Calvin And Hobbes / Tropes J to P

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• Jerkass:
  • Moe. He's a Flat Character whose only personality trait is to be as pointlessly mean to Calvin as much as possible, beating him up just for laughs and stealing his money and belongings just because he can.
  • Calvin's teammates and especially the coach during the baseball arc. He becomes bullied (one of them threatens to hit Calvin with a bat) to the point of not wanting to play anymore. The coach's response? "Ok, quitter! Goodbye."
  • Calvin himself can be one several times due to being an egotistical Bratty Half-Pint. For example, he once stole Susie's doll to use as a ransom for $100. He took it even farther by including a photo of the doll tied to a chair with the ransom note. He also knowingly attempted to try and infect Susie with his chicken pox. During one of his stints as Stupendous Man, Calvin dropped a heavy bowling ball-sized snowball on Susie’s head from a tree, too oblivious to realize a stunt like that could’ve seriously injured her. When his mom confronted him about it, he tried to play it off, but his mom wasn’t having any of it. She drilled into him what he could’ve done and threatened to take away his Stupendous Man costume for good if he ever tried something like that again.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Calvin is a lazy, egotistical Bratty Half-Pint, but he's often right about the things he rants about. This often comes into play whenever he talks about the environment.
  • In a similar twist, Calvin views his long-suffering teacher Miss Wormwood as overly cruel and sadistic, and she frequently plays an antagonistic role in his vivid dream sequences. However, in one strip, Calvin declares that he wants an education that will make him successful; Miss Wormwood bluntly tells him that that's up to him, and that it's not her responsibility to give him guarantees: "In that case, young man, I suggest you start working harder. What you get out of school depends on what you put into it." Calvin acknowledges her point and then immediately rejects it.
  • Right before Moe is about to beat him up again, Calvin demands to know why he doesn't pick on someone his own size? Moe simply replies "they'd hit back". Calvin realizes there's a certain unethical logic to that answer.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Calvin's heart is well hidden, but Hobbes being damaged or an injured animal can bring it out. He can also get genuinely remorseful if one of his pranks goes too far.
• Juggling Dangerously: One strip has Calvin asking his mom where they store their chainsaws. When she tells him they don't have any chainsaws, he's really disappointed.
  Calvin: How am I ever going to learn how to juggle?
• Jumping Fish: In one strip, Calvin is fishing and a fish jumps out of the lake and bites him on the butt. He then reacts with ire when Hobbes arrives and innocently asks if the "fish are biting today".
• "Jump Off a Bridge" Rebuttal: Calvin's mom comes up with a much more effective variant that actually convinces Calvin (who never listens to reason) immediately. Calvin says his dad should start smoking cigars because they're all the rage, but Mom says "Flatulence could be all the rage, but it would still be disgusting."
• Jump Rope Blunders: One strip has Calvin jumping rope, going faster and faster, until Hobbes sticks a branch in the middle, sending Calvin flying in circles.
• Jungle Opera: The strip briefly tried its hand at this trope with Safari Al, an imaginary alter ego for Calvin. Evidently, creator Bill Watterson didn't feel there was much there, as he only ever wrote one strip, with Al encountering a giant gorilla (actually Calvin's mother), and Al never became a mainstay of Calvin's imaginary adventures like Stupendous Man, Spaceman Spiff, or Tracer Bullet.
• Just Plane Wrong: In one Imagine Spot, Calvin fantasizes about being an airliner pilot racing another rival passenger plane for access to the runway. He states (in third-person) that "Calvin pulls back on the throttle and lurches ahead". Pulling back on the throttle would slow the plane down, not speed it up. He also states he reaches up to 5 Gs, but civil airliners are not engineered to withstand more than 2.5 Gs. Of course, the whole thing is just happening in his imagination.
• Kaiju:
  • Calvin is established early on as a fan of monster movies, and on two occasions role-plays being Godzilla, once by stomping on a sand castle representation of Tokyo, and once imagining his mom as "his ancient arch-rival Megalon!", whom he "spews a mighty fireball" at (read: spits a mouthful of bathwater at her).
  • One Sunday strip had Calvin imagining himself turning into a three-hundred foot giant that destroyed the town. His mom is not pleased when he asks her to buy more toy cars to replace the ones stomped on in his "rampage". This strip inspired the back cover for the first treasury, where the town is specifically modelled after Watterson's childhood hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
  • A reoccurring Imagine Spot has Calvin imagining himself as a Tyrannosaurus rex rampaging through a supermarket, an art gallery, or through the city.
  • One strip has an Imagine Spot of an ant so big it's able to destroy an entire city in one footstep. It cuts back to reality to show Calvin deciding not to step on an anthill.
• Karma Houdini: Moe constantly tortures Calvin, despite being the only character to whom Calvin never does anything that would warrant such behavior. Although at times Calvin insults Moe anyway, figuring that, if he's going to get beaten, he might as well get the most out of it.
• Kayfabe Music: Referenced in one strip where Calvin asks his mom for the latest album from a "Satan-worshipping, suicide-advocating heavy metal" band. Calvin's mom points out to Calvin that the fact they're still alive means it's all just an act.
  Calvin's Mom: Calvin, 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. It's all for effect. If you want to shock and provoke, be sincere about it.
  Calvin: Mainstream commercial nihilism can't be trusted?!
  Calvin's Mom: 'Fraid not, kiddo.
  Calvin: Childhood is so disillusioning.
• "Kick Me" Prank:
  • A one-off illustration in one of the annual collections has Moe pinning Calvin against the lockers; the former has a note on his back that says "heave a rock at me".
  • One strip has Moe about to beat the snot out of Calvin before Calvin tells Moe there's a note on his back that his mother must have put there that says "somebody run this boy over with a truck". Calvin promptly gets pummelled for it, but he was going to get pummelled either way so he counts it as a win.
• Kids Driving Cars: Calvin sometimes wishes he was allowed to drive the family car, and in one Sunday strip, he has an Imagine Spot where he drives it so fast, it gets airborne.
• Kids Hate Chores: Calvin, obviously. He absolutely loathes having to do any sort of work, and often will do his chores in an intentionally shoddy way to try and make his parents not ask him again. Of course, the joke is that he puts far more energy into complaining and doing an intentionally bad job than if he just did his chores like he was asked.
• Kids Hate Vegetables: Calvin, a Picky Eater in general, hates vegetables and vegetarian meals, claiming to be a a dessertarian. To be fair, most of his mom's cooking appears to be lumpy green sludge — but that might just be Calvin's overactive imagination. He also once complained about having to eat a "slimy asparagus".
• Kids Love Dinosaurs: Calvin often involves dinosaurs in many of his fantasies and daydreams, doodles them during class, and is keen to study them unlike almost any other subject. When his dad asks why he's not interested in school like he is with dinosaurs, Calvin says it's because school never talks about dinosaurs.
• Kids Prefer Boxes: In addition to using cardboard boxes to make all sorts of devices, one time Calvin sent away for a motorized propeller beanie. When it finally arrives, he kicks it away after realizing that it doesn't let him fly around town as he had imagined and prefers to play with the cool cardboard box it came in instead.
• Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films:
  • Calvin, allowed to stay up one night without a babysitter, decides to rent a VCR and a bunch of scary movies. The aftermath:
    Calvin's Dad: Well, the house is still standing. Calvin must have gone to bed.
    Calvin's Mom: His light is still on. Calvin? Are you awake? (opens bedroom door, gets hit by Bucket Booby-Trap) EEP! Did you watch a scary movie?!?
    Calvin: No. Don't come in. The rug is rigged too.
  • After reading a bunch of scary comics in A Nauseous Nocturne, Calvin fears a monster is coming to eat him. He's right.
  • He also gets pretty traumatized after reading a superhero comic where the superhero gets his spine blown in half. He tries to cope by watching TV, but his mom responds "There's too much violence on TV. Why don't you go read something?"
• Killer Gorilla: An early strip has Calvin imagining himself as a Jungle Opera protagonist called "Safari Al", who is captured by a giant gorilla (actually Calvin's mom) who demands that he clean his room ("it's a jungle in here!").
• Kissing In A Tree: Hobbes sings this to tease Calvin in a Sunday comic where it seems he got a valentine from Susie. Turns out the valentine was for Hobbes.
• Kissing the Ground: One Spaceman Spiff strip has the titular space explorer going down in a fiery crash once more, dramatizing Calvin going down a slide on the playground. Calvin kisses the ground after he survives, prompting his concerned teacher to suggest trying the swings instead.
• Knighting: Parodied at the end of one story arc by Calvin's father. Calvin demanded that he be referred to as "Calvin the Bold", and his dad humoured him by dubbing him "Mud" instead, putting an end to it.
• Knock Out Gas: In one Spaceman Spiff Sunday strip, Spiff is overcome by a foggy sedative and almost instantly puts him to sleep. Of course, in real life it's just Calvin complaining about how utterly boring math class is. His teacher isn't amused and sends Spiff to the dungeon (presumably the principal's office).
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Hobbes is always happy to help Calvin with his homework, but he resorts to feigning knowledge about the most basic things. In one strip, he "solves" a basic addition problem by calling the answer Y (as in "Y do we care?") guessing that Y might be a square number, drawing a square, and measuring the diagonal. When Calvin objects that the answer is too small, Hobbes draws a bigger square.
  • Calvin himself in spades as well. He arrogantly thought he could fix a leaky faucet despite not knowing the first thing about plumbing (he actually considered using a hacksaw to take off the faucet head.) He also called Hobbes a moron for suggesting that he turn the water off BEFORE taking apart the faucet, then wound up breaking the faucet and flooding the bathroom.
• Know Your Vines:
  • After Calvin utterly fails a report on plants, he angrily asks what good it does to identify plants while holding a branch. Hobbes then replies "I believe that's poison sumac you're holding."
  • During a family camping trip, Calvin complains about how itchy his mosquito bites are. Hobbes tells him to think about something else, and when Calvin asks what, Hobbes says, "Like maybe stepping out of all that poison ivy."
• Laborious Laziness:
  • In a June 1989 arc, Calvin's mom forces him to clean his room before he can go out and play. Calvin spends far more effort trying to weasel out of cleaning his room or complaining about it than he would if he just did it. He ends making an even bigger mess by just stuffing everything into his closet, only for it to come spilling out like an avalanche when his mom gets suspicious and checks on it.
    Calvin: It's going to take me all day to do this! Ooh, this makes me so mad! A whole day shot! Wasted! Down the drain! Gone! AARGH!
    Hobbes: Are you kidding? How could this possibly take all day?
    Calvin: Heck, it'll be another hour before I'm even through griping.
  • In an August 1989 arc, Calvin didn't want to make his bed, so he and Hobbes spent all afternoon trying to build a robot to do it for him. They couldn't get the robot to work, but since they spent so long on it, the bed never got made. Mission accomplished!
    Hobbes: Wouldn't inventing a robot be more work than making the bed?
    Calvin: It's only work if somebody makes you do it.
  • In a May 1992 arc, Calvin built a time machine to travel two hours into the future and get a copy of his homework from himself after it was already finished. Predictably, it doesn't work.
    6:30 Calvin: Well, since we're you from the past, I suppose you know why we're here. Did you do the homework?
    8:30 Calvin: Me?? No.
    6:30 Calvin: No?! Why not??
    8:30 Calvin: Because two hours ago, I went to the future to get it.
    6:30 Calvin: Yeah, and here I am! Where is it?!
    8:30 Calvin: That's what I said two hours ago!
• Lame Pun Reaction:
  • Calvin explains to Hobbes that he's taking a toy telephone into the woods to "try some bird calls." The next thing we know, the receiver's been wedged into his mouth and the cord is wrapped around his head and body by Hobbes.
  • In another strip:
    Calvin: Hey Hobbes, want to see an antelope?
    Hobbes: An antelope?
    Calvin: Come on! (goes to an anthill) See, she's climbing down the ladder to her boyfriend's car. (beat) You're not laughing.
    Hobbes: It's not funny.
  • In yet another strip, Calvin tells this joke to Hobbes: "What do you get when you cross a cantaloupe with Lassie? A mellon-collie baby!" Hobbes is not amused.
  • Calvin laments that he doesn't have anywhere to dock his toy boat. When Hobbes remarks that Calvin is "a friend without pier" and suggests that he's "under a lot of pier pressure," Calvin responds: "Is there something wrong with you?".
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • Done with Hobbes' tendency to get 'captured' during games with other people, since he can't move when anyone besides Calvin is around. "I've noticed that when we play games with girls, you get captured a lot."
  • There's a strip where Hobbes asks Calvin why he wears "long pants" in the summer. His answer, and the punchline, is "Short pants touch my feet, ok?!"
  • One Spaceman Spiff strip opens with Spiff observing that he gets "stranded on a distant planet" on the regular.
• The Lancer: Hobbes sometimes acts as Calvin's sidekick.
• Large Ham Title: Calvin briefly renames himself "Calvin, Boy of Destiny." Or as he puts it, "Calvin! Boy... of Dessssstiny!". Another story arc had him try to rename himself "Calvin the Bold", which went on until his dad re-dubbed him "Mud".
• Laser-Guided Karma: In one strip, Hobbes hoists Calvin up to a tree branch. Hobbes then decides to take off Calvin's shoes and tickle his feet. Calvin winds up letting go of the branch and falling on top of Hobbes.
• Last-Minute Project:
  • Calvin once had three days to write a three-minute report on the brain, with visual aid. He used a bag of wet noodles for his visual aid and wrote the entire report on the bus the day of the presentation with only a pocket dictionary as research. Predictably, a pocket dictionary doesn't have enough information to fill an entire report, and Calvin tries unsuccessfully to stall for time during the presentation.
  • In one story arc, Calvin manages to totally forget about doing an insect collection despite it being the only thing the class has been talking about for an entire month. He attempts to collect the fifty insects required the morning before class, but only manages to collect four total (or technically, three bugs and a ball of lint that sort of looks like a bug), and is then told by Susie they also need to be organized and scientifically identified. Calvin ends up getting a D— on it.
  • In another story arc, Calvin is given two weeks to make a leaf collection, but intentionally puts it off until the very last night. He's able to pawn off the project to two aliens, but the teacher doesn't believe they're actually extraterrestrial leaves (according to Susie, they just resemble maple leaves cut into weird shapes) and fails him.
  • In yet another story arc, Calvin is partnered up with Susie on an assignment about Mercury (Calvin the god, Susie the planet). Despite Susie's constant, increasingly angry nagging and being given a week to do it, Calvin only starts his half of the project the very morning before class the day it's due. Unsurprisingly, it's not a factually accurate report, and Susie is last seen advancing on Calvin with a clenched fist.
• Last Place You Look:
  • During the break-in arc, Calvin is in a panic, tearing the house apart trying to find Hobbes because he feared his best friend was tigernapped. He failed to find Hobbes, but Mom does - tucked underneath Calvin's bed covers (or lying in bed safe and sound, if you're Calvin).
  • A one-off strip had Calvin look for his coat in every random place in the house before he ends up finding it hung up in the closet (the joke being that a Lazy Bum like Calvin just tosses his clothes wherever, so of course he wouldn't think it put up properly in the closet).
• Last-Second Photo Failure: Calvin's dad sneezes while getting his picture taken at the DMV. They don't let him retake it, leading to his embarrassment and Calvin's excitement.
• Last-Second Showoff:
  • Parodied when Calvin is supposed to write a story for school, but he tells Hobbes that first he needs to be in the right mood — last-minute panic.
  • It's also a gag in this strip; during a game of baseball, Hobbes hits a clear home run, but he takes his sweet time getting back to the plate by smelling a flower, tying his (nonexistent) shoe, hopping backwards, and crawling along the ground, all while Calvin becomes increasingly desperate to tag him out. Hobbes reaches home plate anyway, just as he planned, but the last panel indicates that Calvin made him pay dearly for it afterwards.
• Late for School: Frequently happens to Calvin, as he's often late for the bus or sometimes even intentionally misses it. Of course, part of this is due to the fact that he is Not a Morning Person, and has little motivation to get up since he hates school.
• Late to the Punchline:
  • Finding that his playing cards are not complete, Calvin remarks that he's "not playing with a full deck," to which Hobbes smiles and responds, "That's what everyone says!" Calvin mutters that they should buy a new deck; HOURS later in bed, he sits up in realization and yells, "HEY!" The next day's strip, Calvin mentions that he lost his marbles, to which Hobbes responds, "Everyone suspected as much;" again, Calvin doesn't get it until the middle of the night.
  • In one New Year's resolution Sunday strip, Calvin says he resolves to be more front and centre with his thoughts and feelings when talking with others, prompting Hobbes to sarcastically reply that Calvin's certainly " been the model of self-restraint and understatement up until now". It takes three panels for Calvin to understand Hobbes was making fun of him.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: For almost all of the strip's run, Hobbes was the only talking non-human character who appeared in the "real" world as opposed to in Calvin's Imagine Spots. This changed two months before the strip ended, when two aliens named Galaxoid and Nebular were introduced.
• Latex Perfection: Two strips had Calvin imaging his parents were alien invaders disguising themselves as humans with rubber masks. In one of them, he's convinced they must be disguises because their faces "sag and don't fit" in the morning.
• Laughing Mad: Calvin once got a little too excited when making a snowball, to the point where he freaked himself out and wondered if he hadn't "tapped into some primeval well of the human psyche."
• Lead In: Subverted late into the strip's run. After Watterson was able to negotiate greater creative freedom, the Sunday strips became one complete strip with no pre-joke that could be cut out.
• Laugh Track: One strip had Calvin try and make his life more like a television show by adding his own musical score and laugh track to the conversation.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The October 15, 1995 Sunday strip, which ran just two months before Calvin and Hobbes ended its ten-year run, has Calvin and Hobbes watching the leaves fall from the trees and wondering whether or not fall is beautiful or melancholy.
    Calvin: I dunno...I think autumn is melancholy. Summer is over and in a week or two, everyone will be hunkered down for the long, bleak winter. Nothing lasts. Fall is just the last fling before things get worse.
    Hobbes: If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?
  • In one strip, Calvin complains to his dad about how obnoxious, foolish, and dimwitted the characters in the newspaper comics are and how there should be more politically correct, morally-upstanding characters in the funnies. Notably, Watterson received a lot of complaints about how mean Calvin's parents were, so this easily be seen as a jab towards those readers.
    Calvin's Dad: Yes, we all know how funny good role models are.
    Calvin: And look, all the kids are obnoxious brats!
• Learning to Ride a Bike: A Running Gag is Calvin having trouble learning to ride his bike, which he imagines as a sentient, evil bike. Bill Watterson loved biking and shared that passion with Calvin's dad, so Dad was trying to share his passion with his son. The series Book Ends with Dad finally putting training wheels on the bike and Calvin finding peace with the dread machine.
• Leaving Food for Santa: The throwaway joke of the Christmas Day 1988 strip has Calvin telling his dad that he's leaving out a sandwich for Santa. Calvin then asks whether Santa would like some milk with it, and his dad responds, "I think 'Santa' would rather have a cold beer," much to his mother's annoyance.
• Lethal Chef:
  • Calvin's mom, in Calvin's mind. Though her cooking really is usually depicted as a formless mass of goo on a plate, it's Calvin who often imagines her dishes having lethal consequences or unspeakable ingredients. At one point, even Calvin's dad (after some comments by Calvin) demands to know what exactly it is he's eating, and that whatever it is, he's not eating it (it's supposed to be stuffed peppers). In this particular strip, Calvin refuses to eat his dinner, so his Mom mentions that it's monkey brains. Calvin, naturally, is eager to try it, but now Calvin's dad has apparently lost his appetite...
  • Another strip had virtually the same thing happening, this time with rice.
  • Yet another had a variation of the joke, in which it's Dad who tries the Reverse Psychology by whispering to Calvin in a confiding tone that he's right not to want to eat the food since it's actually toxic waste that will turn him into a mutant. Calvin gobbles it all up greedily in a fantastic flash. Mom remarks that there simply has to be a better way to make him eat.
  • It also seems to run in the family. One story arc involves Mom getting sick and unable to cook dinner. Dad takes her place in one strip:
    Dad: Since your mom is sick, I'll be cooking dinner tonight.
    Calvin: YOU can cook?
    Dad: Of course I can cook. As you can see, I survived two years of my own cooking when I had an apartment after college.
    Calvin: Mom says you ate canned soup and waffles three meals a day.
    Dad: Your mom wasn't there, so she wouldn't know. Get the syrup out, will you?
  • And then there was the strip where Calvin tried to make breakfast in bed for his sick mom:
    Calvin: I made toast, orange juice, and eggs for you all by myself!
    Mom: Oh, that's wonderful, Calvin!
    Calvin: The eggs got burned and kind of stuck to the pan, but you can probably chip them out with this chisel.
    Mom: Um... Where is the toast and orange juice?
    Calvin: Dad said not to tell you about that until you're all better.
  • In one strip, Calvin tries to make pancakes. We see him dropping whole eggs, still in the shells, into the batter and pouring the whole bowl into the frying pan at once instead of in portions.
• Let's Meet the Meat: In one early story arc, Calvin has to play an onion for the school play and talk about how nutritious onions are.
• Let Off by the Detective: Played for Laughs in one of the Tracer Bullet stories where he was investigating who broke his mom's lamp.
  Calvin: [as Tracer Bullet] I had figured out who trashed the dame's living room, but since she wasn't my client anymore, I felt no need to divulge the information. Besides, the culprit happened to be a buddy of mine. I closed the case.
  Hobbes: [holding a football] I guess we should've played outside, huh?
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Calvin's plan to ambush Susie with water balloons badly backfires and he gets soaked by her hose. He then orders Hobbes that this ignominious incident is not to be recorded in the G.R.O.S.S. log book.
• Library Episode: One early story arc has Calvin being assigned to do a report with Susie on the planet Mercury, and has to go to the library with her to do research. Calvin, of course, ends up wasting their time in the library by doing things like drawing aliens, and when he actually does give his report, it's clear that all of his time in the library accomplished nothing.
