Characters / Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin

Calvin

This picture is as big as his imagination. And ego.

Nothing spoils fun like finding out it builds character.

The star of the strip (named after 16th Century theologian John Calvin), he's a 6-year-old with an unusually large vocabulary and grown-up sense of humor.

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A-E

• Acting Your Intellectual Age: Downplayed as he asks the naive question every now and then, but at just 6 years old Calvin has already developed a cynical worldview and philosophical knowledge, and as such finds social situations with his peers difficult.
• Allergic to Routine: To the point where he once tried to walk out the door without any clothes on. Calvinball operates on this principle, as well.
• All Take and No Give: His quote on the main page sums it up: "I don't want to pay any dues in life. I want to be a one-in-a-million, overnight success! I want the world handed to me on a silver platter!"
• Animal Lover: Despite showing misanthropic tendencies on a number of occasions, Calvin has shown affection and protectiveness for animals. He once tried to save an injured baby raccoon (and was devastated when it died) and was stunned when he saw the body of a dead bird, reflecting on the fragility of life.
• Anime Hair: Shonen Hair, more specifically. It's constantly lampshaded, though he also got the front part matted down and Hobbes suggested curling the back once. Another time, he made his hair a giant swirl with Crisco, his mom made him wash it out, but there was still some that Hobbes used to style his hair like Astro Boy, which made it hair from an actual anime.
• Annoying Patient: Provides the trope page image. He hates going to the doctor for checkups, and always tries to make those visits as difficult as possible. However, on one occasion, he was so sick that he didn't even have the energy to annoy the doctor, who commented that Calvin was a good patient that time.
• Anti-Role Model: It's safe to assume that everything Calvin does, you should not. While generally kind and absolutely intelligent, he's also demanding, self-absorbed, book-dumb, impulsive, greedy, and quick to anger.
• Armor-Piercing Question: During the Gulf War, he asked his father "How do soldiers killing each other solve the world's problems?" Calvin's dad doesn't seem to know how to answer that; Calvin concludes that "Sometimes, I think grownups just act like they know what they're doing."
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: He's very easily distracted, especially from things that don't interest him much in the first place (like school, homework and chores.) Most often, as part of his Cloudcuckoolander nature, it's his own mind that provides the distractions — but he has been known to suddenly get distracted by external things as well.
• Attention Whore: Calvin blows into a paper bag and pops it next to his father, startling him. He then says, "Pay attention to me."
• Babysitter's Nightmare: No one in town will babysit Calvin except Rosalyn, and the only thing that makes her keep coming back is the money she extorts from Calvin's parents. One time, Calvin begged his mom to call another babysitter after finding out he was getting Rosalyn, and her answer was that she called eight people already and Rosalyn was the only one who would do it (and mentions someone named Amy, who just laughed when Calvin's mom called her).
• Bad Liar: Calvin could not tell a credible lie to save his life, although part of this has to do with the fact Calvin lives in his own fantasy world where aliens appear every Tuesday, a cardboard box can turn into a time machine, and a book can come to life and eat his homework, and he doesn't understand no one else sees what he sees. So telling his dad aliens landed in the backyard and want ten dollars sounds perfectly credible to him.
• Being Good Sucks: In a few strips, he attempts to will himself to behave for once. However, every single attempt is short-lived because he hates not being able to get up to mischief.
  Hobbes: (before Rosalyn is about to visit) I suppose we could try being good.
  Calvin: I must've gotten water in my ear. What did you say?
• Berserk Button: Lots of them:
  • He explodes whenever Hobbes implies that he has a crush on Susie.
  • He hates it when people touch his comic books, namely Hobbes who not only touches them, but also draws over them in pen and spoils the exciting moments of any latest issue that he reads before Calvin does.
  • He doesn't like being reminded about his height. When Hobbes wonders why he doesn't wear shorts in the hot weather, we learn that Calvin is wearing shorts. He's just so small that shorts are basically like regular pants to him.
  • He flips out whenever someone (usually Hobbes) brings up the Noodle Incident. Unlike most of his antics, when Calvin will own up to whatever he did, he repeatedly insists that he didn't cause the incident, whatever it was.
  • He goes off like a cannon whenever Hobbes is skeptical about his claims that he's been good enough to deserve Christmas presents.
  • He doesn't take losing very well, usually to Hobbes or Susie. At one point, he throws a fussy fit when Hobbes beats him at checkers. Heck, said "fussy fit" is the image for Sore Loser!
    Calvin: You win? Aaugghh! You won last time! I hate it when you win! Aarrggh! Mff! Gnnk! I hate this game! I hate the whole world!! Aghhh! What a stupid game! You must have cheated! You must have used some sneaky, underhanded mindmeld to make me lose! I hate you! I didn't want to play this idiotic game in the first place! I knew you'd cheat! I knew you'd win! Oh! Ooh! Aarg!
