvin to knock it off.
• Hollywood Board Games: In "Scrabbled Arithmetic", Calvin sucking at maths and tendency to cheat show when he pulls a Scrabble Babble, claims is a double word score, and calculates that it's worth an insane amount of points. Calvin's competitive streak also rears its ugly head when he drops a Precision F-Strike after learning the word "BE" only awards him two points.
• Hollywood Genetics: Calvin's mom has brown hair and Calvin's dad has black hair (his dad's brother Max also has black hair), but Calvin somehow has blond hair. It's not impossible if both his parents were recessive carriers, but it's still fairly unlikely. Some kids at first also have light hair before it darkens.
• Hollywood Mid-Life Crisis: In one Sunday comic, Calvin's dad thinks long and hard about how short life is, and how much time he spends working at a job that he doesn't like at all. He tells his wife that he's thinking of quitting his job and biking full-time. She replies by sarcastically asking if she should ask the bike shop if they'd be interested in sponsoring his mid-life crisis.
• Hollywood Prehistory: Some of Calvin's earlier dinosaur fantasies take place in this sort of imaginary setting, where tyrannosaurs coexist with cavemen and sabre-toothed cats in a generic prehistoric jungle landscape. These got phased out after Watterson did some more research on dinosaurs.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Discussed In-Universe in the baseball team arc. Calvin complains to Susie at the bus stop about how lucky she is to be a girl and not be expected to play sports, to which she comments, "On the other hand, boys aren't expected to spend their life 20 pounds underweight."
• "Home Alone" Antics: One strip has Calvin's parents come home to find a house full of booby traps, because Calvin watched a scary movie while they were out and then rigged up defenses against a monster attack. Amusingly, this strip predates the Trope Namer by four years.
• Hong Kong Dub: Referenced in one Sunday strip where Calvin is watching a translated kaiju movie on television.
  Calvin: I wonder why Japanese people keep moving their mouths after they're through talking.
• Horrible Camping Trip: Calvin and his family's camping trips have a tendency to go wrong.
  • In the first depicted camping trip, it begins raining as soon as the family arrives at the campsite and doesn't clear up until Calvin's dad starts packing up to go home. During the drive back, Calvin's mom comments that "any judge would take this trip as grounds for divorce."
  • The one where they go camping on an island gets off to a bad start when Calvin drops a bag of very expensive equipment in ten feet of very cold water and his dad accidentally stacks a tackle box and bags on his glasses, which he'd taken off to dive for the dropped bag. This leaves Calvin's dad in a bad mood for the duration of the trip; Calvin decides not to tell him he left the car headlights on back at the canoe rental place.
  • The third trip takes a lot of convincing to get Calvin and his mom to go along, and once there the two of them are utterly fed up with the mosquito bites, lack of modern conveniences, and not having anything to do. Calvin's dad eventually decides to end the trip early.
• Horrorscope: There's a story arc involving horoscopes. While the first horoscope he reads, "Many of your key policies will be implemented" isn't bad (even though it doesn't come true), his second one, "Opposite sex finds you irresistible" is very much a Horrorscope. (That one doesn't come true either.)
• Hostile Weather: One Spaceman Spiff strip had him crash landing on a planet which rained sodium hydroxide, a highly caustic alkali. The downpour causes a flood which traps Spiff on a rock to avoid having his flesh melted off... but of course in reality it's just Calvin refusing to get into the bathwater.
• Hot Drink Cure: In one Sunday strip, Calvin's Mom sees him coming inside from the snow, and meets him with a blanket and a cup of hot chocolate by the fire, causing him to comment "Nobody can coddle like a Mom."
• How Can Santa Deliver All Those Toys?: Calvin is childlike enough to believe in Santa and logical enough to think about these questions all the time. He wonders not only about how Santa can deliver the toys so fast, but on at least one occasion asks how Santa makes the toys, given the problems of paying for elf labor and the raw materials to make the toys. He also expresses discomfort, on quite a regular basis, with how he's in the position of being judged as "naughty or nice," and who is Santa to judge him that way? But he doesn't seem to have noticed that adults (and even many children) seem not to believe in Santa, so he's got no cognitive dissonance there (although in one strip he says he's decided to believe in Santa, just to be safe).
• How Do I Shot Web?: After seeing a firefly, Calvin tries to get his butt to light up too, and attributes his lack of success to "not even knowing what muscle to flex".
• "How I Wrote This Article" Article: Hobbes ended up writing this story for Calvin after he tried time traveling two hours into the future to retrieve his completed story, only to find it hadn't been written yet. Unfortunately for Calvin, the class loves it, but it makes him look like a laughingstock.
• Human Hammer-Throw: Calvin tries having Hobbes throw him this way. It ends with him crumpled at the foot of a tree.
  Hobbes: Are you sure there's a career to be made as a "human discus"?
  Calvin: Well, we gotta get a bigger field...
• Human Mail: Calvin sometimes attempts to run away by sitting in a box by the mailbox with a vague address written on it (for example, "To OS TRYLA"). It doesn't work.
• Humanity Is Insane: In one sledding strip, Calvin is trying to hold a philosophical discussion with Hobbes about whether humans are fundamentally good, bad, or crazy. Hobbes just wants Calvin to focus on steering until they collide with a tree and end up buried in the snow, at which point he says he thinks humans are crazy.
• Humanoid Aliens: Often encountered by Spaceman Spiff, although they're never too humanoid.
• Humans Are Bastards:
  • Used repeatedly, and one arc has Calvin as so disgusted with humans that he resolves to become a tiger. It's driven home when he decides to go back to being a human only because he finds out tigers are endangered because of humans, and he doesn't want to be killed.
  • There's also a strip in this vein satirizing hunting, in which a trio of deer walk into an office with hunting rifles and kill an employee. Calvin claims that they do this to curb human overpopulation, a popular justification for deer hunting.
  • Though the Sunday strip where Calvin explains why he hangs out with Hobbes instead of human kids is a heartwarming moment.
  • One memorable comic strip...
    Calvin: Hobbes, look! I caught a butterfly in this jar!
    Hobbes: If people could put rainbows in zoos, they would.
    *beat panel as Hobbes walks away*
    *Calvin opens the jar, releasing the butterfly*
  • Similarly, one strip has Calvin ask Hobbes if he'd like to visit the zoo, which Hobbes responds to by saying "Can we tour a prison afterward?"
• Human Snowball: Hobbes does this to Calvin as revenge after he gets hit with one of his snowballs.
• Human Snowman:
  • One strip takes this trope to another level. It starts with Susie building a snowman, then Calvin and Hobbes come incoming towards her on their sled and end up catching the snowman on the sled. In the snowman's place is Susie with Calvin on her shoulders and Hobbes on his head.
  • Another time, Calvin accidentally made evil "snow goons", and later destroyed them by going out at night and spraying them with the hose. When his dad comes out to bring him back inside, he slips on one of the patches of ice...