• Lies to Children:
  • This is a Running Gag with Calvin's Dad from as the page quote illustrates, but always taking it so far from reality it can hardly count as helpful. He also explains the workings of a light bulb and vacuum cleaner as "magic".
  Calvin: [turns lamp on and off] Look, mom, magic!
  Calvin's mom: That's not magic!
  • Lampshaded in the strip the page quote comes from. After a Beat Panel, we get Calvin commenting to Hobbes about how "The trees are really sneezing today." Calvin himself decided he didn't care to hear the true, complicated answer.
  • He hilariously lampshades the trope and plays it straight in one strip where he tells Calvin that the reason he knows so much is because once you become a father, you get a book that explains everything in the world, which leads to this exchange:
    Calvin: Can I see it?
    Dad: Nope.
    Calvin: Why not?
    Dad: It tells you what it's like to have a kid.
    Calvin: SO?
    Dad: You aren't allowed to know that until it's too late not to have one.
  • Both of Calvin's parents had some pretty unique ways to get him to eat his dinner. Early in the strip, when he wouldn't eat, his dad told him "that's a good idea, Calvin, because it's a plate of toxic waste that will turn you into a mutant if you eat it." He couldn't finish fast enough. While his mom objected to it that time, she did it herself in later strips, telling him that stuffed peppers were "monkey heads", that the rice in soup was maggots, and that her casserole was "spider pie" (unfortunately, while such methods convinced Calvin to eat, they made his dad lose his appetite).
• Life Embellished: In-Universe. In one strip, Calvin writes an autobiography, but he tells Hobbes that it's a fictional biography where he has a flamethrower.
• Life Isn't Fair: In one strip Calvin laments how the world isn't fair, not because there isn't equality, but because it's never unfair in his favour.
• Lightmare Fuel: Due to Calvin being a six-year old boy with a big imagination, he regularly holds conversations with hideous things under the bed who want to eat him. There's also the time his dad told him a bedtime story that wasn't Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey again. It involves a disembodied hand that strangles people. And then there was the time Calvin created a demonic living snowman with two heads that wanted to kill him. This never goes beyond family-friendly.
• Like You Were Dying: In one story arc where Calvin thinks the sun is going out, dooming life on Earth (it actually just winter coming), Calvin tells Hobbes he won't act any different because he's always lived every day like his last. Hobbes tells him that would be inspiring, if that sentiment had come from anyone besides Calvin.
• Lilliputians: One strip involves Spaceman Spiff landing on an alien planet, to find himself standing on tiny geometric farmland, and comes across a sprawling metropolis with skyscrapers an inch tall. This leads him to reflect that human size is by no means a standard for alien life... and of course, a blimp-sized monster appears to menace Spiff (in reality Moe making fun of Calvin for observing an anthill).
• Limited Wardrobe: Calvin typically wears a red and black striped shirt with black pants and white and purple shoes, although a couple of colored strips have shown he owns many other clothes that we never see him wear. Moe usually wears a black shirt and white pants. Everyone else changes outfits regularly.
• Literal Genie: Calvin likes to carefully interpret things people say, especially commands, so that they seem to encourage him to do what he wants.
• Literal Soapbox Speech: Spoofed when Calvin retrieves a small, cardboard soap box to stand on so he can "harangue the multitudes."
  Hobbes: You'd probably be more impressive if you tried using the soap.
  Calvin: Let me know if you see any multitudes.
• Literally Prized Possession: In one storyline, Calvin eats multiple boxes of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs so he can send away for a beanie hat. He then waits for what seems (at least to him) like forever and suffers through trying to assemble it (and the trauma of thinking he broke it), because, being an imaginative kid, he thinks the beanie will enable him to fly. When it doesn't, it comes as a major disappointment.
• Literal Metaphor: One strip has Calvin and Hobbes drop a few of these in regards to some literature Calvin is perusing.
  Hobbes: How's your book?
  Calvin: I can't put it down.
  Hobbes: Gripping?
  Calvin: You said it!
  Hobbes: Maybe you should wash your hands.
  Calvin: It's peanut butter mixed with bubble gum.
• Literal-Minded:
  • Calvin exhibits this in one strip where Susie points out a cloud in the sky and asks what it looks like, with Calvin replying that it looks like "a mass of suspended water and ice particles". Calvin's comment in the last panel ("Everybody hates a literalist," while smiling to the reader), implies he was doing this on purpose.
  • Similarly, after he saw a cloud take the form of his own head giving him a raspberry, he decided that it was an omen. Of "very peculiar high altitude winds, I guess... You know, some sort of cumulonimbal thing." Quoth Hobbes: "Science kinda takes the fun out of the portent business."
• Literally Falling Through the Cracks: In one strip, Calvin's bubble bath tries to drown him, only to be defeated when Calvin pulls the plug, resulting in the monster being sucked down the drain with the rest of the water.
• Littering Is No Big Deal: Subverted when the pair go to Mars, Calvin leaves a candy bar wrapper on the ground but picks it up when Hobbes points it out to him (which is part of the story's Green Aesop).
  Calvin: Yep, Mars may be a little dull, but it's better than Earth. We've got a whole planet to ourselves. Brand new and unspoiled. No people. No pollution. Nothing but rugged, natural beauty as far as the eye can see.
  Hobbes: That's not your candy bar wrapper over there, is it?
  Calvin: It was just there a minute! I wasn't going to leave it.
• Little Known Facts:
  • Calvin occasionally asks his dad to explain some natural phenomenon, and his dad will draw on his vast knowledge of the real world as a patent attorney... And come up with something completely ludicrous instead. Behold his wisdom! A typical example:
    Calvin: Why does the sun set?
    Dad: Because hot air rises. The sun's hot in the middle of the day, so it rises high in the sky. In the evening then, it cools down and sets.
    Calvin: So why does it go from east to west?
    Dad: Solar wind.
    Mom: (off-panel) Dear!
  • Most of the time he just does this to screw with Calvin's head. Watterson was not a parent while the strip was running, but he imagined parenthood would be filled with this temptation.
  • Granted, he did choose to provide an interesting lecture on relativity, using a record player to illustrate his lesson. Calvin ended up unable to sleep, with his brow knitted from trying to understand that.
• Little Miss Snarker: Susie Derkins.
  Calvin: War is a manly art!
  Susie: I suppose anything so idiotic would have to be. Can I play in your game or not?
  Calvin: I don't know, it seems you'd rather be making smart remarks.
• Little Professor Dialog: One of the prime examples of this trope, to the point where it almost becomes a Running Gag. Watterson explained in one author's foreword that his favorite thing about Calvin was "his ability to precisely articulate stupid ideas."
• Living Clothes: In one Sunday strip, Calvin's clothes came to life and attacked him when he opened the dresser, dressing him in his tackiest clothes and then moving his body to make him to walk to school that way.
• Living Toys: Maybe... Hobbes might be an animated stuffed tiger, or it could be all in Calvin's imagination. Calvin, though, doesn't think that Hobbes is a Living Toy; he thinks he's a real (anthropomorphic) tiger. (Albeit a real tiger that gets put through the washing machine whenever Calvin's mom deems it necessary.) The comic is deliberately ambiguous about Hobbes' true nature.
• Lobotomy:
  • When Susie tells Calvin she enjoys going to school to learn, Calvin stares closely at her before declaring: "Your bangs do a good job of covering up the lobotomy scars."
  • After Hobbes cuts Calvin's hair and messes up, he tries to cover it up by tying a cloth around his head. While Hobbes thinks he looks like Lawrence of Arabia, Calvin thinks he looks more like a lobotomy patient.
  • Calvin pretends to be giving one to a pumpkin while carving it into a jack-o-lantern.
  • Susie abruptly ends a playdate in the snow with Calvin in disgust when Calvin begins sawing into the brain of the snowman the two built together.
• Locked in the Bathroom: In one strip, Calvin takes Rosalyn's science notes when she is babysitting him and locks himself in the bathroom with them, threatening to flush them down the toilet. Rosalyn ignores Calvin for a while and, thinking she has gone to call the fire department to axe open the door, he comes out to see the fire trucks.
• Long List: Calvin's Christmas lists. They've been shown to be so long that he needs to divide them into two volumes (Volume One: "Atom Bomb" through "Grenade Launcher") and create cross-referencing indexes for accessory items, and that they cost him $2.50 worth of postage just to mail.
• Look Behind You: Calvin did this twice to his parents to escape dinner. Once by pouring his portions onto his mom's plate while her head was turned, and the second time by just running away.
  Calvin's Dad: What did he see?
  Calvin's Mom: An opportunity.
• Look Both Ways: The exact theme in a road safety poster contest that Calvin enters, to which his slogan is "Be careful or be roadkill!" While his father's suggested slogan is just a full-sentence rant about something else entirely but still related to road safety, his mother's is something much more coherent and tamer:
  Before you cross, look each way, and you'll get home safe each day.
• Look Ma, No Plane!:
  • In one story line, Calvin thinks a motorized propeller beanie will let him fly, complete with fantasy sequence where he waves at a plane. Another Sunday fantasy has his parents letting him drive the car, and he drives so fast he breaks the speedometer, goes airborne and passes a jet.
  • Another strip had Calvin pretending he was the plane complete with a fantasy of him flying through the air with his arms out like a plane's wings. According to his mom, he was just running around in circles with his arms out in the backyard until he got sick (at that point, he was pretending the plane was stuck in a holding pattern.)
    Calvin: From now on I'm playing "bus".
• Loophole Abuse:
  • When asked to explain Newton's First Law of Motion in his own words, he answers the question by interpreting the requirement touse "his own words"... creatively:
    Calvin: [writing] Yakka foob mog. Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. Chumble spuzz. [aloud] I love loopholes.
  • Another example:
    Miss Wormwood: (After Calvin has, as usual, been daydreaming:) Pay attention! Now, what state do you live in?
    Calvin: Denial!
    Miss Wormwood: (sigh) I don't suppose I can argue with that... (Calvin happily goes back into his daydream.)
  • When Calvin's mother tells him to get in the tub, he does so — fully clothed, without running any water. She closes the loophole pretty quickly though.
  • One G.R.O.S.S. meeting had our heroes drafting a list of what girls were "good" for. Calvin exploded when Hobbes suggested they were good for "smooching", and after the ensuing fistfight Hobbes reminded Calvin that his Mom kissed him goodnight the night before. Calvin was mortified, realizing that Mom is "sort of" a girl, and Hobbes pointed out that under club rules he should be excommunicated. Instead, they amended the club's rules to say that smooching a girl is acceptable if it's your mother.
• Lopsided Dichotomy:
  • From a Tracer Bullet story:
    "Either she had a psychotic decorator, or her place had been ransacked by someone in a big hurry."
  • Another earlier in the series:
    "Either Mom's cooking dinner, or someone got sick in the furnace duct."
• Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: Happens to Calvin a lot, usually either when he's hit by a snowball or pounced on by Hobbes. One time he was stripped all the way down to his underwear, which certainly confused his mother.
  Calvin's Mom: I don't understand why you have to take your clothes off to play cars. It's very weird.
  Calvin: Just give 'em here, ok?
• Lost My Appetite:
  • Calvin's mom offers him a jelly doughnut out of a paper sack. Calvin refuses because the jelly always comes out the far side whenever he bites into them, like a giant bug with its guts falling out. Mom glances aside as she pushes the bag away: "And my friends wonder how I stay so thin..."
  • In one strip, Calvin asks his mother if hamburgers are made out of people from Hamburg. When his mom informs him hamburgers are made of beef, the knowledge he's eating cow meat disgusts him and he tosses his burger aside.
  • This happens periodically when Calvin's mom tricks Calvin into eating dinner by saying something nasty in it. While Calvin digs in, Calvin's dad gets grossed out and doesn't even want to open his mouth anymore.
• Lost Toy Grievance: Sort of. Hobbes is a person to Calvin, but looks like an inanimate toy to everyone else.
  • In an early story arc, Hobbes is stolen from Calvin by a dog, and Calvin spends the week trying to find him. Unbeknownst to Calvin, Susie already found Hobbes and, not realizing he belonged to Calvin, took him to her tea party.
  • Calvin and his parents have an overnight trip where Calvin forgets to bring Hobbes along. He spends the entire trip complaining about leaving Hobbes behind, but once they come back, they find the house has been robbed. Calvin's parents are freaking out over the fact someone broke into their home, but Calvin only worries something happened to Hobbes. Fortunately, Hobbes was just hidden under Calvin's blanket.
  • In another story arc, Calvin steals Susie's doll for a ransom, only for Susie to retaliate and steal Hobbes while his back is turned. Calvin is forced to fork over both the doll and twenty-five cents to get Hobbes back.
• Lots of Luggage:
  • Used in the 05/22/86 strip when Calvin is on a camping trip with his Boy Scout troop.
    Hobbes: Grab the hot dogs and come on! The troop's cooking dinner over the fire.
    Calvin: (rummaging in the tent) Oh, that's just great. Here we've been lugging this dumb microwave around for nothing.
  • Another Boy Scouts strip had Calvin and Hobbes hiding in his tent from bogeymen, with their surroundings completely illuminated by rows of spotlights strung up and powered by a generator they'd been lugging through the woods.
• Loves Secrecy: In one arc where Calvin wants to be a tiger, he reads from a book that tigers are secretive. Hobbes then claims to know many secrets and refuses to tell any to Calvin, which drives him crazy. Eventually Hobbes tells Calvin one of his "secrets", which is that his parents bought him at the flea market for a nickel.
• Loving Bully: Calvin does this to Susie from time to time. Hobbes calls him on it but Calvin claims he really does hate her. This is coupled with Author Appeal due to how well the characters bounce off each other due to the "weirdness repels" dynamic. Calvin acts weird to get Susie's attention, Susie's repulsed by it, and Calvin takes this as a cue to act even stranger.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Calvin enters a traffic safety poster contest at school with a poster covered in chunky spaghetti sauce to represent the messy gore of someone who's been run over.
  Calvin: Drawn in patent-pending "3-D Gore-O-Rama," this picture will actually attract flies, because the drawing is splattered with spaghetti sauce! I can see you're all just sick about your chances of winning.
• Ludicrous Gift Request: It's a Running Gag that Calvin always asks Santa for absurdly unsafe items for Christmas, mostly high-calibre weapons like atomic bombs and missile launchers. He also asks for an absurdly large quantity of items, making lists so big they need to be shipped in a box rather than an envelop.
  Calvin's Mom: You're going to be one sad kid on Christmas morning.
• Lured into a Trap:
  • In one G.R.O.S.S. story arc, Calvin attempts to trick Susie into getting ambushed with water balloons using Reverse Psychology. However, Susie is nowhere near dumb enough to fall for such obvious bait and instead tricks Calvin into getting soaked when she doesn't show up and goes out looking for her.
  • In another story arc where Susie is staying at Calvin's house for a few hours, Calvin manages to trick Susie into the closet by putting a tape recorder playing his voice inside proclaiming how he's stuck in the closet.
  • A one-off strip had Calvin put down a series of signs telling people there's an important message under a tree, where he's sitting in the branches ready to drop a giant snowball on them. The strip shows Susie falling for it and only realizing she's been tricked when the last sign says "Look out!".
    Calvin: It's like shooting fish in a barrel.
• Lurid Tales of Doom:
  • Calvin occasionally poses as a reporter of sensationalistic stories based on shameless fabrications or ludicrous exaggerations. He introduces one show-and-tell presentation: "UFOs! Are they real?? Have they landed in our towns and neighborhoods?" In another strip, he wants to create a newspaper to report on household events such as his mom preparing a fish dinner: "KNIFE WIELDING MOTHER HACKS ICHTHYOID!"
  • Calvin selects one of these stories for an assignment where he's supposed to read and explain a newspaper article in class.
    Hobbes: "Space alien weds two-headed Elvis clone."
    Calvin: Actually, there's not much to explain.
• Machine Worship: Parodied once when Calvin pledges undying worship of . . . the television.
  Calvin: This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it to you in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever!
• Mad at a Dream: After having a dream that his parents were replaced by aliens who were experimenting on him, Calvin greets his mother at his next meal with a great deal of suspicion.
• Mad Libs Catchphrase: Calvin's Dad has "[Whatever Calvin's complaining about] builds character." Eventually, Calvin parodied it by combing down his hair, taking his father's glasses, and yelling, "Calvin! go do something you hate! Being miserable builds character!" which dad, annoyed, admitted was Actually Pretty Funny (Calvin's mom, meanwhile, was literally on the floor, laughing uproariously).
• Made from Real Girl Scouts: There's one strip where Calvin asks his mom if hamburgers are made out of people from Hamburg.
  Mom: Of course not! It's ground beef.
  Calvin: I'm eating a cow?
  Mom: Right.
  [Beat]
  Calvin: I don't think I can finish this.
• The Magazine Rule: Calvin subscribes to Chewing, a magazine devoted entirely to chewing gum. Calvin describes it as "high-gloss, literate, and sophisticated" in comparison to Gum Action, targeted more to the "Gonzo" demographic, and Chewers Illustrated which targets vintage gum collectors. Word of God says that these were direct parodies of the half-dozen biking magazines Watterson himself subscribed to, and his thoughts on the matter were pretty clear, judging by Hobbes' reaction:
  Hobbes: What kind of nut would care about all this?!
  Calvin: Everyone! This is hard data. It lets you quantify your enjoyment.
  Hobbes: I thought fun was supposed to be fun.
  Calvin: Well, I prefer to trust the experts.
• Magical Realism: A textbook case. The strip seamlessly blends a mostly-realistic setting with things like time machines, Transmogrifiers, Duplicators, and aliens (not to mention possibly Hobbes as well).
• Magic Carpet: One story arc had Calvin and Hobbes taking the hall rug for a joyride. Hobbes worried about hurting the resale value with this extra mileage. At one point they flew it by Calvin's dad's office window to say hello, but they couldn't get him to look up.
• The Magic Poker Equation: In one strip, Calvin and Hobbes are playing poker. While deciding his next move, Calvin notices Hobbes' tail suddenly thrash about wildly. Calvin quickly folds, much to Hobbes' exasperation.
• The Magnificent: Calvin enjoys giving himself grandiose titles:
  • Calvin the Bold.
  • Calvin, Boy... of DESSSSTINY (cymbal crash).
  • Calvin the Super Genius.
    Hobbes: This is how you sign your reports?
    Calvin: It kinda encourages you to read them more charitably, don't you think?
• Mail-Order Novelty: One plot arc has Calvin gorge himself on Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bomb cereal to collect enough proof-of-purchase seals to order a propeller beanie, believing it to be a real Hat of Flight. When he finally gets it, his test flight is an immediate disappointment, so he tosses it aside and happily plays with the box instead.
• Major Injury Underreaction: One Sunday strip did a parody of Dark Age comic books, in which a character having a huge hole blasted through his torso narrates: "I could feel my spine shatter. It hurt... a lot."
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context: One strip involved Calvin's mom rushing in to stop him from hammering nails into their coffee table. When asked what he was doing, Calvin stared at the coffee table for a moment before responding "Is this a trick question or what?"
• The Maker: One Sunday strip has an Imagine Spot where Calvin pictures himself as a cruel and malevolent god who created the entire universe. The last panel shows he's just playing with Tinker Toys.
• Makes Us Even: In one story arc, Calvin "kidnaps" Susie's Binky Betsy doll and demands a $100 ransom for her return. Susie leaves an envelope by a tree as the note said, but instead of money, Calvin finds a note simply saying "Now we're even!" Calvin is confused, but then sees Susie running off with Hobbes.
• Making a Spectacle of Yourself: In one Sunday Strip, Calvin tried to persuade his mom to buy him some Cool Shades that any troper would testify were from the same manufacturer as Kamina's.
• Malicious Misnaming: Moe tends to refer to Calvin as "Twinky." This is presumably unconnected to the word's modern usage as a slur.
• Mama Bear: Calvin's mother can and does do this whenever Dad's teasing goes too far:
  Mom: I know somebody who's going to get a lot of coal in his stocking, buster.
• Mammoths Mean Ice Age: In one of Calvin's Imagine Spots, a sudden ice age hits the world overnight, covering it in ice and snow and providing excellent sledding opportunities. Calvin realizes what is going on when he sees, besides a glacier covering a large part of his town, a herd of woolly mammoths passing by his house.
• The Man in the Moon: Referenced in one strip where the moon makes goofy expressions at a bewildered Calvin.
  Calvin: I saw the man in the moon tonight.
  Calvin's Dad:(not paying attention) Mmm.
  Calvin: I didn't know the moon made faces.
  Calvin's Dad:(still not paying attention) That's "phases".
• Manipulative Editing: Invoked in one strip where Calvin attempts to establish a fictitious childhood by having Hobbes take pictures of him out of context so it looks like he is always behaving that way. Hobbes gets him back by threatening blackmail unless Calvin lets him read his comic books.
• The Man Is Sticking It to the Man:
  • The strip has a take on this:
  Calvin: Mom, can I have some money to buy a Satan-worshiping, suicide-advocating heavy metal album?
  Mom: Calvin, 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. It's all for effect. If you want to shock and provoke, be sincere about it.^note Paradoxically, many heavy metal bands have used Calvin's mother's argument to their own ends, as a defense of their free speech rights. When Judas Priest were accused of inserting secret messages into one of their songs to persuade listeners to commit suicide, they retorted that making their fans kill themselves would be counterproductive to the band's fortunes, since no one would be left alive to buy Judas Priest albums.
  • Calvin was impressed by a shoe commercial with a rock climber who'd quit his job to go climbing. Hobbes dissects it immediately, asking how he could afford the shoes without a job, while ridiculing his status as a rebellious individual since he urges people to all buy these shoes.
  • Our heroes discuss how Rock & Roll pretends to be rebellious, but the stars are either 45-year old zillionaires or they endorse soft drinks. Instead of listening to that, Calvin prefers easy-listening muzak, which he considers protest music for today's youth because it drives his parents nuts. He even plays it real quiet, too.
• Man-Made House Flood:
  • One strip has Calvin calling his dad at work, apparently to make small talk. The final panel reveals the real reason he's calling: He somehow managed to flood the house, and the waterline is high enough to reach the top of the ladder that Calvin is currently on. In another, Calvin manages to turn the stairs into a waterfall. Unlike the previous example, we see how the waterfall happened; Calvin was horsing around in the bathtub.