• Book Dumb: He's not stupid by any means^note Though he can be stupid on occasion — he especially seems to have a gift for philosophy, social commentary and dinosaurs — but he's terrible wherever school is concerned, especially math. What it ultimately comes down to is that he's perfectly capable, and even eager, to learn new things—just as long as he's not being forced to do it.
• A Boy and His X: A Boy And His Tiger (Which May Or May Not Be Imaginary). Hobbes is the only person that Calvin regularly interacts with and talks to, allowing Calvin to bounce his ideas and theories off of Hobbes. Whether Hobbes is a living toy who only Calvin can see or if the whole thing is all in Calvin's head is deliberately kept ambiguous, but it doesn't change the nature of their relationship.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Grown-ups will often see him as one, due to his refusal to compromise his principles or be as stubborn as possible if he has no choice but to do something. Calvin frequently makes life miserable for his babysitter Rosalyn, and his mother has a Herculean effort in trying to get him to eat his vegetables.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: He's unusually cultured in vocabulary and philosophy, is very knowledgeable about dinosaurs, and has an advanced sense of irony. But since school often teaches things he doesn't like to learn, he just doesn't bother. Calvin could easily succeed in school if he just applied himself — in one strip, he gets a good grade, but feels that it wasn't worth the effort. On the other hand, he's impossibly bad at basic math.^note He has had moments where he showed some knowledge of math, such as in the duplicator arc, but in school he completely fails. More than one strip suggested that his grades at math are bad simply because he finds the subject incomprehensibly boring. It's also indicated that he doesn't like learning things that don't interest him—in one strip, when his dad asks him why he isn't doing better, since he likes to read about dinosaurs, he says "We don't read about dinosaurs." In another Sunday strip, he becomes fascinated by a snake that he and Hobbes find, and decides to learn more about it, but briefly hesitates upon realizing that he's learning something until Hobbes says no one is making him do it; in the next panel, Calvin is shown having fun reading a book about snakes.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • One single-panel strip showed him taping a note to Moe's back that said, "Heave a Rock at Me". Another comic showed him telling the bully (who was already about to hit him) that his mother taped a note to his shirt advising the reader to run him over. In the latter instance, Calvin comments that if he's going to get a beating, he may as well deserve it.
  • He constantly targets Susie with his snowballs, even though she regularly sends his ass to the cleaners in a fight. Word of God says this just encourages Calvin to be even more annoying.
• Butt-Monkey: Although it's usually justified because of his general attitude, sometimes he gets treated unfairly; in the baseball arc, he signs up because people look down on him for not participating, gets berated for accidentally catching the ball for the other team, and gets called a "quitter" when he quits the team under the pressure.
• Byronic Hero: Calvin is passionate about what he believes in, quite intelligent for his age, and unusually witty. But he's also bratty, spiteful, and willfully ignorant of anything that doesn't concern him or his interests.
• Brats with Slingshots: Sometimes he uses slingshots.
• Camera Shy: Despite being a massive Attention Whore, he hates having his picture taken. Whenever his parents try to take a photo of him, he'll always ruin it by making an ugly face.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': He will often be reprimanded or even punished for things, which he would swear are out of his control.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Depending on the Writer. At times he seems to relish in his Jerkass behavior and "villainy," even making up excuses that it's hard for him to be good because he to be naturally evil at heart. But the other half of the time, he's protesting that he's really a good kid with the circumstances just conspiring against him. Whatever will get him more presents at Christmas.
• Character Catchphrase: Every day when he comes home from school, he walks up to the door and yells, "I'M HOME!" prompting Hobbes to pounce on him.
• Characterization Marches On: In early strips, he's enthusiastic about participating in cub scout activities like camping. Later strips show him to be quite antisocial, and not really interested in hanging out with anybody except Hobbes. (Although he does take Hobbes with him on the camping trips, and at times tries to ditch the troop.)
• The Chew Toy: Quite literally to Hobbes at times. Plus... Well, let's just say that he's not physically strong.
• Child Prodigy: Downplayed — he's clearly very intelligent for someone his age (he's got a bigger vocabulary than most adults and has seriously deep philosophical/existential discussions with Hobbes). And yet he can't figure out what 11 + 7 is without Hobbes trying to help him. It's shown to be part of his Brilliant, but Lazy characterization, where Calvin is remarkably intelligent for a boy his age, but simply doesn't care about anything outside of his very narrow range of interests.
• Class Clown: When he's not daydreaming or trying to stay awake, he'll act up for the heck of it or ask odd questions (sincerely or otherwise). However, Calvin's classmates seem to find his antics more annoying and/or bizarre than funny.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Spends a lot of time wrapped up in his imagination.
  Calvin: You know why birds don't write their memoirs? Because birds don't lead epic lives, that's why! Who'd want to read what a bird does? Nobody, that's who! [beat] This is changing the subject, but have you ever noticed how somebody can say something totally loony and not be aware of it? What are you supposed to do, just let it slide??