    Calvin: Run, Hobbes! Dad's a snow goon too!
• Humans Are Smelly:
  • After Calvin turns himself into an owl with his transmogrification gun, Hobbes says he might be better off, and when Calvin asks why, Hobbes replies, "Well, I never knew quite how to say this, but little boys don't smell very good..." This may have less to do with Calvin's species than his aversion to bathing. Ironically, owls are noteworthy for being very insensitive to certain bad smells, especially that of the notorious skunk.
  • And in another two strips, Hobbes tells him that he has unique words for different smells, such as "snippid" for burning leaves. When Calvin asks what the word for his smell is, Hobbes can't resist saying "terrible", causing Calvin to chase after him.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters:
  Calvin: Do you believe in the devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man?
  Hobbes: I'm not sure man needs the help.
  Calvin: (aside) You just can't talk to animals about these things.
• Humble Goal:
  • In one strip, Hobbes's wish is to have a sandwich. He achieves it. This is contrasted with Calvin, whose more extravagant wish for "a trillion billion dollars, my own space shuttle, and a private continent" goes unfulfilled.
  • Another time, Calvin and Hobbes are outside and Calvin asks Hobbes what he would wish for if he could have anything. Hobbes wishes for "a big sunny field to be in." Calvin points out that Hobbes is already in a sunny field and says he should wish for something big like power or riches. Then he looks at Hobbes napping in the grass and admits that it's hard to argue with someone who looks so happy.
  • In one strip, Calvin is writing an obscenely long Christmas wish-list to Santa and asks Hobbes if he wants anything to put on the list. Hobbes can't think of anything because he already has a good home and a best friend; what more could he want? Calvin merely pities his lack of imagination.
• The Hunter Becomes the Hunted: One strip has Calvin writing (and possibly illustrating) a story for class in which a group of deer hunt and kill humans (not hunters, just office workers).
• Hurricane of Aphorisms: One Spaceman Spiff strip ends with Calvin being forced to sit through a "calm discussion of wholesome principles" with Calvin's dad, so starts by rattling off five clichés in one panel in a pontification about the virtue of a good work ethic.
  Calvin's Dad: Yes, life is tough and suffering builds character. Nothing worth having ever comes easy. Virtue is its own reward, and when I was your age...
• Hurricane of Excuses:
  • In the story arc where Calvin tries to fix a leaky faucet and floods the bathroom instead, his dad demands to know what happened. Calvin says that the faucet blew sky-high all by itself, then he says that Hobbes was fooling around with dad's tools, and finally he claims that "evil, bug-eyed monsters from Pluto" did it.
  • In one Sunday strip, Calvin tricks Hobbes into playing a game of catch with a water balloon only to deliberately soak Hobbes and call him a naive idiot for letting himself get splashed. When Hobbes picks him up to exact his revenge, Calvin says that it was a joke before reiterating that it was an accident! Neither saves him from getting dunked in the rain barrel.
• Hurt Foot Hop: There is a strip where the title characters hear a crashing noise on Christmas Eve and assume it's Santa. They listen to see if they can hear what he's saying. Cut to the living room:
  Calvin's Dad: (stands on one leg, clutching his foot after dropping a heavy present on it) Slippin'-rippin'-dang-fang-rotten-zarg-barg-a-ding-dong!
  Calvin's Mom: Quiet dear! Calvin will hear you!
• Hypocrite Has a Point: Hobbes admonishes Calvin for doing such things as upsetting Susie with insults and stealing her doll to hold for ransom, but has nothing against insulting/bullying Calvin and stealing his comics (and once defaced them) respectively. With Calvin almost always being the one to face the brunt of punishment and Hobbes taking the moral high ground the most of the two, it's a given.
• Inappropriate Pride: Calvin proudly announces he's been saving the product of his sneezes so hospitals can use it for mucus transfusions. His disgusted mother tells him no one needs those, and after a Beat, Calvin says he has a jar for her to wash.
• Inconsistent Episode Lengths:
  • When the strip first started out, the Sunday strips had to follow a standard layout that allowed individual newspapers to rearrange the panels to fit either a full page, half a page or a quarter of a page. Cartoonist Bill Watterson found this format restricting, and after his sabbatical he negotiated to have a freeform Sunday layout. These new strips had as many or as few panels as was required for whatever story Watterson wanted to draw, anywhere from twenty small square panels to one Splash Page taking up the entire page and anything in between. Downplayed, as they still had to fit in the same amount of physical space each week.
  • The story arcs that occur repeatedly vary in length from simply two days at shortest to a full month at longest, although they averaged around one or two weeks.
• I Am Not Him: Rosalyn pulls this at one point in one of the babysitting story arcs, after Calvin complains again and again that Mom does it differently (although it's clearly just Calvin being intentionally obnoxious).
  Rosalyn: I'M NOT YOUR MOM, ALL RIGHT?!
  Calvin: No kidding! My mom loves me more than life itself, and she lets me do anything I want. Not like you, you nasty ol' barracuda.
  Rosalyn: I can't believe I postponed a date for this.
• I Ate WHAT?!:
  • Some of the "dinner table" strips have an amusing variation on this trope, in which Calvin is more likely to eat his dinner if he is told it's made from some revolting ingredient (i.e., being told grains of rice are maggots, or that stuffed peppers are stewed monkey heads) and less likely if he finds out it isn't.
    Calvin: Is hamburger meat made out of people from Hamburg?
    Mom: Of course not! It's ground beef.
    Calvin: I'm eating a COW?
    Mom: That's right.
    Calvin: [gagging] I don't think I can finish this!
  • One comic has Calvin complaining about how processed and artificial modern food is, grossing Susie out, but the punchline is that Calvin is happily eating twinkies (a food that is infamous for the long list of chemicals in its ingredients), thinking that they are healthy.
• I Can Explain: Calvin panics as he tries to explain to his mother what he thinks Miss Wormwood told her. He almost confesses to the Noodle Incident in doing so, which his mother didn't even know about.
  • Averted in a strip where Calvin is hammering nails into the living room table. His mother freaks and demands to know what he's doing, to which he simply retorts: "Is this a trick question?"
• "I Can't Look!" Gesture:
  • In one strip, Calvin hides his face as he and Hobbes go plunging off a cliff in their wagon.
    Hobbes: We're headed for that cliff!
    Calvin: I don't want to know about it.
  • In one story arc, Calvin tries to push the family car out of the garage by himself and the car rolls away from him. He and Hobbes cover their faces and scream "I can't watch!" just before the car winds up in a ditch.
• I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham:
  • In one strip, Calvin's mom tells Calvin that she's serving them spider pie for dinner (knowing that a kid like Calvin would be more inclined to eat it thinking that it was something nasty). Calvin, who had initially called the dish "disgusting" on sight, tries some and finds he likes it. Calvin's dad, on the other hand, is so grossed out by visual image of eating spider pie he doesn't even want to open his mouth anymore.