  • Another time, Calvin calls Dad at work, but Dad is very busy and tells Calvin to hang up unless he's calling about something really important. Calvin hangs up, looks at the overflowing sink that is rapidly flooding the kitchen, and decides that this should qualify as "really important" in about 15 minutes.
  • Still another example: Calvin rapidly swims back and forth in the bathtub and then happily exclaims: "Tidal wave!" Cut to Mom standing in knee-deep water on the bathroom floor and Calvin saying he doesn't know how this happened, maybe the seal around the tub leaks.
  • Yet another example, Calvin gets caught in a giant bubble due to using too much bubble bath and it pops causing water to cover the floor.
    Calvin's Mom: How on Earth do you do this??!
    Calvin: These things just seem to happen.
• Mars and Venus Gender Contrast: Calvin believes this, because he's at that age. At one point when witnessing Susie (gasp!) doing her homework, he finds the idea of doing it voluntarily so strange that he dubs girls "the gender from outer space!"
• Mars Needs Water: Parodied in one infamous strip with a poem Calvin wrote about a Flying Saucer stealing the Earth's water and air.
• Mars Wants Chocolate: In one strip, Calvin disguises himself as an alien in another attempt to get some cookies.
  Calvin: Greetings, earth female. Do not be alarmed. Our planet is dying. We need cookies to survive. Do not interfere or you will be destroyed.
  Calvin's Mom: We'll see about that. Get back here.
• Marshmallow Dream: Hobbes and his "weasel dreams". Occasionally, it would be Calvin who gets torn up instead of the pillow.
• Mathematician's Answer: One exchange between Calvin and Hobbes ends up running into difficulties due to the clash of Calvin's philosophical streak and Hobbes' extreme forthright prosaicness.
  Calvin: Why do you suppose we're here?
  Hobbes: Because we walked here.
  Calvin: No, I mean here on Earth.
  Hobbes: Because Earth can support life.
  Calvin: No, I mean why are we anywhere? Why do we exist?
  Hobbes: Because we were born.
• Mating Dance: Referenced (in the biological sense) in one strip when Calvin asks his father whether he did a mating dance when he met Calvin's mother (like the one Calvin saw a couple of birds doing in a nature documentary on TV). After Calvin shows him a rather vigorous reenactment of the birds' mating dance...
  Dad: Yes, that's more or less the way I reacted.
  Mom: To what, buster? Think carefully.
• Matter Replicator: When Calvin introduces his cardboard-box duplicator to Hobbes, he notes that "counterfeiting is just one of its many uses around the home!" However, he only seems to use it to clone himself.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: One of the crucial setting elements of Calvin and Hobbes is the fact that Calvin seems to exist in a much more fantastical world than everyone else, but whether or not it's just an overactive and escapist imagination at work or some sort of personal aura of childhood innocence and wonder manifested into reality that only Calvin can see is left intentionally ambiguous, as the writing is done in a way that the two aspects rarely intersect in a way that could allow the reader to come to a concrete conclusion.
  • This aspect of the story is further muddled by the fact it occurs on a spectrum; there are fantasy sequences which clearly only occur in Calvin's imagination (such as the Spaceman Spiff stories), but other fantasy sequences seem to be "real", yet no one else notices them (such as the duplicator stories). The former provides both evidence for and against the latter being real, as it shows that there is a difference between what Calvin is making up and what he considers "real", but at the same time it also shows he can be very committed to an imaginary adventure, even when no one else plays along, thereby implying the "real" fantasy sequences could also be imaginary.
  • Many of the fantasy sequences can only occur due to the fact no one else aside from Calvin and Hobbes is around to witness it. When Calvin is playing baseball with Hobbes, no one else is around to confirm how it's possible a stuffed animal is throwing the ball at Calvin. The same with Calvin and Hobbes going to Mars in their little red wagon, or Calvin being lifted into the upper atmosphere by a single helium balloon, or the pair being visited by aliens while collecting leaves; it's impossible to confirm or deny that they occurred because there's no one around to see it.
  • The existence of Hobbes. Is he real, or an Imaginary Friend? Everyone else sees Hobbes as merely being a inanimate stuffed animal, but to Calvin he's a living, breathing anthropomorphic tiger just as real as the tigers at the zoo. The fact that people refer to Hobbes as a stuffed animal to Calvin's face, and that Hobbes is repeatedly cleaned in the washing machine and sewn up with thread never registers with Calvin, muddling the question (even Watterson himself admits that this is a "grey" area), and the fact Hobbes himself doesn't actually seem to know a lot about tigers. Debate on this question rages on, though Watterson has said it misses the point and Hobbes' nature is a matter of perspective.
  • Some of the more surreal events of the strip. Was Calvin actually abducted by aliens and replaced by a robot double? Did he truly hijack the spaceship of a shape-shifting alien who took his place? How about the Snow Goons? Or the monsters under his bed? They could all be credited to Calvin's imagination, but there's never any proof that they're not real. Hobbes once wrote a good story for Calvin's homework assignment, and Calvin honestly had no idea what it was about until he read it to his class, though critics use this as proof of Calvin being mentally ill.
  • The monsters in the bed are a strange example, because Calvin absolutely considers them to be real, but they come and go from seemingly nowhere and just as often Calvin goes to bed with no complaints. Why they never seem to come up from under the bed to eat Calvin is another oddity, for which the easiest explanation is simply that Calvin is imagining them. But then again, would he really be imagining them to the point that he would throw garbage under the bed to keep them placated?
  • In three different strips, a leaf pile Calvin's dad raked up turns into a monster that tries to eat Calvin. Two of the instances can easily be explained as Calvin jumping into the leaf pile and scattering them everywhere, but the third instance had the leaf pile crawl away and ambush Calvin from a tree, with even Calvin's dad bewildered how the pile could've disappeared. The strip ends before any sort of "reasonable" explanation is given on how Calvin could have removed a giant leaf pile so quickly.
  • Stupendous Man flew to a tree branch ten feet above the ground to drop a snowball witnesses state was the size of a bowling ball onto Susie Derkins. A cubic foot of well-packed snow weighs over twenty pounds. How could Calvin possibly have gotten it up a tree — much less dropped it onto Susie's head — without her noticing his presence in a red superhero costume with ground-trailing cape? Although skeptics could suggest that a combination of Toon Physics and Rule of Funny were at play, since Calvin's mom didn't see anything particularly weird about it.
  • In one time-travelling story arc, Calvin and Hobbes use their cardboard box to go back to the Jurassic Period and take photos of dinosaurs. To Calvin's mom, it just looked like Calvin was sitting in a cardboard box for several minutes, but Calvin justifies it as the fact they came back using the time machine to only a few moments after they left. When Calvin's dad sees the photos, they just look like small plastic toys. There's also the conundrum that Calvin's mom didn't see Calvin take the photos of dinosaurs, yet he still has them, although you could say that Calvin simply took the photos while she wasn't looking.
  • One story arc has Calvin ask Hobbes to tie him to a chair so that he can break free. Calvin is tied so tight that his parents are stumped as to how he got himself into the situation, despite Calvin's insistence that Hobbes did it. Additionally, there's the fact that Calvin can't escape and Hobbes is either unwilling or unable to free him; is it really because Hobbes got distracted reading through Calvin's Cub Scouts manual or because, as an imaginary friend, he literally can't untie Calvin?
  • There are a few occasions in the strip where a photo is taken from a perspective that makes very little sense given Calvin's circumstances unless Hobbes is real. Calvin takes a picture of Hobbes "pouncing" on him that shows Hobbes flying through the air with seemingly no outside force; the photo could have been timed or a friend possibly could've thrown Hobbes, but of course Calvin has no friends. Hobbes' taking a photo of Calvin mid-sneeze is flat-out impossible for the boy to have done by himself — setting the timer on the camera correctly would be extremely difficult to do and we can see Calvin's hands in the photo. Heck, it makes Hobbes pretty impressive; catching someone mid-sneeze would be an impressive feat for a professional photographer. That said, no one else except Calvin and Hobbes sees the photo so one could still say the picture was imaginary.
  • One strip has Susie see Calvin fighting Hobbes, which to her looks like Calvin's rolling in the dirt and grappling with a stuffed animal, and losing. Even she admits that she can't explain that one.
  • The story arc where Hobbes goes missing has Susie find him and decide to hold a tea party, which is where Calvin finds and reclaims Hobbes. Calvin is in front of Susie and in her line of sight the whole time, but when she turns back to her tea party all of the cookies are gone.
  • Calvin is terrified of his bicycle and convinced that it wants to kill him. An easy explanation is that he's creating malicious fantasies to justify his fear of falling off the bike, yet on one occasion the bike is "hiding" in his room in an apparent ambush. Could Calvin have overcome his fear enough to move his bike in order to set up an imaginary attack, and then seemingly repressed the memory of having done so, when he normally runs away from it as a matter of course? In another case, Calvin's helmet has bike treads on it, which would've meant he somehow ran himself over repeatedly if the bike wasn't alive, although you could interpret it as cartoonish exaggeration. In yet another strip, even Calvin's dad is perplexed at just how often Calvin gets clobbered trying to ride the bicycle, musing about middle ear issues. On the other hand, the one time Calvin's dad accompanies Calvin in teaching him to ride the bicycle, it never acts up even once, and never does so ever again.
  • In one story arc, Calvin makes an intelligence-enhancing device that temporarily grants him Super-Intelligence. However, he never displays any greater intelligence than normal outside of using more complicated words in dialogue, and never uses the device again despite how useful it would be for him. The same could be said of inventions like the transmogrifier, the time machine, and the duplicator, which are described as having so many useful applications, like duplicating money, going to the future, or turning into a giant monster, but Calvin never seems to use them for such. The only reasonable explanation seems to be just that they were imaginary, but then again, would someone like Calvin, who absolutely hates being good, pretend to be a morally superior clone just for the sake of a bit?
  • Several Sunday strips show Calvin having been abducted by aliens and then Cutting Back to Reality to show Calvin subsequently explaining to others that it was the aliens' fault he was causing trouble because they replaced him with an evil double or sucked all the math knowledge from his brain. Whether they actually happened as shown, or we're merely shown a visualization of Calvin's blatantly made-up cover story is left ambiguous. Numerous other stories could also be interpreted like this; we're only being shown a visualization of Calvin's imagined excuse for what happened rather than actually seeing it as it happened. Some story arcs show that Calvin tends to lie a lot when attempting to get out of trouble, and prove that he does make up ridiculous scenarios to mundane situations (such as blaming Hobbes or aliens for causing the bathroom tap to burst).
  • Several situations have other people come to different, totally mundane explanations to what Calvin is doing. In one story arc, Calvin's baseball is suddenly a monster that's trying to eat Calvin. His baseball bat is covered in gnarled dents which Calvin says are bite marks, but Calvin's dad thinks that Calvin is just using the bat to hit rocks. His collection of fifty "alien leaves" is seen by everyone else as just fifty maple leaves cut into weird shapes.
  • On the other hand, it's incredibly convenient that Calvin's fantastical escapades never line up with what anyone else is seeing or end just as someone else comes into the situation. When Calvin's been transmogrified his mom still sees him as a regular boy, occasionally Hobbes gets cleaned in the washing machine and stitched back up despite Calvin thinking of him as a real tiger, when he showed his dad pictures of dinosaurs he took when he went back in time to the Jurassic, they just looked like plastic toy dinosaurs to him, during the arc where his personal gravity is reversed, he suddenly and inexplicably reverts back to normal the moment his mom appears, in the arc where Stupendous Man supposedly "vaporized" Calvin's school still followed up with Calvin continuing to go to the same school afterwards, it goes on and on.
  • Much of the application of this trope exists mostly due to the limited scope of the comic strip format. Because everything snaps back to normal after every story arc or singular strip, the reader never sees if the consequences will actually stick or how the situation could possibly work if it were actually happening as Calvin was seeing it. For example, the duplicator arcs never seem to answer how Calvin is eating, sleeping, or going to the bathroom if he's hiding under the bed all day while a duplicate is doing it all, but only because the story doesn't even bother addressing it.
• May I Borrow a Cup of Sugar?: The usual order of events is inverted in the June 3, 1990 strip (with the joke coming first), in which Susie Derkins goes over to Calvin's house and finds him caught up in one of his "Stupendous Man" fantasies, deciding to just leave after he runs off to continue it. It's not until the last panel shows her coming home that we find out it's this trope, when her mother asks "Did they have an egg you could borrow?", and Susie claims nobody was home.
• Meaningful Name: Averted in early strips. The characters both share the names of philosophers, but a read through the early strips shows that any real significance once the strip itself got philosophical is a coincidence. (Calvin was, in fact, originally going to be named Marvin until a strip of the same name launched.) Later characterizations played this trope straight. John Calvin was a theologian who believed in predestination, similar to how Calvin often ponders destiny and blames his faults on other forces. Thomas Hobbes was a philosopher who after going through the English civil war wrote the book Leviathan, which advanced a very dim outlook on human nature. Likewise, Calvin's tiger often finds problems with humanity's stupidity, saying that tigers are superior. Other parallels exist, as well.
• Measuring the Marigolds: In one two-part comic, Calvin sees a cloud turn into his head sticking its tongue out at him. He tells Hobbes that it must be an omen, but an omen of something completely mundane.
  Calvin: I saw a cloud that looked just like me!
  Hobbes: Really?
  Calvin: There was my head, huge and white, floating in the ethereal blue! Obviously it's a sign!
  Hobbes: Of what?
  Calvin: Very peculiar high altitude winds, I guess.
  Hobbes: Science kind of takes the fun out of the portent business.
  Calvin: You know, some sort of cumulonimbal thing.
• Meatgrinder Surgery:
  • Calvin makes carving a pumpkin sound like this:
    Calvin: OK, JACK, TIME FOR YOUR LOBOTOMY!! Hand me a big spoon, will you, Hobbes?
    Hobbes: Ugh! No anesthetic even.
  • Another strip had Calvin doing this on a snowman. Susie was too grossed out to join in.
• Media Scaremongering: Parodied in one where Calvin's dad was watching "Eyewitness Action News", which aimed to tell its audience ''why YOU should be paralyzed with helpless fear!" He turns off the television and reads the newspaper instead.
• Menagerie of Misery:
  • Hobbes hates the zoo and sees it as equivalent to a prison for animals, as shown in one strip, when Calvin asks to go to the zoo, Hobbes asks Calvin if they can visit a prison afterwards.
  • In one story arc in which they actually go to the zoo, Hobbes feels sorry for the animals because they don't have much room to move and can only sleep until they are fed. Calvin then points out that is all Hobbes does.
• Mental Picture Projector: In one Sunday strip, aliens abduct Calvin and hook his brain up to a computer monitor where they bring up all of Calvin's (incorrect) math knowledge and delete it from his cranium... or so Calvin says to his teacher.
• Mental Story: Even leaving aside the question of whether or not Hobbes is real, a lot of stories take place in Calvin's imagination.
• Merchandise-Driven:
  • A repeating gag is that Calvin, for all his artistic pretension, definitely wants in on the market share.
    Calvin: Look at the dopey clay tiger Hobbes made.
    Calvin's Mom: Gee Calvin, I think this is good.
    Calvin: You LIKE it?? Where's the marketabiity?
    Calvin's Mom: Ask Hobbes if we can put it on the coffee table.
    Calvin: But look what I made! A hundred shrunken heads of popular cartoon characters!
    Calvin's Mom: Eww, you stitched their mouths shut?!
    [beat]
    Calvin: Gloat now, 'cause some day I'll be a lot richer than you.
    Hobbes: I call it "Symphony in Orange, No. 1".
  • Calvin's dad especially rails against the consumerism of mass media, a viewpoint that mirror's Watterson's own.
    Calvin's Dad: Our lives are filled with machines designed to reduce work and increase leisure. We have more leisure than any man has ever had. And what do we do with this leisure? Educate ourselves? Take up new interests? Explore? Invent? Create?
    Calvin: Dad, I can't hear this commercial.
    [Calvin is thrown outside]
    Calvin: If it were up to my dad, leisure would be as bad as work.
    
    Calvin's Dad: How can you stand these cartoons? They're just half-hour commercials for toys. And when they're not boring, they're preachy. And these characters don't even MOVE. They just stand around blinking! What kind of cartoon is THAT?
    Calvin: Meet my dad, the Gene Siskel of Saturday morning TV.
    
    Calvin's Dad: Watching a Christmas special?
    Calvin: Yep.
    Calvin's Dad: Another show extolling love and peace interrupted every seven minutes by commercials extolling greed and waste. I hate to think what you're learning from this.
    Calvin: I'm learning I need my own TV so I can watch someplace else.
• Mercury's Wings: One story arc has Calvin and Susie required to give a school presentation on the planet Mercury. Calvin's section on the mythology of Mercury starts out okay but quickly goes off the rails.
  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.
• Me's a Crowd:
  • Subverted in the duplicator machine arc. Calvin tries to make copies of himself to do his homework for him, but since they all have his personality, the copies don't want to do it either. Calvin is so egotistical he never even considered this possibility. He eventually gets tired of them constantly getting him in trouble and turns them into earthworms (they're okay with this, however).
  • Played straighter when Calvin tries again with morality setting on the duplicator, and makes a "good" clone which willingly does all his homework and chores without any reward. Unfortunately, Calvin and the clone eventually come to blows and he disappears in a Puff of Logic when he states his intentions to tear Calvin limb from limb.
• Mess on a Plate: Calvin's mom's cooking is usually presented as unidentifiable lumps of mush, although it's likely a case of Unreliable Narrator from Calvin's perspective to visually convey that he tends to imagine his mom's cooking being lethally disgusting no matter what it is.
• Messy Maggots: Inverted in one strip, where Calvin's mom persuades him to eat his dinner by telling him they're maggots. Calvin being a Nightmare Fetishist, it works.
• Meta Twist:
  • In one strip, Calvin opens the door, shouts that he's home, and Hobbes doesn't tackle him into the yard like he usually does. Calvin finally finds Hobbes sitting nonchalantly, and gets no more reaction out of him than an acknowledgment: "So you're home." Another later strip is similar, although in that case, it was because it was so cold out Hobbes didn't want to get out of bed.
  • In one later arc, Calvin creates a good version clone of himself to go to school and do all his chores. However, the arc starts off after this initial event has happened, so the audience is dropped into it just as suddenly as Calvin's mother, who, just like the viewer would be, is extremely confused why "Calvin" is suddenly polite and well-groomed.
    Bill Watterson: The humor of this story depends on the reader being familiar with Calvin's personality, so I could only do this sort of thing after the strip was established. Writing is most fun after readers are willing to enter the strip's world on its own terms.
  • The final arc with Rosalyn, Calvin's Badly Battered Babysitter, ended with this. Calvin's schemes against Rosalyn had gone on for years at this point, so when she shows up again, readers expect more of the same...except in this instance, Rosalyn tells Calvin that if he behaves himself and does his homework, she'll play any game he likes with him and even let him stay up past his bedtime to do it. Calvin naturally chooses Calvinball, and Rosalyn ends up picking up the rules quickly. They have a great time playing, and Calvin keeps his end of the deal by going to bed when she says so. It's even lampshaded when Calvin's parents arrive home expecting the usual horror stories and instead find Rosalyn with nothing but praise for him.
  • Done In-Universe in one of the many instances of Calvin hiding to avoid a bath. While he normally chooses extremely bizarre places to hide—including up the chimney, on the roof, or inside a vacuum cleaner bag—in this case he selects somewhere he knows his mother will never look: inside the empty bathtub.
• Metaphorically True: At the end of the last Stupendous Man story arc, Hobbes asks Calvin if Stupendous Man has ever won a single battle. Calvin says they're all "moral" victories, because otherwise he'd never have any victories at all.
• Metaphorgotten: In two different story arcs, Calvin tries to solve a math problems by visualizing them as elaborate fantasy scenarios—only for extraneous details of the fantasy to lead Calvin to the completely wrong conclusion.
  • A math pop quiz opens with "6 + 5 = ?", so Calvin imagines Spaceman Spiff dragging the sixth planet of the Mysterio system and crashing it into the fifth planet. The smaller Planet 5 is completely obliterated, leaving just Planet 6. So Calvin concludes "6 + 5 = 6".
  • When given how long it takes two cars to pass each other and asked how far apart they must have started, Calvin imagines this as a case that Tracer Bullet was hired to solve. Susie's refusal to share her answer with Calvin gets reframed as Bullet's usual stool pigeon, "the Derkins dame", being too scared to talk. Bullet realizes his two drivers must be part of a "numbers racket", and whoever's responsible must be powerful enough to scare the Derkins dame into silence. Bullet consults his case files for a number big enough to fit the profile, and concludes it can only be "Mr. Billion". Therefore, the two drivers started a billion miles away from each other.
• Midair Motion Shot: Both Calvin's wagon and the family car are often shown bouncing in the air to suggest motion (especially in earlier years.) The television is also shown bouncing in midair when Calvin watches it.
• Minimalist Cast: Downplayed. With the exception of the main duo, there's only a handful of reoccurring characters (Calvin's parents, Susie, Ms. Wormwood, Moe, Rosalyn, Principal Spittle, and Calvin's doctor). This is particularly true in the later half of the comic's run, when Watterson stopped depicting background characters. Fantastical characters like snow goons or duplicates kept being introduced, but the story intentionally keeps it ambiguous whether they're real or just products of Calvin's imagination.
• Minor Injury Overreaction:
  • In one strip, Calvin skins his knee, and he starts screaming, hopping on one leg, and clutching in knee in agony... until he realizes there's no one even paying attention to him, at which point he walks calmly back to his house, and resumes his melodramatic performance in front of his mom.
  • One trip to the doctor has him receive a vaccination shot. As Calvin is deathly Afraid of Needles, he reacts with all the severity that one would expect, much to his mother's embarrassment.
    Calvin: AAUGHH! IT WENT CLEAR THROUGH MY ARM!! Ow ow ow ow!!! I'm dying! I hope you've paid your malpractice insurance, you quack!! Where's my mom??!