• Constantly Curious: He used to ask questions to his dad out of naivete earlier in the strips.
• Creepy Child: Some strips (such as the ones featuring his snowmen) cast him in this light, though played for laughs rather than horror. The one where he imagines himself as a vengeful God applies too.
• Curious as a Monkey: Falling off in later strips, when it was harder to pass him off as childishly naïve.
• Damned By a Fool's Praise: Although not without his sympathetic moments, Calvin is largely characterized as an ignorant and obnoxious brat and it's clear when he announces his love of things like television, commercialism, snobby high art, and violent comic books, they're things Watterson himself hates. It is zigzagged a bit because this isn't true of all things Calvin likes.
• Deadpan Snarker: It's clear that he got this from his father. Calvin has a rather advanced sense of irony for his age, allowing him to get in quite a bit of snark on any subject in his world.
• Didn't Think This Through: He never seems to think things through—on one occasion, after throwing several water balloons in the air in an attempt to catch them (and getting soaking wet in the process), he commented, "How can something seem so plausible at the time and so idiotic in retrospect?"
• Ditzy Genius: Calvin can be very insightful and philosophical, but he's completely lacking in common sense. He often doesn't think his plans through, and ends up panicking and making things worse when stuff inevitably go wrong. This often leads to him getting outwitted by Hobbes or Susie, or failing dismally at his schoolwork. It's shown that Calvin can be quite intelligent and receptive to information when he wants to be. It's just that he doesn't want to be for most things.
• Does Not Like Spam: Despite his huge sweet tooth, he doesn't like jelly donuts. Not because of their taste, but because he finds eating them disgusting due to the way the jelly squirts out the other side when you bite into them. Apparently, it reminds him of the way a bug's intestines squirts out if you squish them.
• Drama Queen: Largely due to being a sheltered, middle-class, six-year old, he massively overreacts to incredibly minor misfortunes or just whines about total non-problems just for the sake of complaining, because he doesn't have many genuine issues to worry about.
  • In one Sunday strip, he takes a bite of his mother's cooking, which causes him to turn multi-colour, clutch his throat, flop like a dying fish, and then slump over dead. Until his mom tells him it's hamburger casserole, and there's nothing in it that he dislikes, and he eats it without complaining.
  • Every time his mom forces him to take a bath he puts up a massive fight like he's being led to his execution, screaming his head off, running all over the house, fighting like a cornered animal, and crawling into gross spaces just to avoid taking a bath.
    Calvin: They can make me do it, but they can't make me do it with dignity.
  • In one Sunday strip, he throws a massive tantrum after losing at checkers to Hobbes again. He smashes the board, accuses Hobbes of cheating, says he never liked checkers to begin with, and then screams and runs around in circles until he drops to the ground in exhaustion. And then he admits that's just a mild tantrum compared to when he loses in real life!
  • Endlessly complaining during a family walk around the neighborhood through the snow, ranting about how he's going to freeze to death, not even noticing when they actually arrive home - at which point he immediately cheers up and goes out to play in the backyard.
  • Every trip to the doctor is a ordeal with Calvin, because he's Afraid of Needles and wants to avoid a shot at all costs, even in check-ups or sick day visits where he doesn't need a shot. Then, the one time he actually does get a shot...
    Calvin: I'm dying! I hope you've paid your malpractice insurance, you quack!! WHERE'S MY MOM??!
• Dub Name Change: Is called "Tommy" in Norway and "Steen" in Denmark.
• Dumb Blonde: Played with—he's not stupid (he's clearly very smart for a kid his age), but he tends to make a lot of stupid decisions/mistakes and also clearly doesn't care enough about school to put in the effort to get better grades.
• Everybody Hates Mathematics: Any time Calvin's struggling with his schoolwork, there's a good chance it will be math. It's shown that Calvin finds math incredibly boring as a subject in school, meaning he often zones out during math class and letting his imagination take over. In a vicious cycle, his hatred for math makes him unwilling to learn it, which feeds his hatred for it, which makes him worse at it. Playing into his Ditzy Genius role, Calvin can apply mathematics when he wants to if it means making mischief, but this is pretty rare.
• Everyone Has Standards: Calvin may be an obnoxious little troublemaker, but there are lines even he won't cross, or feels bad about crossing.
  • Calvin may enjoy tormenting Susie, but he always feels guilt whenever it becomes clear his antics really hurt her or upset her. He actually apologizes on one occasion when he thought he had knocked out her eye with a snowball and facepalms in disappointment when Hobbes ate a slice of Susie’s birthday cake before she even blew out the candles.
  • Despite his love for violent comic books, Calvin is visibly shocked when he reads a page where a woman shoots a supervillain in the chest with a blaster powerful enough to shatter his spine. He decides to put the comic book down and watch some TV instead.