  • In one story arc, Calvin's dad forbids Calvin from wasting the evening watching television and forces him to go play outside. Calvin, ever the rebel against authority, vows to not have fun outside just to spite his dad, but quickly ends up forgetting and having so much fun playing outside that when his dad calls him in for bed he wants to stay out longer.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: There are several of these which Calvin names himself including Grim Reaper Gorge, Suicide Slope, or Mount Maim. He does this so he can feel cool while sledding down them.
• Identical Panel Gag: In one strip, Calvin tells Hobbes about his grandfather, who complains that modern comic strips are "nothing but a bunch of xeroxed talking heads." Every panel in the strip is the same two-shot of Calvin and Hobbes, with only the speech bubbles changing. (Although, on closer inspection, there are enough tiny differences to show that each "identical" panel was actually drawn separately.)
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The three treasury volumes of the comic are, in order, The Essential, Authoritative, and Indispensable Calvin & Hobbes, each re-collecting two books apiece up to Scientific Progress Goes Boink.
• I Don't Like You And You Don't Like Me: Calvin says this to his bicycle in one strip. It proceeds to run him over.
• I Don't Think That's Such a Good Idea: Hobbes is known for being this way around Calvin, only reluctantly going along with his crazy ideas related to the cardboard box (the time travel scenes in particular), and stepping off at the last moment before their toboggan careens down into the abyss.
  Calvin: What Could Possibly Go Wrong??!
  Hobbes: Whenever you ask that, my tail gets all bushy.
  Calvin: Oh, knock it off.
• If It Bleeds, It Leads: Parodied somewhat Anviliciously in one strip where Calvin's father is watching TV proclaiming upcoming coverage of serial killing, and why a bushfire conflict half a world away should have the average Joe Schmoe "paralyzed by helpless fear". He ends up reading the paper instead. (A rather predictable opinion for a newspaper-based strip.)
• If It Was Funny the First Time...: An in-universe example, Calvin has the philosophy that if a novelty Christmas song is funny the first time, it's funny every time. His mom disagrees and tosses him out of the house.
• If I Wanted X, I Would Y: Calvin explains why he does not like organized sports:
  Calvin: I hate all the rules and organization and teams and ranks in sports. Somebody's always yelling at you, telling you where to be, what to do, and when to do it. I figure when I want that, I'll join the Army and at least get paid.
• I Fell for Hours: One of the multi-strip story arcs had Calvin holding onto a balloon only to have it float away with him, high into the sky. When it pops, he falls for an incredibly long time. At one point he looks down and expects to wake up from a dream at any moment, but it doesn't happen. Luckily, he finds his transmogrification gun and "safes" himself (that is, turned himself into a safe).
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Calvin constantly overestimates himself (while this is quite natural for any 6-year-old, it looks very weird on Calvin since he uses language and glimpses abstract thinking on levels far above his real-life peers).
• Ignored Aesop: A Running Gag at the end of a story arc is Calvin summarizing everything that's happened and how he got into big trouble, then show he learned absolutely nothing from the experience and is often already in the middle of getting into the same kind of trouble. Understandable, since Calvin's imagination doesn't really work in such a way as to promote obvious, learnable lessons, and his personality actively forbids him from thinking anything is his fault, so actually learning from his mistakes would first require that he admit that he made a mistake to begin with.
  • Calvin somehow forgets a school project that the entire class has been working on and talking about every day for a whole month until the morning that it's due, and only because Susie asked him how his project was. He tries to rope Susie into helping him cobble together the project before the Miss Wormwood has them had it in, getting her into trouble. Susie gets sent to the principal's office and fingers Calvin as the real troublemaker. Calvin gets in big trouble for getting Susie in trouble and even bigger trouble for fudging his project. Hobbes then comments all this must've motivated Calvin to get his book report done on time, a retort that just confuses Calvin.
    Calvin: My what?
  • At the end of the first duplicator story arc, Calvin reflects on the whole incident by saying he's learned a lot from all the trouble it got him into. But when Hobbes asks what it was he learned, Calvin struggles to come up with anything and concludes that he didn't learn anything.
    Hobbes: Live and don't learn, that's us.
  • Calvin's mom goes to a parent-teacher conference, where she's told that Calvin needs to improve his math skills. Calvin's dad attempts to tutor Calvin with his math homework, and Calvin gets so confident with his new math knowledge he bets Susie a quarter he can do better than her on a pop quiz. It then immediately becomes obvious that Calvin learned absolutely nothing and is still just as ignorant about math as ever. It's capped off by Calvin gleefully recounting to Hobbes how he stiffed Susie by giving her three dimes instead of a quarter after he lost the bet.
    Hobbes: I think you'd better study harder.
    Calvin: Oh, now don't you start on me.
  • Calvin has to do a research project about bats and present it to the class. He doesn't want to actually put in any effort researching bats, so he just makes up a single "fact" and puts the report in a "professional" looking binder to guarantee an A+. When he predictably fails the assignment, he blames the class for pointing out his "fact" is wrong and the teacher for not noticing his "professional" binder rather than the fact he did no real work at all, and is last seen burying the assignment to prevent his parents from finding out.
  • Calvin has to write an essay arguing some point for school, but he ends up wasting his time with meandering trivialities and has to rush the essay, resulting in a paper only one sentence long and using Rule of Cool as his sole argument. His teacher takes pity on him for choosing a topic that was was too complex and raises his grade from a D- to a D, but rather than learning that he should manage his time better or that he should choose simpler topics, he learns that he can manipulate the teacher with pity to get better grades.
  • Calvin has a nightmare which makes him realize he forgot to do his homework. He's saved by a snow day, but wastes the opportunity by playing outside all day. He's then saved a second day in a row because the teacher forgets to collect the homework before the end of the day. He reflects upon his luck and that he won't put off pleasure before work anymore.
    Calvin: And it will be a pleasure to have that homework done! C'mon, let's work on a snowman.
    Hobbes: (rolling his eyes) No exceptions.
  • Calvin has to collect fifty leaves for school, and is given two weeks to do it, but puts it off until the evening before it's due. He is able to get two aliens to collect the leaves for him, but to everyone else the "alien" leaves just look like maple leaves cut into weird shapes and he flunks the project. He complains it was a totally pointless project anyway because identifying leaves is completely useless knowledge, picking up a random leafy branch for emphasis. Then Hobbes points out the plant he's holding is poison sumac.
    Calvin: This?? What makes you say that?
  • Discussed during the end of the snow goons story arc, where Calvin gets in trouble once again once his fantastical adventure intersects with his mundane life, Calvin summarizes everything that happened and comes to the conclusion that he's learned the valuable lesson that "snow goons are bad news". When Hobbes points out how inapplicable such a moral is to anything, Calvin says he intentionally made an aesop which discourages any sort of behaviour modification.