  • Calvin tends to react this way whenever he's stung by a bee or other insect (often because his imagination turns them into a Big Creepy Crawly), at one point asking his mother to bandage up the wound from the "harpoon" that "gored" him.
• Miranda Rights: Parodied. Mom sends Calvin to bed, but he comes right back downstairs to play with his toys. When Mom confronts him, he says, "You didn't read me my rights."
• Mirror Monologue: Susie is hit by a snowball, which was obviously thrown by Calvin. After getting trashed by her after she asked if he did it (Answered Calvin: 'Who, me?!'), he's next shown practicing various ways of saying "Who, me?" in front of the mirror like a snowball-throwing 6-year-old Travis Bickle.
• Misanthrope Supreme: Calvin's fantasies often tend in this direction.
  "I'm sick of everyone telling me what to do all the time! I hate my life! I hate everything! I wish I was dead! ...Well, no, not really. I wish everyone else was dead."
  • At one point, Calvin fantasized about being an ancient god who brings whole worlds into existence and torments those who don't appease him. "The doomed writhe in agony!" The only thing keeping the strip from being mega-creepy is the fact that it ends with the reveal he's playing with Tinkertoys.
  • Unintentionally invoked in a Sunday strip in which a daydreaming Calvin uses an F-15 to bomb his school off the face of the Earth. Watterson, upon receiving angry letters about how depicting such a thing was inexcusable, commented that some readers must have never been children themselves.
• Misery Builds Character: Calvin's dad would often invoke this phrase whenever Calvin (or his mom) complained about their current activity. Bill Watterson stated in the tenth-anniversary book that he took this trait directly from his own father.
  • In an arc where Moe successfully pressures Calvin to play baseball at recess, Calvin's dad has the idea to help him practice, because "it builds character." He hits a grounder to Calvin, and it bounces up into his face, leaving him with a nosebleed and a desire to never play baseball again.
    Calvin: All by charagder id drippig out by node!
  • The actual Trope Namer phrase came from somewhat of a parody of this — Calvin finds his father's glasses and uses the phrase in an impression of his father funny enough that his mom was falling out of her chair with laughter.
    Calvin's Dad: OK, the voice was a little funny, but that's still one darn sarcastic kid we're raising.
  • One strip points out that the concept of building character itself is a turnoff for Calvin. After being forced outside by his father, he and Hobbes wind up busy catching fireflies by the time he calls him back inside. After being lectured about how this experience has benefited him (despite not being a miserable one), he later grumbles that nothing ruins the fun in something like being told that it builds character.
  • Humorously subverted in this strip. The man who firmly believes that Misery Builds Character can only be pushed so far.
  • Another strip subverts it when Calvin asks why they can't turn up the thermostat.
    Calvin's Dad: Consuming less fuel is better for the environment and it saves money.
    Calvin: Oh.
    Calvin's Dad: ...and being cold builds character.
    Calvin: I knew it!
  • In a Sunday strip, Calvin is being dragged along by his parents for a walk in the snow-covered outdoors for what feels like hours to him. When Calvin complains about the frigid weather making his toes numb, his dad tells him, "Numb toes build character." Calvin isn't reassured:
    Calvin: Yeah? Well, what about frostbite?! What about hypothermia?! What about death?! I suppose those build character too! I can't believe I'm out here!
  • One one-shot strip has Calvin concluding in a talk with his dad that anything and everything bad he does is everyone else's fault and seeing himself to be nothing more than an innocent pawn living in a toxic society. His father's response is that clearly he needs to build more character and to go shovel the walk to start that.
  • In the strip that currently provides the page image, Calvin begins to suspect an ulterior motive in the fact that his father forces him to shovel snow and "build character" instead of buying a snowblower.
    Calvin: Funny how every time I build character, he saves a couple hundred dollars.
• Misplaced Wildlife: An early strip has hippos and crocodiles in the Amazon (it's caimans that live there, which are more like alligators.)
• Missing C Hild: The time Calvin got lost on a trip to the zoo. His dad guessed correctly that he had found his way to the tiger pit, but wound up running all the way there when the (not wholly unreasonable) thought entered his head that Calvin might be trying to get into the tiger pit.
• Mistaken for Brooding: In one strip, Calvin finds his mother tearing up because she's cutting an onion. When she tells him about this, he thinks she's Mourning an Object.
• Mistaken for Pregnant: In one early storyline, Calvin's mom is sick, and Hobbes wonders if she's pregnant. Calvin later asks his parents, and his dad mentions that if she was, she'd look like "a hippopotamus with a gland problem".
  Calvin: ...That's when Mom creamed him with her pillow. Dad says she must be feeling better.
  Hobbes: You have weird parents.
• Mistaken for Related: One Story Arc has Calvin and his parents going to the zoo. While there, Calvin follows a woman he assumes is his mom around, and only realizes she's not his mom when she's revealed to have light hair and glasses (Calvin's mom has brown hair and no glasses). He apparently thought she looked like her from the legs down.
• Mistaken from Behind: In one strip, Calvin is following his mom around the zoo. When he tugs on her skirt to ask her a question, she turns around... and it's not his mom. In fact, the woman isn't even wearing the same blouse as his mom, only the same skirt.
  Strange woman: Are you lost? What does your mom look like?
  Calvin: From the knees down, she looks just like you.
• Mobile-Suit Human: A strip wherein Calvin trips down the stairs has him crewed by little spaceman versions of himself, who forgot to open the blast shields on the viewports and overcompensated when they found out where they were (in "reality", he was simply too tired to open his eyes and missed the first step).
• MockGuffin: One story arc had Calvin trying to find dinosaur bones in his yard. He ended up digging up a bunch of random trash, but until his mother pointed it out, he had no idea that there was something fishy about the "Calvinosaur" having a bottle for a skull, tin cans for a spine, and forks for arms.
• Modern Stasis: Spoofed in a strip from early 1990, which begins with Hobbes remarking that The '80s are over and The '90s have begun. But Calvin is unimpressed, because there are still no flying cars or moon colonies, and humans still haven't learned how to control the weather. Hobbes notes that "The problem with the future is it keeps turning into the present."
• Modified Clone: After Calvin's first attempt at cloning went predictably awry because he couldn't control his clones, he installed an ethical switch on the duplicator and made a clone of his good side. The clone eventually poofed when he threatened Calvin with violence over their irreconcilable views on Susie.
• Moment Killer: One Christmas Eve comic has Calvin's parents reflecting on the holiday season together next to the fireplace now that they've finished all their Christmas responsibilities and Calvin's asleep. Their peace is interrupted when Calvin suddenly appears next to them with a fire extinguisher, outraged that the fireplace is burning.
  Calvin: WHAT'S THIS?! SANTA FLAMBÉ??
• Mondegreen Gag: In one strip, Calvin intentionally mondegreens the pledge of allegiance at school as "I pledge allegiance to Queen Fragg, and her mighty state of hysteria...", and getting in trouble for it.
• Monochrome Casting: Every single human character, including nameless background characters, are white. It's more obvious in the colored strips, but nobody in the black-and-white ones had any pen shading for darker skin. The fact the deuteragonist is an anthropomorphic tiger does make it less noticeable, however.
• Monochrome Past: Discussed in one Sunday strip. Calvin asks his dad why old photos are in black and white, and Dad explains that the world used to be in black and white before the 1930s ("and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too"). His dad Hand Waves the fact that old paintings use colors that supposedly didn't exist back then; as to why the photos didn't turn to color with everything else, the explanation that they're color photos of a black-and-white world.
• Monochrome to Color: One Sunday strip was drawn in black-and-white (without lines even) as a visual metaphor for Black-and-White Morality, with only the last panel being colored after the metaphor ended.
• Mono no Aware: In one Sunday strip, Hobbes invokes this when he says fall is his favourite season. The fact that it's a transitional season makes it easier to appreciate how precious it is. Calvin doesn't agree and thinks everything should always be good so he can take it for granted.
• Mooching Master: Calvin thinks this trope is in effect with regards to his father making him do chores.
  Calvin: Pretty convenient how every time I build character, he saves a couple hundred dollars.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The poem "A Nauseous Nocturne" has Calvin, certain that a monster really will get him in the night this time, bidding a sad goodbye to a sleeping Hobbes...only to realize that, wait a second, he has a fearsome tiger in bed with him who he can use to get rid of the monster, whereupon he yells frustratedly at Hobbes to get up. "HEY! WAKE UP, YOU STUPID CRETIN! YOU GONNA SLEEP WHILE I GET EATEN?!" Hobbes wakes up and scares off the monster.
  • Rosalyn's last appearance has her make Calvin an offer, but he's too busy screaming at her to pay attention until she mentions that he'll also be allowed to stay up half an hour past Calvin's bedtime. Cue Calvin instantly sitting down quietly.
• Mooning: Calvin mentions he had no choice but to do this to the class when he accidentally ripped the seat of his pants and Miss Wormwood, not knowing what had happened, made him go up to do a math problem on the board (he was too embarrassed to tell her why he didn't want to go up). He then comments to Hobbes that he ended up getting to go home early from school because several teachers and the principal couldn't restore order afterwards.
• Moral Guardians: Calvin finds some of their reports "very disturbing" — where's the "million murders on television" he's supposed to be seeing?
• Moral Myopia: Calvin is a master of this sort of thinking. When he throws a snowball/water balloon at Hobbes or Susie, it's hilarious, but any time either of them retaliate by doing the same thing, they're selfish jerks for not playing along. The fact he's a Small Name, Big Ego factors into this: since he believes himself to be the greatest human who ever lived, he also believes he should get extra special treatment.
• Morality Dial: The "Ethicator" that Calvin added to his second Duplicator. He makes a "good" duplicate of himself that is compelled to do good things like brush his hair, do his homework, get up without being asked, and answering questions at school correctly. It also prevents the duplicate from doing evil by instantly destroying him the second he has an evil thought.
• Morally Superior Copy: Enforced when Calvin duplicates only his good side (after learning from his first time copying himself). Unfortunately for him, his good side turns out to have a crush on Susie, horrifying the original Calvin.
• Most Common Super Power: The strip is the Trope Namer, but doesn't itself contain any examples. The trope name comes from a strip where Calvin and Hobbes are discussing comic books (in a manner which makes it clear it's a veiled Take That!).
  Hobbes: Is Amazon Girl's super power the ability to squeeze that figure into that suit?
  Calvin: Nah, they all can do that.
• Most Writers Are Adults: The strip played this to excellent effect, with him sometimes wise beyond his years, and sometimes just being hyper-articulate about his various selfish whims. To quote Watterson, "Calvin has never been a literal six-year-old.", and he reflected more on his life as an adult than when he was a child.
• Mouth Stitched Shut: In Troubling Unchildlike Behavior incident #2,048, Calvin once made a hundred mini clay heads of popular cartoon characters with their mouths like this. Probably for the best we weren't able to see it in detail.
• Mr. Imagination: Calvin. More than half the time, he's in his own little world trying to escape the harshness and boredom of reality.
• Mr. Vice Guy: Calvin is a selfish, short-tempered, arrogant powder keg that makes his parents and teachers reach for Maalox by the quart... but also intelligent, insightful, imaginative, and demonstrates a true love of animals and nature in his dear friend and Morality Pet Hobbes. Hobbes may also qualify, considering how he constantly attempts to attack and needle Calvin, just as often as he demonstrates his friendship.
• Multiple-Choice Past:
  • In the first strip, Calvin catches Hobbes in a rope trap and this is treated like their first meeting, but the cartoonist later changed his mind and decided that it was now unknown when they met. Hobbes once claimed that Calvin spent most of his infancy burping and spitting up, hinting that they knew each other since Calvin was a baby. Seeing as Hobbes is probably an Imaginary Friend, it's possible that Calvin simply imagined Hobbes knowing about his infancy, though.
  • Calvin's dad invokes this by telling conflicting lies about where Calvin came from. In one strip, he claims he and his wife bought him at a discount from Kmart, in another he says that Calvin was dropped from the chimney by a big hairy pterodactyl.
• Mundane Afterlife: The afterlife is never shown in the strip, but its nature is pondered several times. As seen in the page quote, Hobbes once suggests Pittsburgh as the afterlife (Calvin doesn't know if it's heaven or hell), and once states that he thinks that in Heaven, you play saxophone for an all-girls cabaret in New Orleans.
• Mundane Ghost Story: Calvin has hiccups and asks Hobbes to tell him a scary story to cure him.
  Hobbes: OK, our oceans are filled with garbage, we've created a hole in the ozone that's frying the planet, nuclear waste is piling up without any safe way to get rid of it...
  Calvin: I meant surprise me.
  Hobbes: That doesn't? Boy, you're cynical.
• Mundane Object Amazement:
  • Calvin shares with Hobbes his bafflement at the workings of a toaster — where does the bread go?
  • Calvin digs for buried treasure in the back yard and is thrilled to find rocks, a root, and some grubs: "There's treasure everywhere!"
• Mundane Wish:
  • In a Sunday strip, Calvin asks Hobbes what he'd wish for; Hobbes says he wants a sandwich. Calvin doesn't understand why and wishes for enormous wealth. Hobbes gets his wish, and Calvin obviously does not.
  • Another strip had Calvin ask a similar question, to which Hobbes replies that he'd wish for "a big sunny field to lie in." Calvin is aghast at how mundane this is, but then observes Hobbes sleeping in the grass. "Actually, it's hard to argue with someone who looks so happy."
• Murphy's Bed: This happens to Calvin when he tries to lie in a hammock and he imagines he is a fly trapped in a spider web. Hobbes decides not to join Calvin in the hammock.
• Music/Age Dissonance: Subverted, twice.
  • When Calvin buys a record from a band whose songs "glorify depraved violence, mindless sex, and the deliberate abuse of dangerous drugs". When Hobbes predicts Calvin's mom throwing a fit, Calvin tosses the record into the trash since that's the main reason he got it.
  • Calvin asks his mother for money so he can buy a Satan-worshiping, pro-suicide metal album. She explains to him that they're Only in It for the Money, which is enough to put him off the idea.
    Calvin's Mom: Calvin, 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. It's all for effect. If you want to shock and provoke, be sincere about it.
    Calvin: Mainstream commercial nihilism can't be trusted?!
• Mustache Vandalism: Discussed by Hobbes. Calvin's scheme to avoid getting attacked by Hobbes when he comes home by putting a dummy of himself in front of the door backfires, with Hobbes inviting the dummy inside and locking the real Calvin out. Calvin then overhears Hobbes asking the dummy: "May I draw mustaches on all the superheroes? I may? Oh joy!"
• Mutually Assured Destruction: One early Sunday strip had Calvin and Hobbes playing war with Calvin as the "fearless American defender" and Hobbes as the "loathsome godless communist" (the strip did originally run during the Cold War). Calvin says if they get shot by the other's dart gun they're dead. The game starts, both shoot and immediately hit the other at the same time.
  'Calvin: Kind of a stupid game, isn't it?
• My Brain Is Big: This happens to Calvin when he invents a "thinking cap" to make himself smarter. It ends up shrinking back to normal a few hours later, to the detriment of his assignment.
• My Future Self and Me: Calvin's third and last adventure with the time machine features three Calvins, from only a two-hour timespan (the "original" from 6:30 PM, one from 7:30 PM, and one from 8:30 PM).
• My Life Flashed Before My Eyes: Calvin, falling to his apparent death after his balloon carries him up to the sky before popping, says, "They say when you're falling, your life is supposed to flash before your eyes. The problem with being 6 years old is that my life won't take very long to watch. Maybe I can get a few slow-motion replays of the time I smacked Susie upside the head with a slushball."
• Mystery Meat: Anything Calvin's mom cooks tends to come out looking like a plateful of green sludge. Calvin disdainfully calls it "toad stroganoff" in one Sunday Strip. However, in one strip, Calvin's mom tells him that it's "spider pie"; Calvin, being a Nightmare Fetishist, is persuaded to taste it again and actually approves, though his dad still doesn't want to try eating it. She tries the same trick in another strip, calling stuffed peppers "monkey heads" (with much the same result- Calvin happily eats it, but his dad rejects it).
• Naked People Are Funny: Calvin often finds any reason he can to strip down outside, such as one comic where it was too hot out, another where he decided to shed his humanity, and one where he was trying to fly and took off his clothes to lighten himself.
  Calvin's Mom: Mrs. Carroll says a naked kid tied to a stuffed animal is running through her yard.
  Calvin's Dad: You handle it. I got the little nudist out of her bird bath, remember?
• Named After Somebody Famous: Calvin and... Hobbes.
  • Following in this convention, in one strip Calvin invents a fake little brother named Melville to try to trick extra presents out of Santa. Hobbes is just as confused by the choice of name as the reader probably will be.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Doom Drop, Pallbearer's Peak, Dismemberment Gorge, Lookout Hill (which is not named for its view; rather, the name comes from Hobbes's tendency to yell "Look out!" while sledding down the hill), Mount Maim and Suicide Slope. These are the names Calvin gives to the various cliffs and hills he and Hobbes go down in the sled or the wagon, depending on the time of year. Possibly a joke on Watterson's hometown (and ambiguously the setting for the comic; see Where the Hell Is Springfield?) of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
• Name-Tron: One arc has Calvin invent a device called a Cerebral Enhance-O-Tron to enhance his brain when he needs to write an essay for school.
• Nap-Inducing Speak: Inverted in one strip. Calvin decides to count all the rocks he can find. Next panel he's up to a several-hundred trillion and one. Then he wakes up since it was All Just a Dream.
  Calvin: Wow, I bored myself awake.
• The Napoleon: In one summer strip, Hobbes asks Calvin why he's wearing long pants on a hot day and wonders why he doesn't wear short pants instead. Calvin immediately gets very angry. When Hobbes asks him what's wrong, a frustrated Calvin screams, "Short pants touch my feet, okay?!"
• Narrative Profanity Filter:
  • Used in one strip when a board game between the title characters turns into an Escalating War.
    Calvin's Mom: Isn't it cute how Calvin plays both sides of Monopoly with his stuffed tiger?
    Calvin's Dad: I dunno... I overheard him using words he didn't learn in this household.
  • A different strip has Calvin writing words in the snow with boot prints. Cut to his dad at the window, reading: "'My... dad... is... a... big...' HEY!"
  • Yet another strip involves the tail end of a Horrible Camping Trip, when the non-stop downpour finally ends just as Calvin's family is about to pack up and go home.
    Calvin: Did you know what any of Dad's words meant?
    Hobbes: No, but I wrote them down so we can look 'em up when we get home.
  • The opening of a 1987 Sunday strip has Dad reading a home improvement guide before fixing the sink.
    "Before beginning any home plumbing repair, make sure you possess the proper tools for the job.
    "Check the following list of handy expletives, and see that you know how to use them."
• National Geographic Nudity: Parodied in one strip, where Hobbes claims he only reads the trope namer for the hot tigress babes. Calvin is confused, since he can't tell the difference between male and female tigers.
• Naughty Is Good: Calvin is hardly a perfect angel, but the strip just wouldn't have been nearly as good if he had been better-behaved. This is proven when Calvin creates a "good" duplicate of himself, who is only interesting as a contrast to the ordinary Calvin.
• Necro Non Sequitur: One strip sees Calvin playing in the sandbox, as he narrates an unlucky man about to be the simultaneous victim of a plane crash, a runaway train, a fissure, and an explosion.
  Calvin: At 35,000 feet, the engines of Flight 430 explode for no reason! With plumes of dense smoke trailing from the wings, the giant aircraft plummets out of control! Meanwhile, a 50-car freight train hits a penny on the rail at 80 miles an hour and jumps the tracks, dragging half a million tons of metal into the air behind it! In a freak coincidence, both the jet and the train are converging on ONE SPOT.... where tectonic plates in the earth's crust have just begun to shift! That spot is the house of farmer Brown, who, at this moment, is unaware of a gas leak as he attempts to light his stove! As he strikes the match, he casually glances out the kitchen window.
  Calvin: His eye twitches involuntarily.
  Hobbes: Can't we play something else?
• Negated Moment of Awesome: In the arc where Calvin plays baseball during recess, he catches a fly ball... only to discover too late that his team was actually batting (and boy do his teammates rip on him about that).
• Negative Continuity: Spaceman Spiff apparently suffocates to death in one of Calvin's daydreams, but still reappears later on. Then again, it is just a daydream...
• Neologizer: In one strip, Calvin tells his dad that since the meanings of words are arbitrary, he can intentionally make dialogue unintelligible to others by replacing words with other random words. Of course, Calvin's dad knows this isn't exactly a new idea...
  Calvin: Don't you think that's totally Spam? It's lubricated! Well, I'm phasing.
  Calvin's Dad: (making a peace hand sign) Marvy. Fab. Far out.
• Nested Mouths: , Calvin once built a giant "snow snake" out of snow and pretended he was being swallowed by it, claiming that "horrible inner jaws" were dragging him into its gullet, since its visible mouth clearly wasn't moving. Susie wasn't fooled.
• Never Heard That One Before:
  • In the "Calvin's Good Side" story arc, Good Calvin say something similar.
    Good Calvin: Strictly speaking, I'm not Calvin. I'm the physical manifestation of Calvin's GOOD side.
    Susie: If that was true, you'd be a lot smaller.
    Good Calvin: Boy, have I heard THAT joke a lot.
  • The "Nutrition and the Four Food Groups" play arc had Susie apparently sick of people making a predictable joke about her role:
    Calvin: What are you?
    Susie: I'm "fat."
    Calvin: No, I mean in the play.
    [Next panel: Calvin is lying on his back.]
    Susie: ANYONE ELSE WANT TO SAY IT?
• Never My Fault: Calvin will invent entirely new realities rather than admit he made a mistake in this one. He also tends to blame others for his getting in trouble. He's also a big fan of any sort of philosophy that absolves him of responsibility for his actions, such as astrology and fatalism.
  • In an early story arc, Calvin tattles on Susie for passing notes in class (although it was mostly only because she passed a note insulting him). Both of them get sent to the principal's office and spend the whole time blaming each other for getting them in trouble.