  • He constantly gets sent to the principal's office for misbehaving in class. But in the Duplicator arc, he was pissed when his duplicates kept getting sent to the office one by one while taking turns pretending to be him at school.
    Calvin: Geez, you guys! Even I don't get sent to the principal every day! You're making me look bad!
  • Calvin once tried to hide his mom's shoes to keep his parents from going out, and then ended up locking Rosalyn out of the house (which he got a very bad chewing-out for due to the danger of him not having an adult to help in case of emergency). At the end of the story, Calvin admits that he went too far this time. All the junk food he and Hobbes ate doesn't help either.
• Evil Feels Good: A strong proponent of this kind of thinking, which tends to get him in trouble, especially around Christmastime when he tries to make up for a year's worth of bratty behavior in a short amount of time to get in Santa's good graces. In one Sunday strip, he's about to throw a snowball at Susie until Hobbes comments that "some philosophers say that true happiness comes from a life of virtue." Calvin spends an entire day doing his chores, working on his homework, and cleaning his room, realizes he isn't happy, and then laughs his butt off after pasting Susie with a snowball.
  Calvin: Someday, I'll write my own philosophy book.
  Hobbes: Virtue needs some cheaper thrills.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: In one strip, he sees his mom taking a bath early and realizes it means she's going out tonight. And because she hasn't told him to get cleaned up, he's staying home...and if he's staying home, they've hired a babysitter...which means they've probably hired Rosalyn! Cue Overly Long Scream that lasts over one full strip.

F-J

• F--: Some of his schoolwork has been so bad he's gotten this. His last-minute insect collection, which had only four bugs out of the required 50 (with one of them being a piece of lint), earned him a "D-Minus-Minus."
• The Fatalist: A few times he says he takes up a "fate says so" attitude, if only to once again avoid shirking any sort of responsibility for his own actions. Hobbes trips him into the mud and explains "too bad you were fated to do that".
  Calvin: That wasn't fate!
• Friendless Background: Outside of Hobbes (who's seen as a lifeless stuffed animal by everyone but Calvin), the closest Calvin has to an actual friend is Susie Derkins. Everyone else Calvin's age either treats him like a punching bag (Moe), thinks he's an idiot (the baseball team), or are just totally weirded out by him (his classmates).
• Giftedly Bad: At math in general, and especially when called to do a problem on the chalkboard—some of his "solutions" are truly a sight to behold. It's suggested that the main reason Calvin's so bad at math (despite his general intelligence) because the subject so utterly bores him that he feels like it's a waste of time trying to comprehend it.
• Girls Have Cooties: Calvin's primary attitude when it comes to the opposite sex. The G.R.O.S.S. club has its name for a reason — it stands for "Get Rid Of Slimy girlS".
• Goofy Print Underwear: "What's the point of wearing your favorite rocket ship underpants if nobody ever asks to see 'em?"
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: He uses minced oaths, because he doesn't know any swearing words.
• Hates Baths: A few week-long arcs and several individual strips are dedicated to his attempts to get out of baths.
• Hates Everyone Equally: One winter strip has him making dozens of snowmen, each one representing a person he hates, so he can watch them slowly melt in the sun. Hobbes is more impressed he actually knows this many people.
  Calvin: The ones I really hate are small, so they'll go faster.
• The Hedonist: Desperately wants to be this and live a life of total self-indulgence (in Hobbes' words), and grates over his parents and society's insistence on things like "discipline" and "morals". Of course, being six years old means his idea of hedonism consists mostly of things like staying up past his bed time or not having to eat vegetables or go to school.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Calvin actually does have a sweet, caring side to him, and it's not just for Hobbes. When an injured raccoon Calvin tried to rescue dies, he's so utterly heartbroken that he cries.
  • Not to mention Calvin is surprisingly introspective when he's riding around in his wagon in the woods.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: He has a huge sweet side underneath his Jerkass troublemaking behavior that usually comes out whenever someone else shows him kindness.
• Hot-Blooded: He can get really riled up a lot of the time when one of his Berserk Buttons are pressed, including having to deal with Susie or being reminded about the Noodle Incident. In any case, when Calvin gets truly passionate about something, he tends to scream at the top of his lungs and go into it with his entire soul, for better or worse.
• Hypocritical Humor: Quite a few gags involve Calvin complaining about the state of the world in which he lives, only to have Hobbes point out that Calvin doesn't apply the same standards to himself.
• Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: One of Calvin's biggest character flaws is how he always vastly overestimates his own intelligence and importance. He continuously gushes about how much of a super genius he is and how everyone is jealous of his intellect, but he's repeatedly been outsmarted by virtually every other character, his schemes almost never pan out due to his shortsightedness, he has little common sense or school knowledge, and he refuses to improve himself any time he gets into trouble.