  • One Christmas story arc had Calvin hire Hobbes as his lawyer on a trip to the North Pole to argue that he's been very good all year. He doesn't even make it one block without deciding to paste Susie with snowballs, which leads to him arguing with Hobbes it doesn't count as a naughty act because Susie is a girl. Susie overhears the argument and plants a snowball in Calvin's face in pre-emptive retaliation, and Hobbes tells Calvin it's his chance at redemption if he doesn't fire back. He comes back home happy that he did something technically good, but when his mom asks why Susie hit him with a snowball, he doesn't want to admit she overheard him plotting to throw snowballs at her first and says that they were just minding their own business when Susie attacked him totally unprovoked, negating his technically good act with a bad act immediately.
  • One story arc has Calvin's dad forbid Calvin from wasting the evening watching television, and make him play outside. Calvin hates being told what to do and attempts to not have fun just to spite his dad, but very quickly forgets and so much fun playing outside that he asks his dad if he can stay out longer when he comes to call Calvin inside for bed. Calvin's dad points out that he was right, and now Calvin will have fond memories of doing fun things rather than of just watching something on tv. Calvin later muses that he learned that nothing spoils fun worse than learning it built character.
  • Nearly every babysitting session has Calvin causing huge trouble to Rosalyn that always gets him severely punished when his parents get home. Rather than learning he should just behave himself if he doesn't want to get punished, he decides the actual solution is to cause bigger and bigger trouble each time as revenge. By the time he breaks out Stupendous Man on her, Hobbes just heads straight to bed immediately.
    Hobbes: I suppose we could try being good.
    Calvin: I must've gotten water in my ear. What did you say?
    Hobbes: Nothing. Forget it.
  • Calvin's dad lets Calvin borrow his new pair of expensive binoculars and Calvin predictably breaks them beyond repair by handling them foolishly ("Well, I was tossing them to myself at the time, as I ran down the sidewalk"). He spends the whole day worried about being punished by his dad, but after an initial outburst his dad decides it's not really such a big deal, and even buys Calvin his own pair of small toy binoculars because if he's going to break something it might as well be his own stuff. So rather than learning that he should be careful with other people's belongings, he learns that if he breaks his dad's stuff, he can get his own stuff for free.
    Calvin: Maybe I should break dad's power tools and see if I could get some of those.
• Ignoring by Singing: In this strip, Hobbes starts mocking Calvin's height, telling him he'll get even shorter and that his parents are planning to sell him to a circus sideshow. Calvin shouts "I'm not listening!" then puts his hands over his ears and starts singing "The Star-Spangled Banner."
• I Hate Past Me: When Calvin travels to the (very near) future to get his completed homework from his future self, three different versions of him end up fighting over which of them should have done the homework. Averted with Hobbes in the same story, as his egotism is of a sort that gets along with itself. "You're right, as always, Hobbes."
• I Have This Friend:
  Calvin: They say Santa knows if you've been good or bad, but what if someone had been sort of both? I mean, suppose some kid tried to be good... at least, well, most of the time... but bad things inexplicably kept happening? Suppose some kid just had terrible luck, and he got blamed for a lot of things he did only sort of on purpose?
  Hobbes: Who exactly might we be talking about?
  Calvin: This is a purely hypothetical case, Mr. Smartypants.
• I Just Like Saying the Word:
  • In one story arc where Calvin and Hobbes are playing around with modelling clay, Hobbes admits he just wanted to have an excuse to say "smock" a lot, which quickly drives Calvin crazy.
  • Another strip where he mentions that he likes saying "quark" is a semi-example, as Calvin was talking about other, decidedly less creative terms scientists have come up with.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Calvin occasionally laments the fact that, as a human, he doesn't have any of the cool traits many animals do, like retractable claws, fangs, opposable toes, wings, the ability to light up his behind the way fireflies do, etc.
  Calvin: I'm not even sure which muscle to flex. (as he tries to make his rear end light up like a firefly)
• I Kiss Your Hand: In one of the early story arcs, Hobbes is "kidnapped" from Calvin by a dog. When Susie finds him, Calvin kisses her hand out of gratitude, despite his firm belief that Girls Have Cooties. And also to hide the fact that he's stealing her cookies.
• I Know You Know I Know: Calvin wanted to trick Susie so he could soak her with water balloons. So he left an easily decipherable "secret code" note for her to find (in backwards letters,) hoping she would go behind his house. She caught on quickly and hid elsewhere to spray Calvin with the garden hose.
• I Lied:
  Calvin: Any monsters under my bed tonight?
  Monsters: Nope, no, uh-uh.
  Calvin: Well there better not be, I'd hate to have to torch one with my flamethrower!
  Hobbes: You have a flamethrower?
  Calvin: They lie, I lie.
• Ill-Fated Flowerbed: Calvin has destroyed his mother's flower garden on several occasions. Once trying to parachute out of his room, and landing in the rosebushes, and in another instance while trying to dig out a swimming pool.
• I'll Never Tell You What I'm Telling You!: In one G.R.O.S.S. story arc, Calvin writes Susie a cut-and-paste ransom note for her doll, which reads:
  If you want to see your doll again, leave 100 dollars in this envelope by the tree out front. Do not call the police. You cannot trace us. You cannot find us. Sincerely, Calvin.
• Imaginary Enemy: Calvin is known for his (sort of) imaginary friend Hobbes, but his imagination is enormous enough to accommodate other characters as well. The monsters under his bed, while not specific recognizable individuals, are collectively an imaginary enemy to him. They are always trying to eat him, but are harmless in the sense that it's inconceivable to think of them ever succeeding. His mother once suggests to him that they're a case of Your Mind Makes It Real (or at least that's how he understands her saying they're imaginary), but just because he tried to stop believing in them didn't mean they stopped believing in him. Said imaginary friend, Hobbes, fights with Calvin a fair amount, including pouncing on him every day when he gets home from school.
• Imaginary Friend: Hobbes. Maybe. See Not-So-Imaginary Friend below.
• Imagine Spot: Happens quite often, but most notably the Spaceman Spiff and Stupendous Man sequences.
• I Meant to Do That:
  • Calvin says this after his attempt to launch a giant snowball (by placing it on the end of a plank balanced atop a log and jumping on the other end of said plank) ends with him getting splattered. Hobbes' response: "Then it worked very well."
  • Hobbes also invokes this when he's about to tackle Calvin, but then Calvin ducks down to pick up a dime, causing Hobbes to pass over him and crash-land on the floor. Hobbes then gets up and walks away with as much dignity as he can muster. Calvin's not fooled for a second.
    "He would just love me to believe that somersault was intentional and innocent."
• I'm Going to Hell for This:
  • After an inordinate number of misses trying to hit Susie with a snowball, he finally gets her just after she turns around to mock his lousy aim. The ensuing fight is not shown, but Calvin apparently thinks it constituted a one-way ticket to Hell, as he tells his mom "I promised my soul to the Devil this afternoon". ^note "Oh? That recently?"