  • Calvin tells his dad that his "overall dad performance" rating got very low yesterday because he didn't get dessert that day. Calvin's dad has to, rather angrily, remind Calvin that he didn't get dessert because he flooded the house. Calvin still doesn't get it.
  • Calvin demands that his dad pay a toll to put the into the garage. When his dad asks why he should pay Calvin money to put his car into his garage, Calvin says he'll activate the garage door as he drives in otherwise. Calvin gets sent to his room as punishment, but he just blames his dad for being a cheapskate.
  • Very, very often, Calvin will play some mean prank on another character (Susie, Hobbes, or one of his parents, most oftenly) and then after they get mad at him, he blames them for not having a sense of humour.
  • Calvin is speeding down a hill on roller skates out of control, frantically asking Hobbes how to stop. Hobbes yells out that he should steer into a gravel driveway and fall down. Calvin does so and is promptly mangled almost beyond recognition; Hobbes immediately downplays his part by saying it "was only a suggestion".
  • After Calvin causes another huge mess which results in a waterfall going down the stairs, Calvin's dad tells his wife he's going to see what "your kid" is doing. Calvin's mom is not too pleased by the way he phrased it.
    Calvin's Mom: MY kid?!? C'mere and let me explain something to you...
  • Calvin calls Susie a "booger-brain" after school, which caused her to go home in tears. Calvin feels bad about it, but refuses to admit fault for a while, being extremely reluctant to apologize and laying the blame on Susie for taking the insult personally.
  • Calvin's Sore Loser tendencies also stem from this rather often, as he'll come up with as many reasons as possible why outside factors forced him to lose rather than simply being bad at the game, such as saying the opponent must have cheated somehow.
  • Often, Calvin will blame his teacher for giving him an assignment which is far too much work, or he'll blame his parents for not providing him the necessary resources to get a good grade, but it's totally obvious to everyone else the only reason he struggles to finish the assignment is because he always procrastinates to the last possible second.
    Calvin's Mom: This is your school project, Calvin. You do the work.
    Calvin: If I get a bad grade, it'll be your fault for not doing the work for me!
  • Calvin will frequently miss when trying to throw a snowball at Susie or Hobbes, but rather than just admit he's a bad shot, he blames "cross breezes" (even in the case where he's throwing from about three feet behind Susie) or that the snowball sticks to his mittens.
  • While Calvin acknowledges the seriousness of environmental issues, he doesn't realize how he contributes to them. In a one-shot strip, he complains about global warming and says that it's something his generation will have to live with once his parents' generation is gone, causing his mother to wryly note that he's the kid who "wants to be chauffeured anywhere more than a block away." The Mars arc involves him and Hobbes going to Mars to escape Earth's pollution, but after Calvin litters, they realize that human behavior needs to change.
  • At one point, Calvin blames Hobbes for breaking the battery case of a propeller beanie, even though Calvin was the one who broke it. Played with in that after Hobbes calls him out on it, saying he had just been sitting there watching Calvin work when it snapped. Calvin then tearfully admits that he knows and that having Hobbes take the blame will make him feel better.
  • In one story arc, Calvin has Hobbes tie him up to chair so he can learn to be an escape artist. He predictably fails, and when his dad comes up demanding to know why he didn't come down for dinner, Calvin blames Hobbes completely, despite it being his idea to begin with, and on top of that says that Hobbes was holding him for ransom.
  • In one Christmas Sunday strip, Calvin's dad teases his son by saying they can keep the Christmas tree in the garage this year so they don't have to waste time decorating it, and saying he might get a present. Calvin is horrified and screams for his mom, who isn't amused at her husband distressing their kid. Calvin's dad blames them for not being jolly enough to take a joke.
  • During one of Calvin's trips to the doctor, he gets scared at every medical instrument that the doctor pulls out and demands to know if it will hurt him. The doctor is truthful about the first two devices and how they're harmless, but jokingly says the third one is a cattle prod and "it hurts a little less than a branding iron", which causes Calvin to faint out of fear. He blames little kids for lacking a sense of humour.
  • It's an annual Running Gag that every December that Calvin will come up as many, often ridiculously illogical and nonsensical, reasons as possible to try and convince Santa that he was actually good all year. Like saying bad things just happen in close vicinity to him extremely often, or that Susie is a girl, so hitting her with snowballs doesn't count as bad, or because he's missing the shots it doesn't count.
  • Another similar Running Gag is Calvin rationalizing his bad behaviour as being good because society is the one that defines what he does as being bad rather than objectively being bad, so therefore vice could actually be a type of virtue and Society Is to Blame for punishing his natural urges.
  • During the story arc where Susie is partnered up with Calvin on a research assignment on Mercury, Susie is absolutely livid when Calvin presents his half of the project because it immediately becomes obvious he winged the whole thing and doesn't know a thing about Mercury. He claims he merely "took a few creative liberties".
    Hobbes: And they called your mom over a few creative liberties?
    Calvin: Jeez, you think Susie was mad...
  • Calvin is assigned a research project on bats, but refuses to actually do any research for the project. First he blames Susie for not doing all the work for him, then he blames his classmates for calling out the incredibly obvious factual inaccuracies in his report, and finally he blames his teacher for giving him a bad grade on his terrible work instead of judging it based on his "professional clear plastic binder".
  • When Calvin sees Rosalyn outside the door, she refuses to let him inside even though it's cold and pouring rain out. When Calvin's mom lets Rosalyn in, Calvin sheepishly says that the door was jammed and he couldn't get it open.
  • Calvin attempts to build a model jet plane, which turns out disastrously, but he blames the model pieces and calls the hobby stupid rather than admit it was because he immediately disregarded following the instruction manual.
  • In one story arc, Calvin breaks a pair of expensive binoculars he borrowed from his dad on the stipulation that he was extra careful with them. When he finds out just how expensive binoculars are, he starts getting desperate and starts rationalizing that it was his dad's fault they got broken for letting Calvin borrow such an expensive object.
    Calvin: Why in the world did dad let me use anything so valuable?! He should've known I'd break them! He must've been out of his mind! This is all his fault!
  • The aforementioned Running Gag of Calvin taking up some sort of belief that justify his bratty behaviour, like fatalism (he didn't choose to act badly, it was always fated to be so), astrology (his acts are determined by the stars), the end justifies the means (he's allowed to do whatever he wants as long as the result benefits him), or nihilism (not really matters, so he might as well do whatever he wants without consequences). No one else shares his viewpoints, and Calvin is often put in his place by Hobbes, showing the flaw in that sort of thinking if everyone thought like he did.
  • During one of their Horrible Camping Trips, Calvin's dad is passing Calvin a bag of supplies from the canoe and warns Calvin to be very careful because it has the most fragile stuff in it. He hasn't even finished his warning when Calvin instantly drops it into the lake. Calvin then blames his dad for getting upset at this, although the fact his dad accidentally stacked their supplies on top of his glasses didn't help.
  • During a trip to the zoo, Calvin gets separated from his parents when he accidentally follows a random woman halfway around the zoo. Rather than admit it was his fault for not paying attention for so long, he thinks his mom should've written her name on her legs so it would not have happened (the fact he didn't even bother asking her for help also didn't help).
  • During an ill-fated attempt to fix a leaky sink that ends up flooding the bathroom, his dad demands to know what on Earth happened. Rather than tell the truth, Calvin pulls out a rapid-fire Hurricane of Excuses; the faucet blew off by itself randomly, Hobbes was fooling around with the toolbox, aliens did it and swore Calvin to secrecy. In the aftermath, Calvin blames his dad for getting mad at him, not calling a plumber, and making "such a big deal out of everything".
    Hobbes: And when he does, I sure wish you'd stop trying to pin your crimes on me.
    Calvin: Oh, now you're going to start in on me too, huh?
  • Calvin attempts William Telling with a snowman and a snowball. When he misses and hits the snowman, he blames the snowman for flinching. Another very similar strip had Calvin using a snowman as a crash test dummy for a sled ride down the hill; when it ends predictably, Calvin blames the snowman for being a terrible pilot and says he'd never steer like that.
  • Periodically, Calvin will blame the television providers for having nonstop awful programming, but he chooses to sit there and hate-watch it, complaining all the while, rather than simply not watch it.
  • After Calvin somehow forgets to even start his insect collection project for school (which he had an entire month to do) until the very morning it's due, he tries to rope Susie into helping him fudge the assignment. He ends up getting Susie in trouble, but of course he's perfectly fine with Susie getting blamed for it and not him. He only gets worried when Susie's sent to the principal's office and he realizes she might rat him out.
  • Calvin and his parents have to get to a wedding that's being held out of town, but Calvin spends so much time getting ready that they end having to rush out the door to avoid being late, and he forgets to bring Hobbes along. He spends the entire trip whining and complaining about how they left Hobbes behind, but Calvin's dad points out it's Calvin's own fault for making a fuss about leaving and not having time left to check if they were missing something.
  • The Running Gag of Calvin reading off "poll" results to his dad (as though being a father were an elected position) is basically just him framing him making Calvin do things he doesn't like, such as his homework, going to bed on time, or taking baths, or him punishing Calvin for doing something bad (like the aforementioned no dessert because of flooding the house), as being dad's "fault", and why he deserves more freedoms like driving lessons at six-years old or not having to go to school.
  • During one story arc, Calvin is forced to clean his room before he can go out to play. He tries to wing it by stuffing everything in the closet, but when his mom opens the closet to inspect his work, a mountain of junk topples out and buries her. When she tells him to get back to work, Calvin says she made that mess so she should be the one to clean his room this time.
  • During one G.R.O.S.S. meeting, Hobbes reads out the events of the last meeting, but it quickly becomes clear that he's putting an "editorial slant" on the re-account of the events, making himself look blameless and Calvin far worse.
    Hobbes: 10:32: President-and-First-Tiger offers reasonable solution, but Dictator-for-Life takes needless exception.
    Calvin: Reasonable solution?!? You told me to go jump in a lake!
  • Calvin misses and the bus and tells his mom to hurry and rev up the car so she can drive him to a later stop and catch it from there. When his mom doesn't, he calls her lazy, even though it was his own fault for missing the bus to begin with (knowing Calvin, he woke up at the last possible second again).
  • In yet another attempt to avoid having to take a bath, Calvin hides inside the chimney, getting himself absolutely covered head-to-toe in black soot, and then walks around the house like that, getting soot everywhere, to his mother's horror. Calvin blames his mom for not sweeping the chimney recently.
  • Calvin is in a bad mood and wants everyone to do what he says by using his Bad Mood as an Excuse. He sees Hobbes taking a nap and decides to force him to move, while insulting him, instead of just going around, because he said so. Hobbes refuses to put up with Calvin's attitude and dumps him in a mud puddle once Calvin starts trying to physically shove Hobbes out of the way. Rather than admit he did it to himself, he uses the event to further justify his bad mood.
  • Another time Calvin has a bad mood, he's loudly whining about how he never gets any attention or even "an occasional token gesture of appreciation". When his mom offers a hug, he reveals it was all just a ploy to ask for free money. When she refuses, he continuing whining about how nobody cares about him.
  • Calvin tells his mom that he's bored and can't think of anything to do. Calvin's mom tells him to use his imagination, and Calvin decides that means to scoop up a bucket of pond water and throw it on his mom. Calvin is sent to his room and gets mad at his mom for "inconsistent messages".
  • During one of his overly-complicated attempts to pester Susie, Calvin's plan goes awry, first because the plan takes so long to implement that she went inside for lunch by the time he reached her location, and he blames her for not adhering to his plan rather than admitting to his plan being poorly thought out. She then steals Susie's doll and holds it for ransom, only for Susie to steal Hobbes in retaliation. Rather than recognizing he's getting his just desserts, he's furious at her for getting him back and not just taking the joke.
    Calvin: All this was funny until she did the same thing to me.
  • One story arc has Calvin complaining to Hobbes about how his teacher is demanding that he stop drawing illustrations of dinosaurs in spaceships, and goes on a long multi-day spiel about how his artistic freedoms are being stomped on and how his teacher has shallow taste. It isn't until the very end of the arc that he reveals the reason his teacher is telling him not to draw any more spaceship dinosaurs is because he's drawing them during math class.
  • In one Sunday comic, Calvin goes on a long speech about how he's going to be more of a people person and he'll foster better and long-lasting interpersonal relationships with his fellow humans. As he's in the middle of saying this, he sees Susie walking down the sidewalk and doesn't miss the chance to smack her in the face with a snowball. When she retaliates by pummelling him, Calvin immediately decides humans are actually scum.
  • Calvin makes an intentionally ugly snowman, and is angry that his mom won't sponsor a grant application for it. Hobbes points out the hypocrisy in begging for money from people while also insulting them with his snowman made specifically made to be unappealing. Calvin eventually understands and builds a very typical snowman that's much more marketable (but it's "secretly ironic").
  • Calvin uses a shovel to churn up the dirt, uses a hose to turn the soil into mud, and then leaps into it, covering himself completely in filth. He comes back home to his mother a veritable mud-man and claims that "it couldn't be avoided".
  • Calvin is using a baseball bat inside the house to try and swat a fly, smashing much of the furniture in the process. When Calvin's mom throws him outside, he blames her for valuing a bug more than him rather than the fact he was destroying the house.
  • Calvin furiously asks his teacher for assurance that her education is adequately preparing him for a successful future in the 21st century. When his teacher says it's his job to make sure he gets the proper education needed by putting in hard work, Calvin immediately drops the whole issue because he didn't want to actually work for a successful future.
  • Calvin tells Hobbes that when he's an adult, he won't vote, he won't follow the news, and he won't keep track of important current events, so he can always blame the government whenever anything goes wrong, complain that society is fundamentally broken when something bad happens, and justify his non-participation.
    Calvin: It's a lot more fun to blame things than to fix them.
  • This aspect of Calvin's personality is taken to an extreme during a time travel story where he tries to skip doing a writing assignment by picking it up in the future when it's already written, encountering two of his future selves in the process. When the assignment isn't there in the future, the past Calvin realizes he needed to have done the assignment in the past in order for it to exist in the future. Rather than realize he should just do his assignment, he decides to go and punish the Calvin between the two times for not doing the assignment. That Calvin points out to his past and future selves that he can't be punished without punishing themselves because the past and future selves will feel it too. When past Calvin asks whose dumb idea this whole scheme was, all three Calvins point their fingers at another Calvin, even though they're all the same person.
  • Calvin is fleeing from a furious swarm of hornets; when Hobbes asks why they're so angry, Calvin casually replies that he spent the whole morning throwing rocks at their nest. Calvin is incredulous when Hobbes decides he deserves his fate and leaves Calvin hanging on a tree branch in his underwear for the insects to get him.
    Calvin: A REAL FRIEND WOULDN'T TAKE THEIR SIDE!!
  • In one strip, Calvin says he refuses to take responsibility for his actions because they are the result of a victimized childhood from dysfunctional parenting, and he needs "holistic healing and wellness" before improvement. Hobbes thinks he needs to have his head soaked with ice water.
  • One Sunday strip has Calvin in an Imagine Spot as a tyrannosaur hunting a hadrosaur (read: throwing a snowball at Susie). When Susie gets mad and retaliates, he decides to blame his dinosaur books and throws them in the garbage, as though it were somehow their fault.
  • Most of the Stupendous Man stories are like this due to Calvin's belief in his Paper-Thin Disguise effectively hiding his secret identity. He didn't do that thing he's being accused of, it was Stupendous Man! In the last Stupendous Man story, Calvin uses Stupendous Man's so-called Super-Intelligence to speed write a test. He gets in massive trouble with both his teacher and his parents, and the costume is taken away for good, but he still counts it as a moral victory, even though he also flunked the test.
  • One Sunday strip has Calvin attempting to sell lemonade on the sidewalk. However, Susie is outraged at the ludicrous price of fifteen dollars per glass and the fact the "lemonade" is clearly just a whole uncut lemon thrown into sludge water. Calvin "justifies" the terrible quality of the lemonade and its exorbitant price using Insane Troll Logic, which leads Susie to decide to get a drink at home instead. Rather than admit his business is inherently terrible, he gets mad at her for putting him out of a job and ruining the economy.
  • After Calvin receives an F on an assignment, he tells the teacher it's her fault for not teaching him the material in a way that he can understand and remember. We're not shown exactly what her response is, because it shifts to a Spaceman Spiff Imagine Spot where she's represented by a snarling alien beast, but it seems rather obvious that she doesn't share his opinion.
  • Exploited in-universe in a Sunday comic where Calvin is writing up a self-help book. He describes one of the steps as convincing people that they have a problem and then convincing them that the problem is due to factors outside their control.
    Calvin: That's easy, because it's what people believe anyway. Nobody wants to be responsible for his own situation.
  • Frequently Calvin gets in trouble in class because he said or did something very stupid, like trying to open up a discussion on the tenets of human cannibalism, wanting to burn an effigy of his teacher, screaming about how boring the class is, or attempting to have everyone shout out swear words, and when he gets in trouble he blames his teacher for not being more open-minded.
  • Calvin tells Hobbes about how his parents told him he should live by the ways of the principles he believes in, but when he does they tell him to stop, implicitly blaming them for being contradictory. Hobbes points out that unbridled hedonism isn't exactly a principle.
  • Calvin accidentally breaks a window to his house playing baseball, but rather than take responsibility, he pays Susie ten cents to (unknowingly) take the blame. Susie is rather suspicious of his intentions, but he tells her not to ask dumb questions.
  • One short story arc has Calvin attempting to convince everyone he knows to sign contracts laying down legal blame and potential compensation for any wrongdoing against him. Most of the contracts are written in insulting terms and open to interpretation in favour of Calvin (such as blaming his first grade teacher's inadequate education for any potential future job loss), and as you might imagine, nearly everyone refuses to sign them (except for Susie, whose contract prohibits future social interactions).
  • A Sunday strip has Calvin get bored doing his homework and begin an Imagine Spot as an Allosaurus stalking a Diplodocus in the Late Jurassic (read: waiting to Jump Scare his mom in the cupboard). He screams right in her face, causing her to drop and shatter a jar she was holding, and he's immediately sent back to his room as punishment. He gets mad at his mom for making such a big deal about taking a little break.
  • Calvin makes a bet with Hobbes that he can knock the hat off his dad's head with a snowball. Hobbes takes the bet, saying that he can't, and Calvin decides to prove him wrong. Calvin predictably fails and gets sent to his room, where he blames Hobbes for getting him in trouble, even though the whole thing was his idea to begin with.
    Calvin: Boy, five inches higher would've done it. You always get me in trouble.
    Hobbes: You owe me $2,500 so far.
  • Calvin gets upset when he gets a bad grade on an assignment because it lowers his self-esteem. His teacher tells him bluntly that he should work harder on his assignments if he wants to have better grades then. After a moment's pause, Calvin then says her refusal to accept his victimhood is lowering his self-esteem.
  • Calvin proclaims himself a natural-born leader, but when no one goes where he leads them, he blames everyone else for not choosing to follow him rather than the fact he always leads himself somewhere bad (as depicted in the strip, where he is wading through thick, weedy muck for no reason).
  • In the story arc where Calvin has to make a leaf collection as a school project, he springs the fact his project (which he had two weeks to do) needs to finished the evening before he has to hand it in to his mom at which point it's much too late for her to help him. He gets mad at her for not being flexible, but he (apparently) gets a break when he meets a pair of aliens who will trade him 50 alien leaves for the planet. When the aliens are late in getting back to him, he blames them for procrastinating, utterly failing to see the hypocrisy, and when his teacher fails him because she doesn't believe the leaves he handed in are actually from another planet (they just look like fifty maple leaves cut into weird shapes), he blames her for making him have to do such a dumb, pointless assignment in the first place. Right as he says this, he picks up a random branch to make a point, only for Hobbes to tell him it's poisonous sumac.
  • In one Sunday comic, Calvin is late for the bus again; he barely makes it, but he forgot to pick up his lunch. He rushes back to the house to get it, not knowing his mom was rushing to him at the bus stop to give it to him, and he ends up missing the bus. Calvin and his mom start yelling at each other, blaming the other for missing the bus, even though, given his prior history, it was very likely Calvin's fault he was late in the first place. This is not helped by the last panel showing Calvin put his school books on the table when he went back to grab his lunch and then forgot them.
  • In one story arc, Calvin thinks he's going to ace the next math quiz because of the studying he's been doing with his dad. The moment the quiz starts, he gets lost daydreaming and goes on an epic flight of fancy in his imagination as Spaceman Spiff to determine what '6 + 5' equals. At the end of it all, he still gets the wrong answer, but he wasted so much time on just that one question, the teacher tells everyone time is up. He blames the teacher for not giving him enough to succeed even though it's clear to everyone (except Calvin) that Calvin wouldn't have done well even given all the time in the world, considering the one question he did get done in time wasn't even close. He also yells that "girls mature faster than boys" to justify him getting a worse grade than Susie, rather than him just being awful at math (for the record, it's actually the opposite).
• Never Wake Up a Sleepwalker: Played with in one Sunday strip, as Calvin knows better than to wake a sleepwalking Hobbes because startling a high-strung creature with deadly teeth and claws is dangerous to the one waking them.
• New Media Are Evil: Sometimes used, sometimes criticized. The combination almost seems hypocritical on Bill Watterson's part. Generally speaking, Watterson tended to defend newspaper comics (not an unsurprising opinion for someone whose career was writing newspaper comics). They weren't necessarily less stupid at the time, but in his view comic strips had far more potential to convey deep meaning than the comics from the then-ongoing The Dark Age of Comic Books, which often seemed to be in a competition to cram the highest possible death toll into twenty pages.
  • Various remarks by Watterson in the Tenth Anniversary Book include:
    "I would suggest that it is not the medium, but the quality of perception and expression that determines the significance of art. But hey, what would a cartoonist know?"
  • Yet from the same book...
    "You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering violence, and you can call it a graphic novel, but comic books are still incredibly stupid."
  • He refers to television as the "20th century drug of choice" as well. And then, in There's Treasure Everywhere, there's a strip where Calvin gets so shaken reading a violent comic book that he puts it down and turns on TV instead, and then in the last panel:
    Calvin's Mom: No, you don't. There's too much violence on TV. Why don't you go read something?