• Ignored Aesop: A Running Gag at the end of a story arc is Calvin summarizing everything that's happened and how he got into big trouble, then show he learned absolutely nothing from the experience and is often already in the middle of getting into the same kind of trouble.
  • Calvin somehow forgets a school project that the entire class has been working on and talking about every day for a whole month until the morning that it's due, and only because Susie asked him how his project was. He tries to rope Susie into helping him cobble together the project before the Miss Wormwood has them had it in, getting her into trouble. Susie gets sent to the principal's office and fingers Calvin as the real troublemaker. Calvin gets in big trouble for getting Susie in trouble and even bigger trouble for fudging his project. Hobbes then comments all this must've motivated Calvin to get his book report done on time, a retort that just confuses Calvin.
    Calvin: My what?
  • At the end of the first duplicator story arc, Calvin reflects on the whole incident by saying he's learned a lot from all the trouble it got him into. Hobbes asks what it was he learned, which results in Calvin admitting he learned nothing.
    Hobbes: Live and don't learn, that's us.
  • Calvin's mom goes to a parent-teacher conference, where she's told that Calvin needs to improve his math skills. Calvin's dad attempts to tutor Calvin with his math homework, and Calvin gets so confident with his new math knowledge he bets Susie a quarter he can do better than her on a pop quiz. It then immediately becomes obvious that Calvin learned absolutely nothing and is still just as ignorant about math as ever.
  • Calvin has to do a research project about bats and present it to the class. He doesn't want to actually put in any effort researching bats, so he just makes up a single "fact" and puts the report in a "professional" looking binder to guarantee an A+. When he predictably fails the assignment, he blames the class for pointing out his "fact" is wrong and the teacher for not noticing his "professional" binder rather than the fact he did no real work at all, and is last seen burying the assignment to prevent his parents from finding out.
  • Calvin has to write an essay arguing some point for school, but he ends up wasting his time with meandering trivialities and has to rush the essay, resulting in a paper only one sentence long and using Rule of Cool as his sole argument. His teacher takes pity on him for choosing a topic that was was too complex and raises his grade from a D- to a D, but rather than learning that he should manage his time better or that he should choose simpler topics, he learns that he can manipulate the teacher to get better grades.
  • Calvin has a nightmare which makes him realize he forgot to do his homework. He's saved by a snow day, but wastes the opportunity by playing outside all day. He's then saved a second day in a row because the teacher forgets to collect the homework before the end of the day. He reflects upon his luck and that he won't put off pleasure before work anymore.
    Calvin: And it will be a pleasure to have that homework done! C'mon, let's work on a snowman.
    Hobbes: (rolling his eyes) No exceptions.
  • In one arc, Calvin has to collect fifty leaves for school, and is given two weeks to do it, but puts it off until the evening before it's due. He is able to get two aliens to collect the leaves for him, but to everyone else the "alien" leaves just look like maple leaves cut into weird shapes and he flunks the project. He complains it was a totally pointless project anyway because identifying leaves is completely useless knowledge, picking up a random leafy branch for emphasis. Then Hobbes points out the plant he's holding is poison sumac.
    Calvin: This?? What makes you say that?
• Innocent Prodigy: He can use "evanescence," "ichthyoid," and "visceral" in the proper context, yet still throws tantrums over losing checkers games and adamantly resists doing his homework like any other 6-year-old.
• In-Universe Factoid Failure: His 'report on bats'. For one, Calvin claims that bats are bugs, saying this because bats are big, hairy, and fly. Everyone corrects Calvin (including members of his own classroom), but Calvin refuses to listen. Then again, he was none too willing to do any research. Calvin presenting this report to his class even provides the trope's page picture, along with his class shouting back at him how bats aren't bugs. Bill Watterson said in the Tenth Anniversary book that this makes Calvin easy to write for, since he only needs to know as much as a lazy six-year-old boy.
  Calvin: [Miss Wormwood] said I obviously did no research whatsoever on bats and that my scientific illustration just looks like I traced the Batman logo and added fangs!
  Hobbes: She's pretty perceptive.
• Irony: For all Calvin's belief that Girls Have Cooties, the closest thing he has to a friend outside of Hobbes is Susie Derkins.
• It's All About Me: Claims that the purpose of history was to produce him. Also, as much as he complains about the state of things, he seems to think he's above it all, or that the universe should just bend to his whims.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Underneath all his curmudgeonly layers and troublemaking side is still an innocent kid who really does care about fairness. He just doesn't see too much of it for his liking.

K-O

• Kids Are Cruel: When he's not being the victim of this trope, Calvin himself can be quite the bully towards Susie. He loves throwing snowballs and water balloons at her.
• Kids Love Dinosaurs: He's a six-year-old boy who loves dinosaurs, and many of his daydreams involve dinosaurs in some way (and he'll often pretend he is some kind of dinosaur). When his father talks to him about how he could be doing better in school, the reason he gives for not doing better is "we don't read about dinosaurs".