  • Implied in another strip after the eponymous duo play baseball indoors and completely destroy the living room:
    Calvin: Do you think God lets you plea bargain?
    Hobbes: I'd worry more about your mom.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction:
  • In one strip, Susie accuses Calvin of throwing a snowball at her. Calvin denies it, saying there's no evidence, right before saying he missed, so it shouldn't count. The next panel shows him after being pummelled, buried in the snow.
    Calvin: The defendant petitions the court for a new trial, on the grounds that his lawyer is incompetent.
  • In one Sunday strip, Calvin tricks Hobbes into having a water balloon thrown at him and then calls him a naive moron for falling for it. Hobbes picks Calvin up to exact his revenge, and Calvin frantically says it was just a joke, before changing his statement to say it was an accident. Neither excuse saves him from being dropped in the rain barrel.
• Implausible Deniability:
  • Calvin is an artist, and Blatant Lies and Insane Troll Logic are his canvas. It doesn't matter if you photographed or video recorded him in the act, that's only circumstantial evidence.
  • Any time the monsters under the bed try to convince Calvin that there are no monsters under the bed. At one point, Calvin asks who he's talking to if there aren't any monsters, and the monsters insist that they're just dust balls.
• Implied Death Threat:
  • In one strip, Calvin prepares to throw a water balloon at the resting tiger, only to stop when Hobbes comments, "As if life isn't short enough."
  • In another strip, Hobbes offers this gem in response to Calvin once again trying to nail him with a water balloon:
    Hobbes: Here's a hypothetical question you should ask yourself. If you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do different? Especially if, by doing something different, today might NOT be your last day on earth?
  • In another, Calvin's dad says "The body is the home of the spirit and if you're not in bed in two minutes, your spirit is going to be permanently nomadic".
• Implied Love Interest: Susie is one for Calvin. They're both little kids, so they can't actually date, but occasionally it's hinted that one has a crush on the other. For instance, when Calvin sends her a Valentine, even though the card disses her and is brought with dead flowers and leads to Susie throwing a snowball at him, both walk away concluding that the other one likes them. Complicating things further is the fact that they're friends, but with a great deal of rivalry, and Calvin thinks Girls Have Cooties.
• Impossible Shadow Puppets: Calvin makes a shadow puppet, which looks like, as Hobbes calls it: "A bug-eyed, tentacled thing." Turns out it's the real thing, to the duo's horror.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: In one Sunday strip, Calvin's clothes come to life and team up to attack him and dress him in the tackiest outfit possible. He tries to resist, but the pants force his legs to move. His mom lampshades it when he comes downstairs, asking if he's gone colorblind.
• Improvised Catapult:
  • Calvin once tried to launch a snowball bigger than his body by putting it at one end of a board on a log and jumping on the other end. It launches... only to land on his head. He claims that "I Meant to Do That".
  • In another strip, Calvin tries to make a springboard in basically the same way but replaces the snowball with a large rock, after his mom refuses to buy him a real one. He tries it out only for the rock to get launched right at his head.
• Improvised Parachute: In one Sunday strip, Calvin tries parachuting off the roof by using his blanket. Rather expectedly, he instead drops like a stone. His fall is cushioned by landing in some thorny rose bushes, however.
• Inconvenient Itch: One Sunday strip has Calvin trying desperately not to scratch his mosquito bites, because he knows that scratching will just make it feel worse later. Calvin's pain is visualized by showing Calvin being eaten alive by ants, or with his head on fire. Calvin eventually gives in and scratches, and although he's momentarily relieved, it does indeed come back far worse.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: There are several strips, particularly earlier in the strip's run, in which Calvin, usually with no explanation, finds himself either changed to the size of an insect, or acting out the role of a bug itself. Since these episodes, from what we can see, are entirely within his imagination, they usually end in an anticlimax when a parent interrupts his reverie.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: Calvin's Dad deliberately chooses vacations and hobbies that build character.
  Calvin's Dad: Ahh, what a day! Up at 6:00, a 10-mile run in the sleet, and now a big bowl of plain oatmeal! How I love the crazy hedonism of weekends!
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Occurs in the September 1989 arc where Calvin locks Rosalyn out of the house. The arc begins with Calvin hiding his mom's shoes so she can't leave the house, and the second strip has this exchange:
  Calvin: Hi, Roz. My parents changed their minds about going out, so we won't be needing your services. Goodbye.
  Calvin's Dad: Hi, Rosalyn. What are you talking about, Calvin?
  Calvin: You can't go out if mom can't find her shoes, right?
  Calvin's Dad: And what do you know about that?
  Calvin: (makes an "Oh, Crap!" Smile) Uh, nothing, ha ha! Um, why, are her shoes missing?
• Incredibly Lame Fun:
  • Calvin plays a game where he asks Hobbes to guess a number between one and seven hundred billion. No "higher/lower" or "warm/cold"; only "nope, guess again". Hobbes wanders off after two guesses.
    Calvin: What's the matter, don't you like games?!
  • Similarly, Calvin asks Dad to pick a number that he will then try to guess:
    Calvin: Is it 92,376,051?
    Dad: By golly, it is!
    Calvin: Wait a minute! You're just trying to get rid of me, aren't you?!
    Dad: No, you're psychic. Go show Mom.
• Indubitably Uninteresting Individual: Calvin's parents seem to be like this, at least from his point-of-view.
  • One comic has his dad doing this after a Saturday run:
    Dad: Ahh, what could be better than a Saturday 6-mile run at dawn in 20-degree weather...
    Dad: ...followed by a big bowl of gummy oatmeal and some dry toast!
    Calvin: [still groggy] How about dried-up prunes and a root canal?
    Dad: Dried-up prunes! Do we have some??
  • In a New Year's strip:
    Hobbes: Are your parents going out for New Year's Eve?
    Calvin: Are you kidding?
    Calvin: My parents' idea of a wild night is to mix a scoop of real coffee in with the decaf.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Calvin's teacher Miss Wormwood has done this at least once. She also variously downs antiacid medicine, coffee, and large quantities of cigarettes (or at least, so Calvin says). But with Calvin in front of her for several hours every day, who wouldn't...
  Calvin: Does her doctor know she mixes all those medicines?
• Infantilization Retaliation: Hobbes has beaten up Calvin on at least two occasions for baby-talking to him and waking him up from a nap, which he doesn't like. The second time Calvin baby-talks to him, this time without petting the tiger in his sleep, Hobbes gets up to give Calvin a pretty good glare before the panel cuts away to a beaten-up Calvin.
  • This strip from March 8, 1990:
    Calvin: Hewwo! Is Hobbesie-wobbsie sweepy? Ooh, he's just a big snoogie-woogie, isn't he? Yes he is! Hewwo, snoogie-woogie!