  • And for that matter, There's Treasure Everywhere is the same comic collection that brought us:
    Calvin: I resent the quality of network programming! It is all fluff, violence, sensationalism and sleaze! I hunger for serious, tasteful entertainment that respects my intelligence!
    Calvin's Dad: Then turn off the stupid TV and read a book.
    Calvin: All right, I Lied. Sue me.
  • There's also a strip in which the TV appears to be broken, and Calvin and Hobbes are reading a book. Calvin reads Karl Marx's famous "religion is the opiate of the masses" quote and ponders the meaning; a thought bubble from the TV reads: "It means Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet."
  • See also this strip on "high" art vs. "low" art.
• New Technology Is Evil: To hear Calvin's dad talk, you would think any form of technology was the devil's magic. He refuses to buy a VCR or an answering machine, having already gotten fed up with TV and radio, and when Calvin asks him about the internet in one strip late in the comic's run, Dad responds that "it's bad enough we have a telephone!"
• New Year Has Come: Famously employed in the very last strip.
  Calvin: A new year... a fresh, clean start!
  Hobbes: It's like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!
• New Year's Resolution: A near-annual Running Gag has Hobbes asking if Calvin is making any resolutions for the new year, and Calvin angrily declaiming as to how he doesn't need to change a thing about himself.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Several times Calvin's built scenes of snowmen who suffered a horrible death, causing his parents to question his sanity.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Rivals!: One Sunday strip involves the duo attempting to make a snow sculpture of two snowmen shaking hands in a show of the spirit of compromise. However, Calvin makes his snowman's arm too short, prompting Hobbes to ask him to make it longer. Calvin refuses and the resulting negotiations quickly devolve into the two mutilating each other's snowmen and getting into a Big Ball of Violence. When the dust settles, the snowmen are completely destroyed.
  Hobbes: I don't think this sculpture is very good.
  Calvin: It's a compromise.
• Nice to the Waiter: Calvin always gives a rather flattering compliment to his barber no matter how much he dislikes his haircut. ("Never argue with a guy holding a razor," he says.)
• Nightmare Fetishist: A lot of Calvin's creations and imaginary antics disturb his parents, like making a bunch of snow people terrified at their impending melting.
  • Perhaps the most chilling of all of Calvin's fantasies had his parents clucking over him delightedly as he played with his Tinkertoys ("He's creating whole worlds over there") - without knowing that their son was imagining that he was the god of his own private universe and enjoyed sending mortals to Hell.
  • Calvin once invented a game called "Gross Out" in which players score one point by coming up with the grossest thing they can imagine; nobody has ever played a full, 50-point game with him.
  • In an early strip, when Calvin refuses to eat his usual unappetizing green dinner, his dad tells him: "Good idea, Calvin. It's a plate of toxic waste that will turn you into a mutant if you eat it." Calvin thereupon devours it with ravenous glee. In another, he becomes suddenly very eager to sample his mom's foul-smelling cooking when she tells him she's "stewing monkey brains."
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: Calvin has drawn some pretty disturbing things (and relatedly, sculpted them out of snow), but this is usually Played for Laughs. The images usually come from his deranged imagination and not from scary stuff he's actually seen.
  • More than once he has drawn people getting eaten by animals and monsters. Once he drew a flip-book style animation in the margins of his dad's book showing a tiger biting a guy's head off.
  • Once, when he was required to do a presentation on traffic safety, he designed a gruesome poster with the slogan "Be Careful, Or Be Roadkill." For the blood, he used spaghetti sauce so the gory images would actually draw flies. Naturally, he didn't win.
  • While assigned to work with Susie on a class project, he drew a flipbook of a Martian eating an astronaut. Susie was more upset that he was procrastinating than that the art itself was gruesome, though.
  • When his class was making crayon drawings, He criticizes Susie's drawing of a house for being too simplistic, he then shows her his drawing of "a squadron of B-1 bombers nuking New York City."
• Nightmarish Factory: Calvin imagines his stomach to be like this, with gut flora wading waist-deep in a vat of acid set into a dungeon floor, breaking food down with sticks, and getting blown to pieces every time he belches.
• '90s Anti-Hero: Being a six-year-old Nightmare Fetishist, Calvin thinks these are the coolest comics ever, though one Sunday comic shows that he does have his limits.
  Calvin: Oh no, Captain Napalm's getting his kidneys punched out with an I-beam!
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: "Tyrannosaurs in F-14s!!" He once doodled in the margins of his new school textbook, creating an animated flip sequence in which "T-Rex drives the Batmobile and explodes."
• Nobody Likes a Tattletale:
  • Calvin's mother once called the school to report that Moe was stealing money from him, even though Calvin begged her not to because he knew what Moe would do to him if he found out he'd squealed. Moe never finds out, but he does mention to Calvin when he's forced to return the money that, "Somebody ratted on me, and it's gonna be a dark day if I ever find out who."
  • In another series of strips, Susie got sent to the Principal's office after the teacher caught her reacting to Calvin's provocations. At first Calvin is relieved that she got blamed instead of him, then he starts to panic inside when he suddenly realizes she might actually tattle on him. When she comes back, the first thing he asks her is, "You didn't snitch on ME, did you?" She did, and she shrugs it off when he calls her a "stoolie" and a "canary" because she's so mad at him that she doesn't care.
• No Communities Were Harmed:
  • While it never names the state or town in which Calvin lives, the back cover of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes shows a giant Calvin stomping through what looks like cartoonist Bill Watterson's longtime hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio; the building Calvin is picking up is a dead ringer for the Chagrin Falls Popcorn Shop.
  • On their return from Mars, Hobbes claims that on maps their home is near the "giant letter 'E' in 'States.'"
• No-Dialogue Episode: There were frequently strips with no dialogue, relying on the characters' gestures and shown emotions to convey the story.
• No Ending: The first camping/vacation story arc from the summer of 1986 concludes this way. The arc just ends on a strip where Calvin and Hobbes attempt to roast hot dogs over a campfire only to burn them, and then in the next strip they are suddenly back home in their own backyard with no explanation or resolution. Subsequent camping trips usually do wrap it up properly, usually with the family starting to pack up to head back home, something Calvin had been anticipating the whole trip.
• No Full Name Given: Calvin's last name is never revealed. Susie Derkins is the only major character with both a first and a last name. Several background characters who don't appear but are only mentioned, and then usually just the once, have full names: This includes three of Calvin's classmates and the author of his favorite book.
• Noir Episode: The reoccurring Tracer Bullet stories where Calvin imagines himself as a Hardboiled Detective solving crimes by a Dame with a Case in a shadowy city where it always rains. Interestingly, Watterson stated he didn't have much familiarity with the genre, he was just riffing off other parodies of the genre he'd seen.
• No Name Given:
  • Calvin's parents. Watterson once commented that he did this because the strip is presented from Calvin's viewpoint, and as such his parents are only important as his parents. Part of the reason that Uncle Max never made any further appearances in the strip was that Watterson found it awkward that Max couldn't refer to Calvin's parents by their names.
  • The doctor which Calvin occasionally visits. Despite being one of the few reoccurring characters, his name is never mentioned.
• No Ontological Inertia:
  • One Sunday strip saw the titular twosome engaging in one of their trademark petty arguments in the midst of a meeting of their "anti-girl" secret club. While Calvin's head is turned (he's writing a derogatory "law" about Hobbes in the club charter), Hobbes snatches Calvin's "Supreme Dictator Hat" off of his head and proclaims "Now I'm the Supreme Dictator!" — as if taking off the Supreme Dictator's hat automatically drains him of his power.
  • A few strips indicate that outside of Calvin's immediate presence, Hobbes reverts to an inanimate toy. One Sunday strip shows that when Hobbes accompanies Calvin to the bus stop in the morning, he doesn't walk back by himself, Calvin's mom walks out to retrieve him (the end does show Hobbes waiting for Calvin in his bedroom, but you could interpret that as Calvin just imagining that scenario while at school). The "Yukon Ho!" story arc shows Calvin abandoning Hobbes in the forest, but since Calvin isn't with Hobbes, he's still there until Calvin's parents go out searching for him in the middle of the night. There are a few strips which imply Hobbes can move outside Calvin's presence, but they're left ambiguous to suggest Calvin's could just be imagining it.
• Noose Necktie: Invoked in one strip; Calvin has an Imagine Spot that he's a criminal going to the gallows while his parents are forcing him to put on a tie.
• The Nose Knows: Hobbes (as a tiger) has a good sense of smell, and has unique words for different smells, such as "snippid" for burning leaves. (When Calvin asks what the word for his smell is, Hobbes says "terrible", causing Calvin to chase after him.)
• No-Sell: While Calvin's parents — and especially his mom — will occasionally indulge in his fantasies and games, there are also times when they simply refuse to put up with his bad attitude and ignore him.
  • In one strip, Calvin covers himself with a cardboard box and pretends to be a robot probe from Jupiter in an attempt to steal some chocolate from the pantry. Calvin's mom doesn't even look up from her coffee and tells him no, then remarks "Go back to Jupiter, X-3 whatever" when he threatens her with a dart gun.
  • Calvin once claimed to have a stick of dynamite (really a hot dog with some string attached) and threatened to blow the house up if he didn't get cookies. His mom saw through the ruse, scolded him for wasting food without even acknowledging what he said, and threw him outside.
  • Calvin's alter-ego Stupendous Man often has to resort to this as a pseudo-Watsonian excuse as to why Stupendous Man's powers never affect his foes... since his foes are "played" by real people in his life who are not playing by Stupendous Man's rules.
    "Gadzooks! Stupendous Man's amazing powers are of no avail in this cunning trap!"
    "Great Galoob! [Baby Sitter Girl] must have superpowers too!"
    "Great Zok! [Evil Mom Lady] affixed me with her Mind-Scrambling Eyeball Ray! I am suddenly filled with the desire to go upstairs and do her nefarious bidding [to clean my room]!"
• No, You: On Calvin's photograph of Hobbes:
  Hobbes: It's kind of fuzzy.
  Calvin: You're kind of fuzzy!
• Noodle Incident: Has its own page (which makes sense, considering it's the Trope Namer).
• "No Peeking!" Request: Calvin comes up to his dad with something in his hands and tells him the old "Open your mouth and close your eyes and you will get a big surprise," adding "No peeking!" when Dad complies. Then comes the big surprise:
  Calvin: Hold on, he got away.
• No Poker Face: In one strip, Calvin and Hobbes are playing poker. Hobbes is able to hold a perfect poker face, but his tail on the other hand...
  Calvin: I fold.
  Hobbes: Are you cheating?!
• Nose Nuggets: Calvin walks outside in the cold, then wrinkles his nose before making an Aside Glance and saying, "Don't you hate it when your boogers freeze?" Lampshaded in an anthology, where Bill Watterson wrote, "I hope some historian will confirm that I was the first cartoonist to use the word 'booger' in a newspaper comic strip."
• Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be: For a work that often depicts the joys and wonders of childhood, Calvin & Hobbes also doesn't hold back about the frustrations, disappointments and difficulties that come with it. Calvin is a smart kid with a vivid imagination and an expert at making his own fun, but he also has practically no means to impact the events that unfold around him or the relationships he has with other people, almost all of his decisions are made for him but he still has to suffer the consequences, real-world problems are much bigger to him because his world is so much smaller, and even when he's 100% right about something, he still gets shut down by the adults in his life simply because they're the adults and he isn't. Calvin himself sums it up in one strip where he's knocked into a mud puddle by resident bully Moe, just because Moe felt like doing it:
  "People who are nostalgic for childhood were obviously never children."
• Nostalgia Filter: Calvin's dad often complains to Calvin or his wife about how everything was better back in the day and how evil modern technology is. Calvin hates this, and once says that he is "a 21st century kid stuck in a 19th century family." In one strip, Calvin's dad bores him with a long, rambling monologue on how modern escalators lack the character of their wooden forebearers.
• No Sympathy: Hobbes never has any sympathy to Calvin when he gets in trouble despite being his best friend, but unlike many other examples on his page, it's actually justified. Hobbes is with Calvin whenever he's planning to do something that will (very obviously) blow up in his face, and will advise against it. After Calvin inevitably ignores his advice, Hobbes will switch gears and instigate the situation either by trolling Calvin or making the problem worse (often capped by Calvin trying to pin the blame on Hobbes when he's busted by his parents). When Calvin's suffering from something that isn't his own fault, Hobbes will be genuinely helpful and sympathetic.
• Not Actually the Ultimate Question: Played straight in a few strips, but also inverted once; Calvin and Hobbes are sitting under a tree when Calvin asks why we're here. Hobbes replies with "because we walked here" before Calvin clarifies that he meant here on Earth. Hobbes continues giving mundane answers to the philosophical questions until Calvin gives up.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: Nobody in the strip ever ages up, despite celebrating Christmas each year, referencing upcoming dates, and the passing of multiple seasonal cycles; Calvin and Susie remain perpetually six years old (complete with an Ageless Birthday Episode for Susie). This is occasionally lampshaded with a few Leaning on the Fourth Wall moments.
• Not an Act: One arc begins with Calvin willingly leaving for school and acting disturbingly nice to his mother. She's left in complete confusion, while the reader learns that Calvin has used his cardboard box to make a pure good(y-two-shoes) clone of himself. Then again, if you choose to ascribe all the fantastical elements to Calvin's imagination, it is an act.
• Not Big Enough for the Two of Us: Parodied. In one strip where Calvin and Hobbes are roleplaying as cowboys, starting with this line, only to clarify they'll have to annex the county because Calvin's mom won't let them play with guns.
• Nothing Is Funnier: Has its own page.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The monsters under Calvin's bed are never seen, only heard, though often they aren't that scary. However, the monster from the anthology poem A Nauseous Nocturne IS scary, and we only see hints of its body.
  • The last panel in this strip (part of the out-of-control helium balloon arc) uses a very minimal approach to convey what happens when the balloon pops.
• Not a Morning Person: It's a struggle for Calvin's parents to get Calvin out of bed on a school day, commonly having to resort to multiple calls, and sometimes, even physically dragging him out of bed. Inverted on non-school days, where Calvin is up at the crack of dawn and running wild before his parents even stir from bed. One strip has Calvin's mother lampshade this.
  Calvin's Mom: (as Calvin is already running off with Hobbes to play) Just once, I'd like to see you manage this during the school year.
• Notary Nonsense: Calvin draws notary seals on his assignments and deems them official.
  Miss Wormwood: By the way, you can stop signing your work "Calvin, Boy of Destiny," and I think your time would be better spent studying than drawing "official notary seals" at the bottom.
• Not Helping Your Case: In one Christmas story arc, Calvin appoints Hobbes as his attorney to convince Santa that he's been good all year. As they're walking to the north pole, he lays out their case, that he's an extremely good kid who's simply a victim of malicious slander, but he doesn't even get past his street before he sees his neighbour Susie building a snowman nearby and immediately deciding to pelt her with snowballs.
  Calvin: Susie's still concentrating on her snowman! Let's sneak up and barrage her with slushballs!
  Hobbes: Two minutes ago we were on our way to tell Santa how good you are, remember? Have you lost your marbles?!
• Not Listening to Me, Are You?:
  • Calvin tries to trick his mother by announcing that he plans to become a radical terrorist when he grows up and that he's going to inhale a pesticide, to both of which his mother responds with a distracted "Mm hmm". But when he declares that he's going to stay up all night and watch television, she shoots him down, leading him to observe "You can never tell if they're listening or not".
  • Another has him pester her while she's reading a book.
    Calvin: What time is it?
    Mom: Go look at the clock and see.
    Calvin: What's the weather outside like today?
    Mom: Go step outside and see.
    Calvin: How fast can our car go?
    Mom: Go... ...nice try.
• Not Now, Kiddo:
  • An Author's Note in the anniversary edition stated simply "Right lesson — wrong time." after this:
    Calvin: MOM! 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 does]
    Calvin: I stepped in dog doo. Where's the hose?
  • Calvin calls Dad at work. Dad says he's very busy and tells Calvin to hang up unless he's calling about something really important. Calvin obediently hangs up, without telling Dad that there's a Man-Made House Flood going on in the kitchen.
    Calvin: [watching the water slowly rising in the house] This oughta qualify as "important" in a few minutes.
• Not So Above It All: While Susie is generally more well-behaved than Calvin, even she was impressed with his idea to style his hair with Crisco for Class Picture Day. She even muses out loud that she wished she had some Crisco.
• "Not So Different" Remark: One strip has him do this with his mom — she remarks that she hopes that someday, he has a bratty kid to put him through hell, and Calvin snaps back that his maternal grandmother wished the same thing for her.
• Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Hobbes may or may not be one of these. Interestingly, Calvin seems not to know or care that other characters don't "see" Hobbes as he does.
• Not Where They Thought: In this strip, Calvin appears to be in his house as usual and he notes that there's a door that wasn't there before. A puppet version of his mother comes out holding a bowl of oatmeal, which gets him to realize he's not at home. He looks out the window and sees that it's just a fake house that two aliens have put him in. This turns out to be All Just a Dream.
  Calvin: Oh no! That's not our yard outside! It's...it's a cage! Aaaughh! I'm trapped in a lab and they're trying to get me to imprint on my own species before they return me to the wild!
  Alien scientist 1: (holding the puppet) He's on to us, Wayne.
  Alien scientist 2: (giving an Aside Glance) There goes our funding.
• Not Worth Killing: One Sunday strip has a non-killing variant: Calvin is trying to fill balloons for a water fight, but keeps messing them up and splashing water on himself. By the time Hobbes arrives, Calvin is soaked from head to toe. Hobbes just says, “Gee, what’s the point?” and walks away.
• Numbered Homeworld: Spaceman Spiff encounters planets with names like this a lot, such as in one story line where Calvin uses Spiff to imagine how to add 6 and 5 by having Spiff pull two planets called Planet 6 and Planet 5 together.
• Nutritional Nightmare: Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs.
  "They're crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and they don't have a single natural ingredient or essential vitamin to get in the way of that rich fudgy taste!"
  • In some strips, Calvin likes to add more sugar to the already super-sweet cereal or using soda instead of milk. One shows the consequences of him doing so:
    How Calvin's Mom really said it: Calvin, that's enough.
    How she said it from Calvin's perspective: Caaaaaaallllllvvinnnnn, thaaaaat's eeenouughhh. (while shaking like she's standing on a paint mixer)
    (later, Calvin is incredibly jittery with a dazed look on his face)
    Calvin: M-Mom s-sure was m-movingg st-strangellly t-toddayy.
    Hobbes: Maybe she's right about how much sugar you put on that cereal.
  • In the "Yukon Ho!" Calvin makes two sandwiches for the trip, but makes sure they pack plenty of energy: one is filled with chocolate syrup, and the other with marshmallows and honey.
  • In one strip, Calvin shows Hobbes how he makes hot chocolate. First, he pours as many mini marshmallows as he can into the mug so that the chocolate just fills in the cracks, and second, he doesn't dilute the chocolate syrup with milk.
    Hobbes: I wondered why you eat it with a fork.
• Obfuscating Stupidity:
  • Calvin is apparently a user of this trope, as he once told Susie that it's far easier to keep people's expectations low, and wow them every now and again, than to keep them high and wind up disappointing at some point.
  • A cloning storyline in which Calvin (supposedly) creates a personification of his "good half" to take his classes for him proves this: if the clone is real, then it demonstrates that Calvin could do well in school if he bothered to try; if it's an extended game of make-believe then Calvin really is doing well for a change (if only for the sake of keeping the game going.) Then again, any of Calvin's musings to Hobbes on the nature of existence and reality during any given 'sledding' strip should tip even the most casual reader off that the kid's a freaking genius; it's just that school bores him senseless.
• Objectshifting: One strip features a helium balloon carrying Calvin into the stratosphere, before abruptly popping and sending him plummeting back to the ground. Fortunately, Calvin finds his transmogrifier gun in his pocket on the way down, and transforms himself into a cast-iron safe to survive the impact.
• Obliquely Obfuscated Occupation:
  • In the Tenth Anniversary Book, cartoonist Bill Watterson says he wanted to avoid readers asking "What is Dad's job?", so he made Calvin's father a patent attorney, like his own father. However, it only comes up in three strips: The one where Calvin calls him at work demanding a story, the one where Calvin tries to patent his robot, and the one where Calvin invents a personal tailhook.
  • In another comic Calvin is seeing a pediatrician for a check-up and accuses him of being a quack, he remarks that his dad is a lawyer and threatens to sue him for malpractice. It's unclear whether or not he was just lying to scare the doctor or he assumes that all attorneys are the ones that go to court.
• Oblivious to His Own Description: Calvin, a lot. He's so self-centred and and has a huge ego, insults that apply to him tend to fly over his head. In one strip, he starts a list entitled "A Million Things That Bug Me." Hobbes suggests he add "excessively negative people," which Calvin happily adds, although he eventually catches the insult.
• Oblivious to Love: Calvin and Susie Derkins. Word of God says (in the Tenth Anniversary Book) that Calvin likely has a mild crush on Susie. Calvin apparently doesn't know how to deal with it, so he does his best to gross out and anger Susie, who then always gets mad at him. They are, after all, six year-olds.
  • Strangely enough, in the strip it's Hobbes who is attracted to Susie and is always persuading Calvin to go play with her.
    Calvin: So what happened to the mandibles of death, you sissy fur ball?!?
    Hobbes: I was beguiled by her feminine charms. Yow. Go soak your head.
  • Evidently, this romantic channel seems to work both ways, seeing how Susie even sent a Valentine's card addressed to Hobbes.
  • It's not like Calvin never gives any indication of liking Susie himself. In fact, before you ever see her, the first strip to mention her features him comically blatantly bringing her up for no apparent reason and loudly protesting too much that he doesn't like her, with Hobbes teasing him about it.
  • Perhaps the most obvious example of their mutual crush is when Calvin sends Susie a "hate-mail" valentine and a bouquet of dead flowers, to which she replies by yelling at him and hitting him with a snowball. As she's walking away, she smiles and thinks "A Valentine and flowers! He likes me!" while Calvin simultaneously thinks, "She noticed! She likes me."