• Kids Prefer Boxes: The Propeller Beanie arc concluded this way. Despite his disappointment that his long-awaited propeller beanie couldn't fly, he's happy it came in a cardboard box that he and Hobbes could play with.
• Laborious Laziness: A big part of Calvin's character is that he avoids doing simple tasks just because people tell him he needs to do them in favour of complicated alternatives that never work out, often using more energy avoiding what he was supposed to be doing than if he just did it.
  • In one arc, he used a time machine to try and get his completed homework assignment from his future self (so he wouldn't have to write it). It doesn't work because, since he had to have written the assignment in the past in order for it to exist in the future and he didn't write it, it doesn't exist. Past Hobbes and future Hobbes end up doing the assignment for the Calvins, but write about what an idiot he is for trying such a stupid scheme.
  • In another arc, Calvin's mom tells him to make his bed, but he doesn't want to do it, so he tries to invent a robot to do it for him. Of course, being a six-year old with no money or engineering skills, he wastes his whole day making something completely nonfunctional instead of just doing something that would've taken less than a minute. But at least that got him out of having to make his bed in the end!
  • In one Sunday strip, Calvin finds a snake and wants to know about snakes, but since it's summer break he doesn't want to actually learn things. Hobbes justifies that "if nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun", which is good enough for Calvin.
  • In multiple strips, Calvin's dad has him shovel the walkway, but Calvin deliberately does a terrible job each time. In one case, instead of just shovelling the walkway from the door to the driveway, he shovelled a path all the way around the house and put huge snow piles in inconvenient spots like behind the car and right in front of the door. As he explains, "if you do the job badly enough, sometimes you don't get asked to do it again."
• Lack of Empathy: Calvin expects everyone to bend over backward to accommodate his whims, yet refuses to do any work that doesn't have immediate benefits for himself. Moreover, he deliberately annoys people around him, yet is incensed when someone else deliberately slights him. This isn't just hypocrisy; Calvin genuinely believes that he is the most important person in the world, and that different standards of behavior apply to him. This is all pretty standard for a small child, the difference being that Calvin has the ability to cleverly articulate his worldview without ever seeing the inconsistencies within it.
• Large Ham: Especially when his imagination runs wild. He was born to live in pulp fiction.
• Last-Second Showoff: Parodied. 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.
• Lazy Bum: Always acts incredibly put-upon when asked to do chores or roped into something that "builds character." It should be noted that all of the "builds character" moments are basically anything that Calvin's dad deems to be as such, like going camping in horrendous weather and enduring mosquito bites. The point being that life both sucks and doesn't suck and you have to take all of these moments in hand.
• Limited Wardrobe: He always wears the same shirt and pants combo. He does have other clothes, as seen in one strip when the clothes in his wardrobe came alive and forced him to wear an incredibly gaudy set.
• Literal-Minded: When he feels extra rebellious. Once when his mom told him to get in the bathtub, Calvin did so without turning on the water. However, his mom caught wise to that pretty quickly.
• Long List: His letters to Santa always consist of pages and pages' worth of outlandish requests for things like atomic bombs and grenade launchers. One time, he had to mail his letter in a box because "those big envelopes could only hold a couple hundred pages."
• Loving Bully: Well, maybe. He constantly pelts Susie with snowballs and water balloons, and once sent her a hate-mail valentine and a bunch of dead flowers, but it's also implied that he has a mild crush on her and that's the only way he really knows how to interact with her. One strip ended with Susie hitting Calvin with a snowball in retaliation for the above-mentioned "valentine", and then walking away thinking, "A valentine and flowers! He likes me!" (Calvin's thoughts: "She noticed! She likes me!")
• Mad Artist: Many winter strips show him creating elaborate and often grotesque snow sculptures. And then there was the traffic safety poster doused in pasta sauce — "Be Careful or Be Roadkill!"
• Made of Iron: He regularly goes careening off cliffs in his sled or wagon, yet never suffers any serious injuries.
• The Masochism Tango: With Susie. He constantly insults her or annoys her, and she's just as vitriolic right back.
  Calvin: It's shameless the way we flirt.
• The McCoy: To Hobbes' The Spock. Calvin's entire character runs on his wild imagination, impulsiveness, and making decisions that he deems to be right.
• Meaningful Name: He's named after theologian John Calvin, who believed that humanity was not inherently good, human salvation was preordained, and only the "elect" were good enough to get into Heaven. Watterson suggests that this explains Calvin's misanthropy and his attitude that nothing is ever his responsibility.
• Menace Decay: While he still remains selfish and impulsive, many of the worst aspects of his personality are softened considerably in the last year of the strip. Most evident in the last Rosalyn arc, which has the two actually cooperating.