    (Hobbes bites Calvin's head)
    Calvin: Hey! Hey! (while fighting with Hobbes) OW! OW! LEGGO, YOU BLOODTHIRSTY CARNIVORE! (after getting beaten up) I can see why little tabby cats are so much more popular.
  • This strip from September 29, 1993:
    Calvin: Ooh, wook at da big, stwipey putty! Is oo a fuzzy, fwendwy putty??
    (Hobbes wakes up and glares at Calvin)
    Calvin: (after getting beaten up) Tigers don't like to be called "putties."
• Informed Ability:
  • Played for Laughs with Calvin's imaginary alter ego Spaceman Spiff. He's constantly described as a tremendous pilot, superb marksman and all round brilliant space explorer, but pretty much every story about him begins as his ship is crashing and/or he's captured by aliens. His "Death-Ray Blaster" also tends to be utterly useless, because in real life it's actually a squirt gun. Spaceman Spiff's piloting is also lampshaded in one strip: "The intrepid Spaceman Spiff is stranded on a distant planet! ...our hero ruefully acknowledges that this happens fairly frequently."
  • Same with Stupendous Man; after yet another blunder, Hobbes asks Calvin if Stupendous Man ever won any battle. Calvin replies they are all "moral victories". Calvin also describes him as a super"hero" but he's never shown actually doing anything really heroic.
  • In one arc, Calvin uses a device to enlarge his brain and increase his intelligence. While his vocabulary becomes somewhat more verbose, he never actually makes smarter decisions than normal, still believing girls are gross, forgetting what his homework even was, thinking that Rule of Cool is a viable basis for a scientific argument, wasting his dwindling homework time drawing pointless doodles, and deciding that walking around with a bedsheet wrapped around his head would "allay any suspicion" from his massively enlarged head. Hobbes even notes snarkily how Calvin doesn't seem to know any more than him despite the massively increased brain.
• Informed Flaw: In one comic, it's claimed Susie eats sandwiches by taking them apart and eating each ingredient separately. Not only is this never referenced again, several later comics show Susie eating her sandwich normally.
• Inherently Funny Words: In one story arc where Calvin and Hobbes are playing with modelling clay, Hobbes demands that Calvin give him a smock to wear (actually one of his dad's business suits). Hobbes ends up getting sidetracked by the smock for a while, and thinks it's just inherently funny.
  Hobbes: Smock, smock, smock, smock, smock, smock!
  Calvin: WHAT ON EARTH IS WRONG WITH YOU?!
• In Medias Res: The second duplicator arc begins with three strips showing a well-groomed, well-behaved Calvin, but no indication of why he's acting that way. A few strips later, we find out that the Calvin from the beginning of the arc is actually a duplicate of Calvin's Good Side.
• Innocent Awkward Question:
  • This comic has a strip where Calvin asks his dad how exactly soldiers killing each other solves the world's problems. Two wordless panels later, Calvin muses that adults only act like they know what they're doing.
  • The usual "how are babies made" situation is also averted, in that Calvin's dad, rather than be embarrassed, makes up a crazy lie, and Calvin finds his dad's explanation (most babies are delivered by stork, he was unceremoniously dumped down the chimney by a big hairy pterodactyl) much cooler.
  • In one strip, Calvin asks his father why he lives with his [Calvin's] mom instead of with "several scantily-clad female roommates". Calvin's father looks shocked, and in the next panel, Calvin grumbles about no longer being allowed to watch TV.
  • In one strip, Calvin asks his mom why it's worth $4 a minute to talk on the phone with "goofy ladies who wear their underwear on TV commercials", causing his mother to indignantly ask him when he was watching that. Calvin says that it was during his morning cartoons.
• Innocent Prodigy: Calvin, waxes philosophical about the nature of the universe...to his stuffed tiger. While pretending to be a space cadet. Or a superhero. Or a jungle explorer. Or a private eye. Or a dinosaur. Lampshaded by Calvin's mother in a punchline, "How can one kid be so smart and yet so dumb at the same time?"
• Insane Troll Logic: Calvin loves this type of logic.
  • When he's doing a report on bats, he classifies them as bugs because they fly, they're ugly, and they're hairy. He also says he'll get an A on his paper because he's using a "professional" clear plastic binder.
  • Calvin protests going to school because if ignorance is bliss, then his education is a violation of his right to the pursuit of happiness. He puts on a patriotic, American Revolution-esque shtick, and when his teacher chases him as he tries to leave the classroom, he yells "Monarchists!"
• Insanity Defense: In one Christmas story arc, Hobbes acts as Calvin's lawyer in his letter to Santa. Needless to say, the only defense Hobbes offers is to prove Calvin is insane, simply because he considers it impossible to argue Calvin was innocent. Calvin is not pleased.
  Calvin: We're not copping an insanity plea, you moron! We're saying I'm innocent!
  Hobbes: Insulting an attorney is a penal offense, so watch it, buster.
• Insignificant Blue Dot: Played with by Calvin, usually to get out of answering test problems in school.
  Test question: What was the significance of the Erie Canal?
  Calvin's answer: In the cosmic sense, probably nil.
  • In another strip, Calvin is looking at the stars with Hobbes and talks about how small and insignificant Earth must be compared to the universe... then says: "I wonder what's on TV now?".
  • In yet another strip, Calvin is again looking at the stars with Hobbes:
    Hobbes: What a clear night! Look at all the stars. Millions of them!
    Calvin: Yes, we're just tiny specks on a planet particle, hurling through the infinite blackness. (beat) Let's go in and turn on all the lights.
  • In another, he's looking at the stars alone:
    Calvin: I'M SIGNIFICANT!
    (Long beat)
    Calvin: ...screamed the dust speck.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • In one story arc, Calvin decides to change his title to Calvin the Bold, and only answering to the whole name, at one point even ignoring his teacher and being sent to the principal's office because she refused to call him "the Bold".
  • "You seem to have mistaken me for some mild mannered youth! I am STUPENDOUS MAN!"
• Insomnia Episode: One Sunday strip involved Calvin being unable to fall asleep, as late as 1:30 in the morning. He tosses and turns, and is really tired, but just can't get to sleep, until he hears his mom's voice. Turns out, it was All Just a Dream. At breakfast, Calvin mutters to himself "This is going to be a bad day."
• Instant Fish Kill: In one early Sunday strip, Calvin tries blasting the fish out of a lake by throwing a large rock into the lake; he does so, but only succeeds in making a huge splash, getting him and Hobbes wet in the process. This annoys Hobbes, who tells Calvin that it was a good idea, they just didn't throw a large enough object into the lake...
• Instant Wristwatch: A watch will spontaneously appear on Hobbes' wrist when he needs to check the time, despite the fact that, as a possibly stuffed tiger, he usually doesn't wear anything at all.