  • And another strip in which Susie and Calvin run into each other, do nothing but trade insults, and walk away. Calvin observes: "It's shameless the way we flirt."
• Obviously Fake Signature: Calvin attempts to do a parental signature for a document from school, signing it "Calvin's mom".
• Oddly Small Organization: Calvin and Hobbes are the only members of the Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS club. As such, the two have many high-ranking positions, including Dictator-for-Life, President, Top Scout, Strike Force Commander, Chief Strategist, cartographer, and Munitions Officer, among others.
• Odd-Shaped Panel: Arguably one of the Trope Makers for newspaper comics. Watterson was given greater freedom for creative panel structure in the Sunday strips after his first sabbatical, although he did say it took two or three times longer to draw them out than the conventional Sunday strips.
• Of Course I Smoke: In one early Sunday strip, Calvin tries smoking a cigarette, only to end up in a violent coughing fit after the first inhale. At the end of the strip, Calvin comments that it was trusting parents that caused him to smoke and therefore damage his health. It should be noted that his mom knew this trope was coming and let Calvin smoke in order to teach him a lesson.
• Offending the Fool: Downplayed. Moe is a musclehead who usually fails to realize when Calvin's insulting him. There are a few exceptions, however, like when Calvin tells him that his mother has taped a note to his back with "Somebody run this boy over with a truck" written on it. Calvin gets beaten up for that.
• Offerings to the Gods:
  • Calvin, during a speech worshiping his television, sets a bowl of tapioca in front of it an offering, saying it represents his brain.
  • Another time he wants to burn leaves as a sacrifice to the "Snow Demons" to ensure a snowy winter.
    Calvin's Dad: I don't know whether your grasp of theology or meteorology is more appalling.
• Off-into-the-Distance Ending: The last ever strip, on Dec. 31, 1995, has Calvin and Hobbes contemplating a fresh new snowfall. The next to last panel has Calvin saying "It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy..." before the last panel has them sledding away as Calvin says "...let's go exploring!".
• Offscreen Crash:
  • In a few strips, all we see of Calvin's sled trips is Hobbes' reaction as he watches from the top of the hill. What makes these strips hilarious isn't necessarily the reaction shots, or the implied carnage, but that inevitably, for some reason, Hobbes always looks up into the sky at the end, just before Calvin shows up again. Implying that Calvin managed to catch some serious air.
  • Not to mention that one strip has a sled ride through Hobbes's point of view, where there are only flashes of the ride. They end up in a tree, though Hobbes has no idea how because he kept closing his eyes.
  • The second panel of one early strip where Calvin and Hobbes are horsing around the house and smash into a table.
  • In the story arc where Calvin and Hobbes accidentally push the family's car into a ditch, the crash isn't seen, just the pair averting their eyes with a horrible crunching sound effect. It turns out the car was undamaged though.
• Off the Chart: One strip where Calvin claims his father's approval rating has done this. Calvin goes so far as to tape several sheets of paper and trail them along the floor just to hammer home the fact that he thinks that Dad's being a pretty horrible parent. Of course, he is only six, and his parents are doing what just about any good parent would do (try to get Calvin to eat healthier foods, go to bed at a reasonable hour, etc.).
• Offing the Offspring: Never actually happens for obvious reasons, but Calvin has imagined his parents trying to kill him on two separate occasions — one where they serve him a plate of living green glop for dinner that eats him alive and burps out his bones, and another where they turn out to be aliens from Neptune and make him into "Earth boy waffles".
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Calvin's Mom reacts this way when Calvin gets the chicken pox and the doctor tells her Calvin will have to stay inside for a week. The doctor expresses concern about the nasty twitch she suddenly develops.
  • Calvin reacts this way when Mom tells him she's going to meet Miss Wormwood. He reacts that way again when she comes home. When he panics and tries to explain away what he thinks Miss Wormwood told her, he lets slip about the Noodle Incident, marking its first reference in the strip.
• Oh, No... Not Again!:
  • Two strips several weeks apart show Calvin opening a can of food and Hobbes pouncing on him. The second time it happens, Calvin feels the Bad Vibrations and braces himself.
  • This occurs in two different Sunday strips where Calvin gets naked in public. At the end of both strips, Calvin's parents allude to prior incidents where he did the same thing.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Hobbes repeatedly brings up something Calvin apparently did at school that is the Trope Namer for Noodle Incident. When he does this, Calvin gets angry and claims he was framed.
• One-Note Cook:
  Calvin's Dad: Since your mom's sick, I'm making dinner tonight.
  Calvin: You can cook?
  Calvin's Dad: As you can see, I survived two years of my own cooking when I had an apartment after college.
  Calvin: Mom says you ate frozen waffles and canned soup three times a day.
  Calvin's Dad: Your mom wasn't there, so she wouldn't know. Get the syrup out, will you?
• One Scene, Two Monologues: In one sledding strip, Calvin is trying hold a philosophical discussion on human nature with Hobbes, asking him if people are fundamentally good, bad, or crazy. Meanwhile, Hobbes is just yelling at Calvin to avoid the obstacles in front of them, until eventually the sled violently collides with a tree.
  Calvin: You know, it's very rude of you to keep changing the subject after every sentence.
  Hobbes: I choose crazy.
• One-Two Punchline: Bill Watterson was fond of these, with Hobbes adding another punchline on the far right of the last panel, often a mockery or lampshade hanging on what Calvin was saying.
• One, Two, Skip a Few: Used in two different strips. In one strip he's doing push-ups and his counting is well in the hundreds, because he claims exercise is more rewarding if you count what it feels like. In another he's jump-roping, and is counting in the millions because higher numbers give him more time to jump over the rope.
• Onion Tears: In one strip, Calvin mistakes the reason for his mother sobbing over an onion she's cutting:
  Calvin: Whatcha doin', Mom?
  Mom: (sobbing) I'm cutting up an onion.
  Calvin: It must be hard to cook when you anthropomorphize your vegetables.
• Only One Finds It Fun:
  • Calvin's dad drags the family on a Horrible Camping Trip each summer despite Calvin and his mom openly complaining about it each time. Calvin's dad justifies the trips as being a chance to get away from the bustle of civilization and build some character. Of course, even he has his limits and each trip always ends when he's suffered enough misery.
  • The arc where Calvin's home gets broken into starts with Calvin and his parents going to a wedding. Calvin hates being there because he doesn't know anyone and they forgot Hobbes at home, while Calvin's dad just looks bored, yawning and checking the time on his watch. Calvin's mom is the only one who's actually enraptured by the ceremony (since it's implied that the person being married is someone who only she knows).
• Only One Name: While the human characters presumably have two names, even though we're not told them except for "Susie Derkins" (and no names at all in the case of Calvin's parents, who, again, are not presumably nameless in-universe), Hobbes is a tiger, so it's quite possible he's really just "Hobbes".
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Mom and Dad tend to be hard on Calvin when he breaks something in the house, usually because of the repairs and his lying about it. During the car arc, Calvin thinks they'll kill him for rolling the car into a ditch by accident, and runs away into the woods with Hobbes. When Mom sees the car in the ditch and realizes what it must mean, she runs to find Calvin in the woods. Her first reaction is to ask if he's okay. She tells him the car is fine, she's more worried about him because the car could have easily run him or Hobbes over, or if he had gotten injured in the woods no one would have known where to find him. Dad apparently had the same reaction offscreen, much to Calvin's surprise as he and Hobbes discuss this in bed.
  • Dad is normally sarcastic towards Calvin or facetious. When the whole family tries to take care of an injured raccoon, he calmly tells Calvin the raccoon died. As Calvin starts to sob, Dad hugs him and comforts him, telling him they all did the best they could. It's one of the few times Dad is sincere and loving.
  • Despite normally being inconsiderate and lazy, Calvin demonstrates compassion and strong initiative as he tries to save the raccoon in the same arc.
  • Calvin's mom finally panics about Calvin being sick when she says it's Saturday and therefore he won't be missing school, to which he simply replies "I know" without being upset about losing leisure time.
  • The break-in story arc is one of the few occasions in which Calvin is depicted as anything other than an explosive ball of hyperactivity — the contrast is quite jarring.
  • The last Rosalyn arc is a rare one where Calvin actually behaves in her presence, to the point where his parents think she must be joking when she said that she and Calvin played a game and he went to bed with no troble. Even Hobbes is shocked when Calvin asks him calmly to check his homework as he works to get it done before it gets done. The reason? Rosalyn said that Calvin could choose any game he wanted, and went along with it when he made her a mask for Calvinball.
• Open-Minded Parent:
  • Calvin's parents turn out to be an example of this when he wrecks the car and runs away. Apparently when the kid takes a saw to the coffee table you're allowed to blow your top but when he puts himself in genuine danger, you have bigger things to worry about.
  • After a visiting relative leaves some cigarettes where Calvin can find them, Mom tells him that if he's going to smoke, he should do it outside. She expects, rightly, that he'll hate the experience and never try it again.
• Opposite Day: One story arc is based on this and the logical paradoxes inherent to it.
  Calvin: Is there a bee on my back or not?
  Hobbes: No.
  Calvin: Good, now I— OW!
  Hobbes: (hiding in a tree) Remember, at midnight Opposite Day is over. Got it?
  Calvin: (holding a baseball bat) "Yes".
• Oracular Head: In one strip, Calvin pretends to have one of these in a paper bag for Show and Tell (it's actually his Stupendous Man outfit). He uses it as a vehicle for teasing Susie Derkins.
  'Head': Soooosie is a Booooger Braaiin!
  Calvin: It speaks the truth!
• Orifice Invasion: In one strip, Calvin imagines this is how he gets a 'frog in the throat:'
  Calvin: Calvin wakes up staring into the eyes of a big frog. Seeing Calvin awake, the frog scrambles down and forces open Calvin's mouth! Calvin tries to fight, but the slippery amphibian instantly slides in and is swallowed! How disgusting!
• Original Position Fallacy:
  • In one strip Calvin complains to Hobbes that the ends should justify the means: you shouldn't get in trouble if you get what you want. Hobbes promptly pushes Calvin into a mud puddle, saying that Calvin was in his way but now he's not, so the ends justify the means. An irate Calvin shouts that he only meant for him, not for everybody.
  • Another strip has Calvin decide to become a fatalist. That way, if bad things happen he's not responsible for them. Cue Hobbes tripping him into the mud puddle again.
    Hobbes: Too bad you were fated to do that.
    Calvin: THAT WASN'T FATE!
• Origins Episode: The very first strip establishes how our heroes supposedly met. Calvin catches Hobbes by baiting his tiger trap with a tuna fish sandwich, which tigers can't resist. This was later Retconned when Hobbes recalls what Calvin was seemingly like as a toddler.
• Orwellian Retcon: A handful of strips had their dialogues altered in The Complete Calvin and Hobbes boxed set. When the first two mentioned below were published, Watterson recalled getting lots of hate mail claiming that they were insensitive towards adoption.
  • A strip from January 7, 1987 had the dialogue "Was I adopted?" changed to "Was I genetically engineered or cloned?".
  • A similar change was done for the November 25, 1988 strip, where mentions of "biological mother" was changed to "a good mother".
  • A strip from November 24, 1987 had Calvin's dad's explanation for why the weather is getting colder altered so that it's more scientifically correct.
• Ostentatious Secret:
  • At the start of the first Get Rid Of Slimy girlS club arc:
    Calvin: Good news, Hobbes! I'm starting a secret club, and you can be in it!
    Hobbes: Oh, boy!
    Calvin: It'll be great! We'll think of secret names for ourselves, secret codes for our secret correspondence, a secret handshake... We'll have a secret club-house with a secret knock to get in, and we'll do big secretive things!
    Hobbes: Why all the secrecy?
    Calvin: People pay more attention to you when they think you're up to something.
  • In another strip, Calvin pulls this in Show and Tell. He loudly declares that he's not showing the class what he brought, and declares that it'll haunt them for the rest of their lives.
  • During the arc where Calvin decides to become a tiger, he reads a book describing tigers as "solitude and secretive creatures." Hobbes takes the opportunity to brag about all the big secrets he knows, leaving Calvin begging for more info. Eventually, he tells Calvin the secret is that his parents bought him at the flea market for a nickel.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Calvin's "Good Duplicate". The good one also thinks this of his original after realizing how much of a complete Jerkass he is.
• Ouija Board: One early arc had Calvin and Hobbes asking an Ouija board different questions. First, "who is smarter?", which didn't have a definite answer because the two of them kept trying to force the planchette to go to the first letter of their name. Second, Calvin asked "will I become president?", which got the answer "G-O-D-F-O-R-B-I-D", causing Calvin to kick the board in anger. Lastly, Calvin asked how it knew all the answers to life's mysteries, which it just answered "3", to the pair's confusion.
  Calvin: You know, I didn't ask for this last Christmas. I asked for a computer.
• Our Time Machine Is Different: Calvin makes a time machine of a cardboard box, the same box that serves as his duplicator and transmogrifier. It's function depends on what position it's in; upright for time machine (so you can sit in it), on the side for duplication, and upside down for transformation. It works by flying into a time vortex and needs to be physically steered.
• Our Zombies Are Different: In late April 1987, Calvin got bored with his homework and started walking around sticking his eyes and tongue out, pretending to be a zombie. Hobbes saw this and decided to follow along, thinking "When in Rome." The April 30th strip had them staring at each other pretending to be zombies until they started laughing at the sight of each other.
  Calvin: "Heh heh... Of course, REAL zombies NEVER get the giggles by looking at each other."
• Outfit Decoy: In several strips, Calvin has used this ploy to distract Hobbes from attacking him:
  • Knowing that Hobbes would pounce on him when he opened the front door, he puts his clothes onto a pile of leaves, using a paper bag with a smiley face written on it for the head.
  • He does the same trick using a broom. This time Hobbes isn't fooled, and pretends the fake is Calvin, bringing it inside and leaving the real one locked out.
  • Twice he dresses up a snowman in his weather gear as a decoy in snowball fights. Both times Hobbes catches on immediately and Calvin gets soaked.
  • Calvin also builds a snowman on the doorstep with his hat and coat on it as pounce bait. Hobbes simply opens the door, notes the presence of a tiny snowman and asks why Calvin is hiding there with no overclothes. Calvin reclaims his coat, angrily demolishes the snowman, opens the door and then Hobbes pounces.
  • Calvin does this with his shoe at least twice; once by tossing it around a corner (causing Hobbes to pounce), and once by lowering the shoe to the floor while sitting in an armchair (Hobbes is under the chair and forcefully nabs the shoe). It does make his mom wonder how his shoes get worn down so quickly though.
• Out Giving Birth, Back in Two Minutes: Implied in one Sunday strip, in which Susie and Calvin are playing house. Susie walks in the door, saying, "I stopped by the hospital on the way home from work!" and reveals their new baby (which is a rabbit). Of course, this could be justified by the fact that these are two six-year-old kids who likely wouldn't understand how giving birth actually works.
• Out-of-Character Alert: The second duplicator story arc begins with a seemingly well-groomed Calvin announcing he'd better hurry up and take a bath if he wants to get to bed on time. Later, the bathroom is cleaned and Calvin is already in bed, and asks Mom to check his homework for him. Then the next morning, Calvin is up and out of bed without being called and eager for school. Mom is completely confused. Watterson admitted in the tenth anniversary book of deliberately invoking this trope, noting that he knew that fans of the strip would know right away that something is up, but he took his time revealing what.
• Out-of-Character Moment:
  • In one strip, Calvin asks his dad why the sky is blue and how clouds stay in the air. His dad can't remember why, only being able to guess vaguely and can't answer his questions. Very strange considering his usual glee in deliberately giving Calvin the wrong facts.
  • There is also a time when Susie asks Calvin for the answer on a test, versus the other way around, and Calvin supplies the correct answer, albeit accidentally.
    Calvin: Krakow! Krakow! Two direct hits!
  • There was a strip where Calvin asks his dad to build a snowman together. It's very rare for Calvin to get along with his parents like this.
• Out Of Control Popcorn: In one daily, the duo decides to see what happens when you pop a normal amount of corn with the lid off, and it fills up the entire kitchen.
  Calvin: That's more fun than exploding a potato in the microwave!
• Out Sick:
  • In one strip, Calvin tries to invoke this by sticking his head out the window to catch a cold so that he'd not have to go to school and take a test he didn't study for.
  • In another strip, Calvin's mother gets sick so his father cooks the food (badly).
  • Subverted in an O.O.C. Is Serious Business moment described above. The fact that it's Saturday, and there is no school to miss, means Calvin must really be sick.
• Outlandish Device Setting: In the 8 December 1985 Sunday strip, Spaceman Spiff sets his Ray Gun to "deep fat fry".
• Oven Logic: Calvin once tried to make pancakes, but he was too lazy to follow the recipe to make twenty individual pancakes, so he poured all the batter in the pan at once to make one big pancake that he'd cut in half to share with Hobbes. We don't see how it turned out, but considering he also didn't remove the eggs from the shells when he added them to the batter...
• Overly Long Scream: Calvin does one upon learning that he is going to have Rosalyn as his babysitter.
  Calvin's Mom: For goodness sake, Calvin! Take a breath before you pass out on the floor!
• Own Goal:
  • In one story arc, Calvin plays baseball at school. He gets assigned to play the outfield, and goes so far outfield that he doesn't even notice when it's his team's turn at bat (he can see the teams switching sides but nobody bothers to tell him to come in). Someone hits a fly ball in his direction, and he catches it to get an out—and only afterwards realizes it's his own teammate at bat. The rest of the team turns on him for this mistake, and Calvin quits the team in response.
  • In another Sunday strip, Calvin and Hobbes play a two-person football game, and keep introducing bizarre new rules to give themselves advantages. At one point, Hobbes claims that he swapped the two teams' end zones, so if Calvin scores a touchdown he'll actually earn points for Hobbes' team instead.
  • In another strip, Calvin is playing with a baseball and bat by himself when he hits the ball high into the air, then runs and actually manages to catch the ball. He celebrates his accomplishment for a moment before realizing that he's out.
• Padding the Paper: One story arc has Calvin doing an assignment about bats. When Hobbes points out all he has is one "fact" that he made up (claiming that bats are bugs), Calvin replies that once they add a few illustrations and a conclusion it will look like a graduate thesis. It... does not go well.
• Painless Death for a Price: Played for Laughs. When Spaceman Spiff is captured and brought before the ruler of the Zorg aliens, he is offered a "rather painless" death in exchange for a summary of Lewis and Clark's expedition to the Pacific Northwest. The last panel cuts back to reality, where Calvin is refusing to answer a question in class from his teacher, Miss Wormwood.
• Pain-Powered Leap:
  • Calvin does this moments after Hobbes assures him that there isn't a bee about to sting him—it's Opposite Day, and there was one.
  • Basically, anytime a bee lands on Calvin's back, this results. There was another time when Hobbes reassured Calvin that a bee didn't land on his back... it was a hornet. Then there was the time Hobbes told Calvin not to imagine the bee very well crawling down his shirt and into his pants, with expected results.
  • Hobbes was once on the receiving end of one of these - Calvin told him that a "big hairy caterpillar" was about to bite him, and then stomped on it for him. Given that the "caterpillar" was Hobbes's own tail, of course, the resulting leap isn't quite as extreme as the other examples in the strip.
  • Another strip had Calvin jump up screaming in pain after a fish bit him on the bum. It's the page image for the Butt Biter trope.
• Painting the Medium:
  • The aforementioned black-and-white, un-outlined strip led to a punchline of Calvin's dad telling him "The problem is, you see everything in terms of black and white." Actually, that's more like not painting the medium.
  • Another example is Moe, who always speaks in mixed-case instead of all-caps.
• Paper-Bag Popping:
  • Calvin pops a paper bag while his dad is reading a newspaper. Having startled his dad, Calvin says "Pay attention to me."
  • One Sunday strip has Calvin ask Dad if people ever spontaneously combust. Dad says no. There's a Beat Panel, then Calvin pops a paper bag around the corner and scares the living daylights out of Dad.
  • In another strip, Calvin uses this ploy to simulate a gunshot to get out of taking a message for his mom, except it was used with a balloon instead of a paper bag in this case.
• Paper People: Deconstructed in one strip where Calvin imagines himself to have turned into one; he can't move unless he wriggles on the floor and is susceptible to the slightest gust of wind, but can hide by standing sideways.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Calvin, after breaking a vase and bringing bugs in the house — wearing a pair of Groucho glasses and his regular clothes: "Who ees thees Kählveen?"
  • Calvin always thinks everyone is fooled by his Stupendous Man outfit, even his mom, who made him the costume to begin with, but it never fools a single person.
  • Calvin attempts to dress up Hobbes as himself so Hobbes can take his place in class for once. His mom isn't fooled.
    Hobbes: See? I told you it wouldn't work!
    Calvin: Of course not, dummy! You didn't put on any pants!
• Paper Tiger: Parodied. Calvin asks Hobbes what a paper tiger is. Despite being a tiger himself, Hobbes responds that a paper tiger delivers newspapers. Calvin is thus completely confused by his book that used the term.
• Parasol Parachute: In the strip that inspired the cover of the very first collection, Calvin attempts a form of land parasailing by tying himself to the little red wagon while holding an umbrella and wearing roller skates. He only gets airborne for a few seconds as the wagon shoots off a dock into the pond, but that's good enough for him. The trope is later referenced again when Calvin is carrying a "be prepared" kit with him, which includes an umbrella that "doubles as a parachute".
• Parental Outfit Veto: Despite Calvin normally having a Limited Wardrobe, several strips involve Calvin's mom disagreeing with his style choices:
  • In one strip, Calvin's clothes gain sentience and force themselves on him, leading to him trying to leave in horribly mismatched outfit. Calvin's mom says "You're wearing that?" and is implied to make him change.
  • Another strip involves Calvin trying on Triangle Shades, only for his mom to refuse to buy them.
  • In one strip, Calvin decides to invert his pants and shirt when headed to school, but his mom has none of it.