• The Millstone: In any sort of group activity, Calvin drags down everyone else.
  • He significantly slowed down his troop of Boy Scouts during his imagination running away with him.
  • In the arc where Calvin joins a baseball team to get out of being teased, he ends up in "deep" left field. He ends up getting his own teammate out when he catches a flyball because the team switched from defense to offense without Calvin realizing it (though as Calvin figured they would've told him if it was something important.)
  • When he and Susie were paired up to do a report about Mercury — both the planet and the Roman god — Calvin spent pretty much the entire time goofing off and did his share of the report the very morning of the presentation (despite having at least a week to work on it). Since he clearly didn't do his fair share of the work for the assignment, Calvin significantly lowered his and Susie's overall grade for the project, which Susie was not happy about.
• Mouthy Kid: In certain comics, he just seems to go on and on and on about certain subjects.
• Mr. Imagination: Calvin provides the page image. A good half of all strips involve his weird imagination in some way, slipping into a weird daydream or fantasy when he's bored.
• Multiple-Choice Past: Played for laughs. According to Dad, Calvin was either bought as a blue light special at K-Mart or dropped down the chimney by a big hairy pterodactyl.
• Mr. Vice Guy: Sloth and Pride. The former because he's Brilliant, but Lazy and unwilling to do anything to better himself, and the latter because he thinks he's the most important person in the world.
• The Napoleon: Tends to become insecure about his height whenever it gets too obvious, such as in comparison to Hobbes, Moe, or his parents. One strip makes a punchline out of the fact that because he's so short, short pants touch his feet the way long pants would, which immediately sends him into a bad mood when Hobbes innocently asks why he wears "long pants" all the time.
• Never My Fault: This is Calvin's biggest flaw—this is a kid who will invent entirely new realities rather than admit he made a mistake in this one. Example include:
  • Claiming his dad's "polls" are slipping starting the day before...when Calvin's mad he didn't get any dessert because he flooded the house.
  • While appropriately concerned about environmental issues, he also fails to realize that his behavior might be contributing to them. After a spiel about how adults are causing global warming, which his generation will have to live with, Calvin's mom wryly says to the readers that this is coming from a kid who wants to be chauffeured anywhere that's more than a block away. The Mars arc has him realize the error of his ways when he ends up littering.
  • When he tries to make a point to his dad that Calvin's faults are "caused by negative influences of society", and therefore he's completely blameless and should not be held accountable for whatever bad things he does because "it's society's fault". The Dad responds by saying Calvin needs to build more character and makes him shovel the walkway.
  • When he tries to fix the faucet. Unsurprisingly, he floods the bathroom. While his Dad is understandably pissed off by this, Calvin gets into even more trouble by refusing to own up to it. First he claims it was a freak accident, then tries to pin it on Hobbes who wasn't too happy about it in the following strip and when Dad gives him one last chance to come clean, he desperately tries to blame it on Aliens. To crown it all, Calvin does not learn anything, instead getting upset that "Dad blew his stack" at him.
• Nightmare Fetishist:
  • Thoroughly enjoys violent comic books (although at least once, he's seen as being horrified by the gore).
  Calvin: Captain Steroid is getting his kidneys punched out with an I-beam!
  • His snowman gallery. It is downright horrifying that this six-year-old relishes such horror. To list a few - the gleeful snowchicken beheading/executing a snowman — the snowman who suffered a death by hanging — the tentacled monster who devoured many innocent snowmen — the snowmen who predicted impending and inevitable doom for their race and were right.
  • The only thing that can make him eat his mom's cooking is telling him it's something horrifying, disgusting, or dangerous like toxic waste, spider pie, or shrunken heads.
• Nighttime Bathroom Phobia:
  • In one strip, Calvin has to pee at night, but is too nervous to get up because he thinks there are monsters under his bed. He eventually pees out the window.
  • In another strip, Calvin says he has to use the bathroom, but the monsters under his bed are waiting for him. Hobbes distracts the monsters by feeding them a shoe, but Calvin's still too frightened and settles for just peeing in the bed.
• No Indoor Voice: The volume of his yelling is inversely proportional to his height.
  "If you can't win by reason, go for volume."
• Not a Morning Person: He hates getting out of bed on weekdays and having to go to school. Not so much on weekends when he has the whole day to play with Hobbes.
• Not Me This Time: Calvin repeatedly insists that he didn't cause the Noodle Incident, and that he was framed. Notably, unlike other times when he grudgingly takes his punishment for things he really did do, the Noodle Incident continues to be a Berserk Button for him.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Uses this to try to get away with certain things—but he's done it so much that the people around him (his parents, peers, Miss Wormwood, etc.) have wised up to it, so it doesn't work anywhere near as often as Calvin thinks it should.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • When Calvin got sick with the flu but didn't drop the sick behavior on the weekend, his mom ran to call the doctor. Also, Calvin was a good patient at the doctor for the first time in his life, suggesting he was just too sick to bother with annoying the doctor.