• Insult Backfire: In the story arc where Calvin's class is making traffic safety posters, Calvin shows his poster to Susie while waiting for the bus, and Susie is grossed out by it, but Calvin considers it a compliment.
  Susie: "Be careful or be roadkill!" That's really disgusting.
  Calvin: Thank you.
• Intellectual Animal: Hobbes. "There are times when it's a source of great personal pride to not be human."
• Intentional Mess Making: In this strip, Calvin won't allow Hobbes in his kiddie pool, saying that Hobbes will get his fur in the water. Hobbes then deliberately starts shedding before getting in anyway. Calvin then implies that he peed in the pool, much to Hobbes's horror.^note Though Calvin may have been lying.
• Interrupted Intimacy: A mild version occurs in a Christmas Eve strip after the gifts have been wrapped, Calvin's been put to bed, and Mom and Dad are now cuddled up on the love seat in front of a roaring fire in the fireplace. They then note that with the chaos of the holidays, it's nice to have a little quiet time to reflect, only for Calvin to come in with a fire extinguisher and shout "WHAT'S THIS?! SANTA FLAMBÉ??"
• In the Name of the Moon: Stupendous Man attempts one of these speeches after transforming from Mild-Mannered Calvin (and getting stuck in a locker), but of course Calvin isn't actually good at spelling so he never finishes it:
  S... for Stupendous!
  T... for Tiger, ferocity of!
  U... for Underwear, red!
  P... for Power, incredible!
  E... for Excellent physique!
  N... for... um... something... hm, well, I'll come back to that...
  D... for Determination!
  U... for.. wait, how do you spell this? Is it "I"??
• Intimidating Revenue Service: Parodied in one strip.
  Calvin: Gosh, I never get mail! I wonder who sent this. There's no return address! In its place there's a crude human skull with X's for eyes and its tongue hanging out! ...Maybe it's the IRS.
• Intolerable Tolerance: In one strip, Calvin justifies refusing to improve his behavior by claiming that society needs to be as tolerant of vice as it is of virtue.
  Hobbes: How are you doing on your New Year's resolutions?
  Calvin: I didn't make any. See, in order to improve oneself, one must have some idea of what's "good". That implies certain values. But as we all know, values are relative. Every system of belief is equally valid, and we need to tolerate diversity. Virtue isn't "better" than vice. It's just different.
  Hobbes: I'm not sure I can tolerate that much tolerance.
  Calvin: I refuse to be victimized by notions of virtuous behavior.
• In-Universe Factoid Failure:
  • When giving a report on bats, Calvin does no research and repeatedly calls them bugs. Despite everyone telling him otherwise, he doesn't listen, and fails the assignment.
    Class: BATS AREN'T BUGS!
    Calvin: Look, who's giving the report, you chowderheads, or me?
  • Every time we see Calvin trying to do basic addition or subtraction math homework, or Hobbes trying to help him, it's truly a spectacle of Insane Troll Logic. Never before would anyone guess that three plus eight equals six.
  • Calvin believes that the simple machines consist of the lever, the pulley, the inclined plane, and the internal combustion engine.
  • Calvin and Susie are partners on a report on the planet Mercury. Calvin writes his portion the morning of, after having a week to prepare.
    Calvin: The planet Mercury was named after a Roman god with winged feet. Mercury was the god of flowers and bouquets, which is why today he is a registered trademark of FTD florists. Why they named a planet after this guy, I can't imagine. ...Um, back to you, Susie.
  • For one of history tests, Calvin wrote down that the first president of the United States was Chef Boyardee, among other errors. His teacher called Calvin's answers "preposterous" and "an absolute disgrace".
• Invisible Stomach, Visible Food: In one strip, Calvin imagines being turned into "a living x-ray" which makes his mealtimes "a disgusting ordeal" for everyone, given that they can see the chewed food. The comic ends in the real world with Calvin's dad yelling at him to close his mouth when he chews. "You think we want to see that?"
• Invisible Streaker: In one strip, Calvin imagines he's become invisible, which results in his mother catching him trying to steal cookies while naked. Another strip has Calvin thinking he's invisible while at school and trying to strip down and escape the class naked; his teacher stops him before he gets his pants off.
• Invisible to Normals: One possible interpretation of Hobbes and all the other fantastical things Calvin encounters, if they aren't all occurring in his head. Either way, Calvin never seems to question why no one experiences what he experiences.
• Irony: The very first mention of "Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie," which becomes Calvin's favorite book.
  Dad: You might like this story.
  Calvin: Oh yeah? How good can it be if it hasn't been made into a TV show?
  • Watterson entitled the three treasury books The Essential, The Authoritative, and The Indispensible Calvin and Hobbes purely for the irony, as, aside from some newer stories/poems included at the beginning of each, they contain only strips that had already been published in the smaller collections.
• I Reject Your Reality: Calvin can be quotes thus: "It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept."
• I Resemble That Remark!:
  • Calvin does a rant about how violence on television doesn't have any effect on the watcher and concludes with "I'd like to shoot the idiots that think this stuff affects me."
  • Calvin also ranted about a television show which made no sense. When Hobbes remarked that it was targeted at the average American's fifteen-second attention span, Calvin's response was only, "You're still talking about that?"
  • One Sunday strip was nothing but this trope. Starting a meeting of their club, G.R.O.S.S., Hobbes started to read the minutes of the last meeting, which began with how he read the minutes of the previous meeting, followed by Calvin's "commentary on the editorial slant" of the minutes, and various technical terms to state, simply, that Calvin had lost his temper and called him a liar. Of course, as he's doing this, Calvin is again getting angry and calling him a liar, which results in a fight between the two. (And gives the reader the idea that club meetings between the two of them rarely ever result in anything but the two fighting.)
  • In the opening panels of one Sunday strip, Calvin is stomping around the house and yelling that he shouldn't have to go to bed now because he's not sleepy. Then he collapses on the floor and starts snoring.
• Irisless Eye Mask Of Mystery: Calvin's two fantasy alter egos, Spaceman Spiff (a Flash Gordon parody) and Stupendous Man (a superhero parody) both have masks with blank irises.
• Ironic Echo Cut: One Sunday strip has Calvin imagining that he drank too much water and melted into a liquid. He figures that he can only survive if he can freeze himself solid until he can get medical attention.
  Water Puddle Calvin: Unfortunately, as a liquid, Calvin can only run downhill! Can he make it? Can he make it??
  Real World Calvin: I don't think I'm gonna make it.
• Ironic Hell: After dozens of nights after having to read Hamster Huey over and over again, Calvin's dad muses:
  Dad: Architects should be forced to live in the buildings they design, and children's book authors should be forced to read their stories aloud every single night of their rotten lives.
• I Should Have Done This Years Ago: Calvin's dad uses the "Should have thought of this years ago" variation in one bedtime story strip: the story is about a disembodied hand that goes around strangling people and was never found, so to this day it could be anywheOHMIGOD IT'S GOT ME!!!! With Calvin out cold, his dad says the above line.