• Parents as People: Back in The '90s, it was pretty shocking to show a father openly regretting having children unless he was a villainous character. What's more, Calvin goes to great lengths to instill this antipathy in his parents (hiding dead bugs in his own mother's shampoo, blockading his dad's driveway with snowmen so he'll be late to work). The pair can't even have a nice dinner out without Calvin destroying the house in their absence. Hence, when badgered with letters regarding Calvin's cruel parents, Watterson simply said, "They do a better job than I would." On the other hand, there are things that Calvin's parents could be criticized for that seem to be independent of the possible effects of his brattiness on them. Good examples are found mainly with Calvin's father, who drags his family on camping trips they hate and can be preachy, like all the times when he tells Calvin that doing things he hates builds character. Makes you wonder if Calvin's misbehavior is not at least in part a reaction to some of his parents' behaviors.
• Parental Bonus: Has its own page.
• Pascal's Wager: Played with in one of the Christmas arcs. Calvin briefly questions Santa's existence, then decides that it's safest to just continue believing in Santa to ensure that he doesn't miss out on getting Christmas presents.
• Passing Notes in Class: This happens fairly often in strips set during class. One time when Calvin tried to read a note that Susie told him not to read, it read "Calvin, you stinkhead, I told you not to read this".
• People Fall Off Chairs: One strip has Calvin leaning back in his chair at school, and then flipping, head-over-heels, causing all his papers, books and even his desk to fly all over the place comedically. It's implied he did it on purpose just because he bored in class.
• Periphery Hatedom: In-Universe. The book Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey, Calvin's favorite bedtime story, which he insists his dad read to him every night. It's implied to be poorly written, repetitive, unbearably cutesy, and generally unappealing to anyone older than six. Naturally, Calvin's dad hates it and is desperate to read him anything else, although a lot of that has to do with the fact Calvin wants him to read it every night.
• The Permanent Record: While not outright named, the idea of a "Thick permanent record" is used as a punchline in one story arc. The Principal shows Susie a massive file filled with papers and says that they have quite a file on Calvin.
• Perp Sweating:
  • One incident had Calvin's mother going for a parent-teacher interview with Miss Wormwood, which prompts Calvin to start packing a suitcase to run away. (Calvin does have a perpetually guilty conscience since he misbehaves all the time.) When his mother comes back and tries to talk to him about the conference, she inadvertently Perp Sweats him and he begins panicking as he tries to explain what he thinks Miss Wormwood told her:
    Calvin: Lies! Everything Miss Wormwood said about me was a lie! She just doesn't like me! She hates little boys! It's not my fault! I'm not to blame! She told you about the noodles, right? It wasn't me! Nobody saw me! I was framed! I wouldn't do anything like that! I'm innocent, I tell you!
  • Another time Calvin broke his dad's expensive binoculars, and burst into a hysterical confession at the dinner table when his dad hadn't even found out yet.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Calvin has a vocabulary that any adult would be proud of, but that doesn't stop him from making up words when the opportunity arises. In one short story arc, Hobbes uses made up words like "snippid" and "brambish" to describe certain smells, although when Calvin asks how to describe how he smells, Hobbes just says "terrible" before running away laughing.
• Pet Baby Wild Animal: In an early story arc Calvin found and brought home a baby raccoon. It was already severely injured when he found it, and died overnight. Besides showing the rarer compassionate side of Calvin, the story also explained that death was sometimes inevitable, and the best you could do was make the victim comfortable.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Even in her first appearance, Rosalyn locked Calvin in the garage for an unknown misdemeanor, so her kind moments are few and far in-between.
    • During an arc where Calvin and Hobbes tried to run away from her, she actually offered to make popcorn with him. Rosalyn rescinded the offer when she saw they had flown the coop.
    • Her last arc has her bribe Calvin that if he gives her no trouble, they'll play his favorite game and he gets to stay up half an hour past his bedtime. She actually keeps her word (and has fun) when she grabs the nuances of Calvinball is to make up as you go along. While Calvin isn't thrilled that she won and took Hobbes, hostage, he honored the rules and went to bed without complaint.
  • Calvin is generally inconsiderate, selfish and lazy. However, the raccoon strip shows Calvin making a genuine effort to help a dying baby raccoon by getting his parents to help out, even becoming sad and indignant over its death.
• Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity: In one strip, Calvin says he's brought one to class for show and tell.
  Calvin: I have in my hand an invisible cretinizer! One shot renders the victim a babbling simp, a dolt, an utter moron!
  Ronald: OH SURE, CALVIN! GIVE US A BREAK!
  Calvin: As Ronald proves, it's quite effective even at long range.
• Phoney Call: In one of the babysitting stories, Calvin tells Rosalyn he's on a doctor-mandated Big Mac-only diet. Rosalyn isn't fooled at all, but decides to trick Calvin back by calling his bluff and telling Calvin she'll call the doctor to check. After faking a call to the doctor, she tells Calvin the "doctor" said he'll need to eat a spoonful of castor oil.
• Picked Last: In one of the Sunday strips, during a particularly bad day, Calvin was not only picked last for baseball at school, but the two team captains fought over who was stuck with him.
• Pick on Someone Your Own Size: Calvin uses this trope in one strip against Barbaric Bully Moe. Moe's response is that he doesn't pick on other kids his own age, because they fight back. Calvin acknowledges that there's a certain immoral logic to that answer.
• Picky Eater: Calvin provides the image for the main page. It's heavily implied on multiple occasions that Calvin's pickiness is more for its own sake than genuinely disliking his mother's cooking.
• Picture Day: One of the early story arcs had Calvin attempting to style his hair in a crazy way with Crisco so he could get some crazy school pictures; he originally tried to have a swirl, but after his mom forces him to comb it out, Hobbes changes it to Astro Boy-like spikes. He also drew a weird face on his chest and takes his pictures shirtless, much to the photographer's chagrin.
  Calvin: Look, Hobbes. I got my school pictures back.
  Hobbes: Look at you! Ha ha ha! Look at your hair! Hee hee! These are great!
  Calvin: Aren't they though?
  Hobbes:' Hee hee hee! Look at this one! What an expression! Hoo hoo hoo! Ha ha!
  Calvin: Yeah, see how I got my one eye to roll back?
  Hobbes: Ha ha ha! Your mother's going to go into convulsions, of course...
  Calvin: Oh, c'mon. Years from now, think of the memories these will bring.
• Pig Latin:
  • In one strip, Calvin sneaks a walkie-talkie into class during a test to communicate with Hobbes. When Miss Wormwood catches him, he's muttering "Ixsay inusmay ourfay! Urryhay!" into the speaker.
  • In another strip, it's shown the G.R.O.S.S. club charter rejects Pig Latin as a secret code because everyone knows it.
• Pint-Sized Kid: Calvin and his six-year-old peers aren't much taller than their parents' ankles.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Roughly two-thirds of all G.R.O.S.S. meetings consist of Calvin and Hobbes arguing over procedural matters, getting into fistfights and then declaring a truce, rather than actually doing anything to get rid of any girls, slimy or otherwise. Partly because there only seems to be one girl in the whole neighbourhood.
• Place Worse Than Death:
  Calvin: I wonder where we go when we die.
  Hobbes: Pittsburgh?
  Calvin: You mean if we're good or if we're bad?
• Planet Looters: Calvin once wrote a poem about such aliens visiting Earth and sucking up the ocean and atmosphere.
• A Planet Named Zok: Several of the planets Spiff crash-landed on followed this structure.
• Planetary Relocation: In the strips for the week of 24 September 1990, Calvin has an Imagine Spot of Spaceman Spiff towing the sixth planet of the Mysterio System out of its orbit and smashing it into planet 5; planet 5 is shattered. The big joke being, this is prompted by the question "6 + 5 = ?" on a math quiz: Calvin spends so much time in the Imagine Spot that Mrs. Wormwood calls the end of the quiz just as he writes down "6" for the answer.
• Plato Is a Moron: Calvin claims he's too smart for school, and as proof claims:^note For the record, it's an urban legend; by all accounts Einstein got excellent grades in school.
  "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well, mine are even worse!"
• Platonic Kissing: Calvin's parents sometimes kiss him goodnight when they're putting him to bed. Mom also often has to kiss Hobbes, much to her chagrin. One strip even had Calvin wake her up in the middle of the night to kiss Hobbes again because the first one "didn't take":
  Hobbes: Hmmph, I don't think that one took either.
  Calvin: Oh, go to sleep.
• Playing Catch with the Old Man: Calvin's father takes him outside to play catch to give him practice for school baseball. It doesn't go well, as the immediately ball flies up and hits Calvin in the face, giving him a bloody nose.
• Playing House: Calvin and Susie play house a few times, once with Calvin refusing to accept Mr. Bun as their child, and another ending with him deciding to be a jungle man and running off in his underwear. For these sequences, the strip has an Art Shift to a Mary Worth-style soap opera comic.
• Playing Sick:
  • Subverted in a strip. Calvin won't get up because he's too sick. His mother mentions that it's Saturday and he won't miss school, but Calvin's only response is to curl up further in his blankets and mutter "I know". This is a kid who usually gets up at the crack of dawn on Saturdays, so his mom realizes it's serious and runs to the phone to call a doctor.
  • Played straight on other occasions. Once Calvin even got himself sick on purpose (by sticking his head out the window) in order to delay turning in an assignment. He regrets it when his mom hears his coughing and makes him drink some nasty-tasting medicine.
  • Calvin tried to pull this off in one strip, but he made the ailments sound so severe, his mom decided to go call the doctor. Suddenly, Calvin was feeling better.
• Playing Pictionary: One camping trip strip has Calvin's dad try to draw an island in the distance some time after breaking his glasses. Calvin initially thinks he's drawing a Brontosaurus with rabies.
• Plot Archaeology: In one storyline, Calvin needs to make a report on leaves, which he gets two aliens named Galexoid and Nebular to make for him in exchange for ownership of planet Earth. He flunks, of course. Several strips later, when winter comes, Calvin gets excited to go sledding, when Galexoid and Nebular show up at his front door, covered in snow and apparently angry over not knowing about winter being a thing on Earth. Hobbes helps by giving them his and Calvin's Christmas stockings to wear, which is all it takes to warm them up and placate them.
• Plot-Sensitive Button: Calvin's transmogrifier is a cardboard box with an indicator that points to whatever animal Calvin wants to turn into. If he wants to turn into something that is not listed, he just writes it on the side. The box itself is context-sensitive: crawl underneath it and it's a transmogrifier, go into it from the side and it's a duplicator, and climb in the top and it's a time machine.
  Hobbes: Oh no, I'm not getting into that box. I don't want to be transmogrified or duplicated or whatever.
  Calvin: What? When the TOP is open, it's a time machine, remember?
  • Actually weaponized when Calvin gets rid of his clones by tricking them into running into the duplicator, then flipping it over to turn it into a transmogrifier, whose effect produces a "ZAP" sound instead of a "BOINK" sound.
• Pluralses: "Thanks, Hobbeses! You guys are life savers!"
• The Points Mean Nothing: In Calvinball, the points determine who's winning, but they're completely incomprehensible unless you're playing, of course, and it's never made clear how one even "wins" a game.
  Hobbes: Okay, so now the score is oogy to boogy.
  Calvin: I already had oogy!
• Poor Man's Porn: Parodied when Hobbes admits to checking out tigresses in National Geographic.
• Post-Robbery Trauma: One story arc had burglars break into Calvin's house and steal the TV and some jewelry while they were out of town. Calvin's parents were traumatized by the breach of security, but Calvin was (once he had ensured that Hobbes was safe) mostly just annoyed about the lack of TV, and actually thought it was cool something dramatic happened to him for once.
• Potty Emergency:
  • In one Sunday strip, Calvin has an Imagine Spot where he drinks one too many glasses of water and dissolves into a liquid. Cut to Calvin sitting in the back of the car telling his parents he doesn't think he's going to make it.
    Calvin's Dad: Didn't I tell you not to drink so much before we left?!
  • In a different Sunday comic, the monsters under the bed make splashing sounds to force Calvin to jump off the bed to go to the bathroom. Cut to his parents outside noting how the bushes growing under the window of Calvin's bedroom don't grow very well.
  • One comic has Calvin putting on his numerous layers of winter clothing, taking one step out and realizing he needs to go pee, then taking everything off again just to go to the bathroom.
  • Hobbes doesn't like that Calvin's taking up too much room on the bed, but Calvin refuses to move, so Hobbes forces Calvin off the bed by describing things involving flowing water, making him go to the bathroom.
  • One Sunday strip has Calvin seeing increasing amounts of water, from a dripping rainspout up to being swept up in a raging storm at sea. It ends with Calvin springing awake from his dream and rushing to the bathroom.
• P.O.V. Cam: Ever wonder what it would be like to go sledding with Calvin?
• Power Fantasy:
  • Many of Calvin's Imagine Spots originate from the fact he doesn't have much control of his life in real life, so he can imagine himself as many cool and powerful creatures and entities, such as a renowned space explorer, a Flying Brick superhero, a Tyrannosaurus rex, or a giant monster rampaging through town.
  • There's also the strip where Calvin fantasizes about being an all-powerful, sadistic god who enjoys tormenting the denizens of his little world. The final panel reveals that he's playing with Tinker Toys.
• Prank Call:
  • Calvin never actively calls people (probably because he doesn't actually know anyone), but he does answer a lot of incoming calls with abject nonsense and then hangs up, simply because the call is never for him and he hates taking messages (and his luddite father refuses to get an answering machine that would solve the issue). Calvin will also sometimes call the library or the hardware store for ridiculous requests like making bombs or how to spell swear words, but these aren't jokes, he's completely serious.
  • Sometimes Calvin will call his dad at work to bug him with his shenanigans, such as saying how lame it is he's stuck in a boring job while he can run and play outside all day, or pretending to be a literal bug.
    Calvin: Bzz bz! Bzzzz! Bzz bzz! Bzzz bz!
    Calvin's Dad: Calvin, this had better not be you.
• Prank Injuries: In one strip, Calvin hides some pasta up his shirt and claims to Susie Derkins that his intestines are tearing out of his body, then opens up his shirt to make the pasta spill out.
• Prisoner Exchange: When Calvin "kidnaps" Susie's doll, Binky Betsy, and holds it for ransom, Susie "kidnaps" Hobbes in retaliation. Calvin ends up paying the ransom by giving Susie both her doll and a quarter in exchange for Hobbes.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • The comic came close to it in a 1986 strip:
    [Calvin hands Hobbes a book]
    Calvin: What does this word mean?
    Hobbes: Which one?
    Calvin [pointing] That long one.
    [Hobbes sees the word — and his eyes bug out, he claps his paw over his mouth, he jumps into the air, and his fur goes all bristly. Finally, he relaxes]
    Hobbes: [lying] I don't know.
    Calvin: You do too!
  • The only time there is actually a curse spoken in the strip is also 1986, whereupon seeing that "Be" only got him two points in Scrabble, Calvin states "2 POINTS? IS THAT @#$% ALL?"^note possible if "_E", with the blank used for a B, gets played on a double word score space, which was just done to have Hobbes say "My, this game does teach new words!".
• President for Life:
  • Calvin calls himself Supreme Dictator and President for Life of G.R.O.S.S. Only until Hobbes declares himself King and Tyrant, at which point Calvin decides that's what he wants to be instead.
  • In one strip, Calvin asks his dad when his term as "dad" is up, because he wants a new dad. He's very disappointed when his dad tells him that he was appointed dad for life and demands an impeachment or vote recall.
• Pretend We're Dead: Calvin the Zombie is one of his many alter egos, this one created for the purpose that the undead don't need to do homework. Eventually, Hobbes decides to join in, saying "When in Rome..." They kept it until they saw each other's snarling zombie faces and burst out laughing.
• Print Bonus: Several collections are prefaced with bonus stories and poems done in watercolor:
  • The Essential Calvin & Hobbes had the story poem "A Nauseous Nocturne."
  • The Indispensable Calvin & Hobbes had several short poems.
  • The Authoritative Calvin & Hobbes had a story in which Calvin, while doing his homework, decides to boost his memory by transmogrifying himself into an elephant.
  • The Calvin & Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book had a story in which Spaceman Spiff fights a Booger Being (Susie Derkins) and a Naggon (Calvin's mom).
  • The Tenth Anniversary Collection had author commentary next to each strip.
• Private Eye Monologue: Calvin delivers dead-on parodies of the Private-Eye Monologue as "Tracer Bullet", one of his alter egos. It's surprising how well it's done, since in his intro to the strip's Tenth Anniversary Book Bill Watterson admits he's not a fan of the Hardboiled Detective genre and really knows nothing about it except what he picked up by osmosis from pop culture.
  "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."
  "I've got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon. The drink packs a wallop and I pack a revolver."
  "Suddenly a gorilla pulled me in an alley, squeezed my spine into an accordion, and played a polka on me with brass knuckles!"
  "The dame's scream hit an octave usually reserved for calling dogs, but it meant I had a case, and the sound of greenbacks slapping across my palm is music to my ears any day. After all, I'm not an opera critic. I'm a private eye."
• Projectile Toast: Occurs in one early strip when the duo are marvelling over the miracle that bread left in the toaster becomes toast ("where does the toast go?").
• Prone to Vomiting: Not now, but when he was a baby Calvin spat up most of his time, at least according to Hobbes.
• Propeller Hat of Whimsy: In one arc, Calvin (who is known for his active imagination) orders a propeller hat in the mail, mistakenly believing it'll make him fly. He even spaces out in class and imagines flying with it. He finds out too late that it only spins and can't make him airborne, much to his disappointment.
• Protagonist Title
• Public Execution: One strip begins with an Imagine Spot with Calvin as a condemned criminal on the gallows, giving the crowd his best Defiant to the End glare as the noose tightens around his neck. Cut back to reality, where it turns out his dad is trying to get him to wear a tie.
• Puff of Logic: One duplicator story ends this way. Calvin made a clone of his "good side" to do his chores and go to school for him. They got into an argument over Good Calvin having a crush on Susie, and the clone disappeared as soon as it got angry enough to have an evil thought (namely, beating the snot out of Calvin).
  Hobbes: Another casualty of applied meta-physics.
• Punched Across the Room: Mentioned in one of the throwaway gags in the beginning of one Sunday strip:
  Calvin: That big, dumb bully Moe punched me at school yesterday.
  Hobbes: Really? What did you do?
  Calvin: Well, first I skidded across the playground, then I caromed off a rock and...
• Punny Name: Mable Syrup, author of "Hamster Huey."
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Calvin tries to use these to get a flamethrower. Doesn't work.
• Puppy Love: Calvin and Susie have Toy Belligerent Sexual Tension, of all things. It's a bit blatant in the earlier strips, but got more subtle as time went by and Bill Watterson got a better sense of both characters' personalities and could let them bounce off each other.
• Push Polling: Calvin likes to confront his dad with polls of the 6-year-old and tiger populations of the house. While these invariably show a landslide of popular opinion, his father inexplicably remains unmoved.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: Calvin is forced to wait for the bus against his wishes to go to school, which he has no desire to attend, once expressed a similar sentiment:
  Calvin: (angrily) I'm sick of everyone telling me what to do all the time! I hate my life! I hate everything! I wish I was dead! (taken aback by what he said) ...Well, no, not really. (angrily again) I wish everyone else was dead.
• Putting On My Thinking Cap: Calvin once built a literal thinking cap out of one of his ubiquitous cardboard boxes, some thread, and a colander. It resulted in his brain swelling in size, which (supposedly) increased his intellect greatly, although it didn't help him finish his homework at all.
• Putting the Pee in Pool: Heavily implied in this strip, where Hobbes dumps his fur in the pool to spite Calvin, only for Calvin to tell him he already did something a lot worse in there.
• Put Off Their Food:
  • In one strip, Mom tells Calvin that the icky stuff on his plate is monkey brains in order to get him to eat it. But now Dad can't eat it because it Squicks him out.
  • Mom uses this tactic on another occasion as well, telling Calvin his dinner is "spider pie." Calvin is momentarily shocked, then decides he likes it. Mom says she believes they're going to have a quiet dinner for once. Dad looks queasy and says he doesn't feel like opening his mouth.
  • Mom brings home jelly doughnuts, and Calvin doesn't want one because he says jelly doughnuts gross him out: "They're like eating giant, squishy bugs. You bite into them and all their purple guts spill out the other end." He tells Mom she can eat the doughnuts instead, but she pushes the bag away, saying, "My friends ask me how I stay thin."
  • There's a Running Gag about Calvin tormenting Susie at lunchtime by pretending his lunch is something unbelievably gross, such as slugs or phlegm. "And my mom wonders why I'm so hungry after school."
  • In one strip, Calvin asks if hamburger meat is made out of people from Hamburg. When his mom tells him it's beef, Calvin is disgusted by the fact he's eating cow meat and tosses the rest of his burger aside.
• Put on a Bus:
  • One story arc features a visit by Calvin's Uncle Max, whom Watterson first intended to be a recurring character. But while writing the story he realized Max wasn't bringing out any new sides to Calvin, and also found it awkward to write around Max not addressing his brother and sister-in-law by name, so Uncle Max boarded a plane and went home, never to appear in the strip again.
  • Rosalyn disappeared halfway through the strip's run but returned for one final story arc in September 1995.
  • During the first half of the strip's run, Calvin would occasionally visit an unnamed doctor for checkups or when he was sick. Despite being one of a small handful of reoccurring adult characters, he never appeared after a June 1990 story arc where Calvin caught the chickenpox.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Played with in one story arc, where Calvin attempts to weasel out of having to do a writing assignment for school by using time travel to get it in the future when it's already written. It doesn't end up working out, because in order for the assignment to exist in the future he had to have written it in the past, but the past and future Hobbeses together, realizing in advance Calvin's scheme won't work, write up a story themselves and give it to Calvin, so he still gets out of having to write a story himself in the end. Unfortunately, when Calvin presents the story the next day, he finds it's an insulting story about how much of a useless idiot he is for using time travel to weasel out of doing his homework with time travel that, according to Calvin, turned him into the laughingstock of the class...and earned him an A+.

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