• I Take Offense to That Last One: Inverted slightly in one story arc where Calvin receives insulting letters from an anonymous sender. It's Hobbes, naturally. When he receives one that says, "You look like a baboon and smell like one too," he replies:
  Calvin: What kind of sick freak would do something like this?!
  Hobbes: A reckless exaggerator. You don't look like a baboon...
  Calvin: Oh, you're a big help!
• It Runs on Nonsensoleum:
  • Calvin invents devices that run on nonsensoleum, especially a cardboard box capable of traveling through time, transforming Calvin into an animal, or duplicating him. These are all the same box, the only changes being what direction the box's opening is facing and what's scribbled on its side^note apparently the box is just a casing, since the transmogrifier device is small enough to be housed inside a toy squirt gun as well. Hobbes lampshades these inventions by saying, "It's amazing what they can do with corrugated cardboard these days."
  • Calvin himself took advantage of this at one point: after creating several duplicates of himself (whom he couldn't stand), he got rid of them by getting them to stand under the duplicator box, crossing out the label "Duplicator," and writing in the new label "Transmogrifier" so he could change them into worms.
  • When the transmogrifier was introduced, it was able to select between 4 forms: eel, baboon, bug, or dinosaur. When Hobbes asked what if he wanted to turn into something else, Calvin simply replies he left space to write more stuff on the dial.
• It's All About Me: Calvin, very much so. While he'll occasionally show concern for others, for animals (the little raccoon), or for the environment, the majority of strips show Calvin only thinking about himself.
  Calvin: I don't want to pay any dues in life. I want to be a one-in-a-million, overnight success! I want the world handed to me on a silver platter!
  Hobbes: Good luck.
  Calvin (Yelling after him): Surely you concede I deserve it!
• It's Been Done: Done implicitly in a one strip where Calvin proclaims he's going to change the meanings of words so that his parents won't be able to understand him. His father responds with slang terms that were presumably used by his own generation, showing those did the same thing.
  Calvin: Isn't that totally spam? It's lubricated! Well, I'm phasing.
  Calvin's Dad: [not looking up from his book, flashing a peace sign] Marvy. Fab. Far out.
• It's Quiet… Too Quiet:
  • Calvin's mom on a couple of occasions, has noted that if she doesn't hear from Calvin for a little while (one time she said in fifteen minutes, another time she said two), it means he's probably getting into trouble. She's always right with this assumption.
  • Calvin tends to go into panic mode when he doesn't see or hear Hobbes, knowing this usually means Hobbes is planning to pounce him.
• It's the Principle of the Thing: This is implied to be the reason that Calvin consistently spends so much time and effort hiding from his mother when it's time to take a bath that it would be far quicker to just take the bath without complaint.
• I've Heard of That — What Is It?:
  • When Calvin is told that he'll be having tortellini for dinner, he doesn't allow his ignorance of what it is to stand in the way of a loud tirade about his dislike for it.
  • In only early strip, Calvin and Hobbes set out to catch crawdads, but only when they get to a stream do both of them realize neither of them even knows what a crawdad is.
• I Want My Jet Pack: Occurs in a late-1989 strip when Calvin is vocally disappointed at the lack of technological progress in the new decade:
  Hobbes: A new decade is coming up.
  Calvin: Yeah, big deal! Hmph. Where are the flying cars? Where are the moon colonies? Where are the personal robots and zero gravity boots, huh? You call this a new decade?! You call this the future?! HA! Where are the rocket packs? Where are the disintegration rays? Where are the floating cities?
  Hobbes: Frankly, I'm not sure people have the brains to manage the technology they've got.
  Calvin: I mean, look at this! We still have weather? Give me a break!
• I Want My Mommy!:
  • Calvin likes to put on a brave front, but it never lasts:
    Calvin: We're brave explorers! The word "Lost" isn't even in our vocabulary!
    Hobbes: How about the word "mommy"?
    Both: MOMMMYYY!
  • Calvin often does this when the monsters under his bed make an appearance:
    Calvin: Are there any monsters under my bed tonight?
    Monsters: No. Nope. No.
    Calvin: If there were any monsters under my bed, how big would they be?
    Monsters: Very small. Go to sleep.
    Calvin: MOMM!
  • One week where Calvin's falling ill, he calls for Mom only to have Dad show up — only to be sent back to fetch Mom.
    Mom: Me? What's wrong with you for crying out loud?!?
  • This trope is subverted on several occasions as well; Calvin yells for Mom in the middle of the night and she rushes into his room, thinking something's wrong. Then it turns out Calvin just wants a glass of water or wants to ask her some random trivial question, such as, "How do ugly things like octopuses and hairy bugs reproduce? Are they actually ATTRACTED to each other?"
• I Warned You:
  • In one strip, Calvin has an Imagine Spot of himself as a volcano spewing lava into the air. The last panel reveals that Calvin is frantically gulping down water after having drunk a bottle of chili sauce, while being scolded by his parents.
    Dad: I told you that chili sauce was hot!
    Mom: Yecchh, he spewed it all across the table!
  • In a story arc where Calvin is trying to fix a leaky faucet, Hobbes asks if he's supposed to turn the water off before taking it apart. Calvin calls him a moron because the faucet leaking is why he wants to fix it begin with, right before a torrent of water being spraying him in the face.
    Hobbes: I'll get you some paper and carbons for your written apology.
• I Was Just Joking:
  Calvin: It's too darn hot out here.
  Hobbes: You could go wading in the creek.
  Calvin: (at the creek) This water is too darn cold.
  Hobbes: You could go sit in the shade then.
  Calvin: (sitting in the shade) This shade is too darn dark.
  Hobbes: (exasperated) You could go sit in your room with the windows shut and the fan and lights on.
  Calvin: That's what I was doing when Mom threw me out here.
  Hobbes: I was kidding.
• I Was Quite a Fashion Victim: While we never see what is in the picture Calvin is looking at, apparently in college his dad wore a "Party Naked" T-shirt and his mom looked like a "bimbo." (Bill Watterson himself claims that college yearbooks should have statutes of limitations.)
• I Will Tear Your Arms Off: During the second duplicate story arc, Calvin makes a duplicate of his good-side, but the two end up getting into a fight when the duplicate tries to be nice to Susie. Calvin is angry over the fact that he's being nice to a girl, and the duplicate is angry that Calvin is such a jerk, that Susie doesn't trust him. The duplicate then threatens to rip Calvin from limb to limb. Of course, because he's supposed to be a physical manifestation of Calvin's good side, and he had a bad thought, he immediately vanishes.
• I Wished You Were Dead: Downplayed. In one strip, Calvin wakes his parents up in the middle of the night. The mother, cranky at having been awakened, says she hopes it's because he's sick (as opposed to some trivial reason). When Calvin throws up, however, she guiltily exclaims, "I didn't mean it!".