  • The burglary storyline, where Calvin's legitimately panicked when he realizes that Hobbes may have been stolen by burglars.
  • Calvin finds an injured raccoon and asks his parents to help him take care of it in the hopes of saving it, showing real concern for another living creature. And when the raccoon ultimately dies despite the family's best efforts to save it, Calvin's gets upset to the point of crying.
• Only One Name: His last name is never revealed.

P-T

• Pain-Powered Leap: Has done this on more than one occasion when stung by a bee (or, in one case, a hornet).
• Picky Eater: To an even greater extent than most young children who tend to be this by nature. The only meal he's never seen complaining about is his Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs and pizza. He even put off burgers once when he found out they're made of cows (he initially thought that they were made of people from Hamburg, Germany).
• The Pig-Pen: Hobbes will occasionally drop hints that he doesn't smell so good, probably because he loves getting dirty and also Hates Baths. In one strip, Calvin bribed Susie with a quarter to go to the front door of his house and yell, "I'm home!" Hobbes didn't pounce on her, she walked away with the quarter, and a frustrated Calvin came up to the door, only for Hobbes to pounce him.
  Calvin: Never, never, never, never, NEVER trust a tiger.
  Hobbes: I can always tell when it's you by the bad smell! Woo hoo hoo!
• Ping Pong Naïveté: Especially in the first year of the strip. He watches a trashy soap opera about two adulterous — and murderous — lovers and buys a violent and sexually explicit Heavy Metal album just to anger his parents...but also thinks that when you put bread in a toaster, the bread disappears and toast replaces it.
• Pint-Sized Kid: Lampshaded in one strip where he looks up at his parents and realizes he only comes up to their knees, and constructs a tiny two-ball snowman so that he can have someone to look down on.
• Political Overcorrectness:
  • Parodied in one strip, where he complains about the lack of positive role models in the Sunday funnies.
    Calvin: Look at how people are portrayed in comic strips. The women are indecisive whiners, nagging shrews, and bimbos! And the men are no better. They're befuddled morons, heavy drinkers, gluttons, and lazy goof-offs! Everyone is incompetent, unappreciated, and unsuccessful! What kind of insidious social programming is this? No wonder the world's such a mess! I demand politically correct, morally uplifting role models in the funnies! And look, all the kids are obnoxious brats!
    Dad: Yes, we all know how funny good role models are.
  • In another strip, Calvin claims that he shouldn't have to be forced to do anything that hurts his self-esteem, and therefore he can skip his homework, because getting wrong answers makes him feel bad.
    Hobbes: Your self-esteem is enhanced by remaining an ignoramus?
    Calvin: Please! Let's call it "informationally impaired".
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The hyperactive and impulsive Red Oni to Hobbes' Straight Man Blue.
• Ridiculous Procrastinator: Arguably his biggest flaw after Never My Fault—assuming that he bothers doing it at all, Calvin will pretty much always put off doing any kind of homework assignment or school project until the absolute last possible minute. And he's always shown suffering the consquences of it. To name some examples:
  • In one arc, Calvin gets paired up with Susie to do a report and presentation on Mercury (Susie, the planet, and Calvin, the god). Calvin puts off doing his share of the work until the very morning of their presentation (despite having at least a week to work on it), and rather predictably gets more than a few facts wrong. Susie is not happy.
  • In another arc, Calvin is given three days to write up a report on the brain, which he decides to write up on the bus the day it's due, researched from his dictionary.
  • In yet another arc, Calvin and his classmates are given two weeks to collect and identify fifty different leaves—Calvin doesn't even bother getting started until the night before it was due. He gets a pair of aliens to collect the leaves he needs, but his classmates aren't impressed by it^note When Susie sees Calvin's collection, she says that it looked like he just found a bunch of maple leaves and cut them into weird shapes and Miss Wormwood fails Calvin for the project, clearly not believing that his leaves came from another planet.
  • In the story arc where Calvin and his classmates have to do an "Insect Collection," Calvin ends up completely forgetting about the project until the day it was due, despite having at least a month to work on it—he also apparently wasn't paying much attention in class during that time, because Susie claims that it was pretty much all their class had been talking about it in school. He tries to catch some bugs before school starts, and ends up with a drowned worm, a smashed fly, a live ant, and a ball of lint that vaguely looks like a bug.
  • In a different arc, Calvin forgot to do his math homework, but miraculously a snow day occurs that gave him an extra day to do it. But even given the chance, he still shirks it off, only for his teacher to forget to collect it the next day, giving him another extra day to do it. And he still doesn't end up doing it.
  • Another arc, Calvin has to present an essay to the class, but wastes his homework time drawing useless doodles and inventing a brain-enlarging device that doesn't end up helping him at all. By the time he finally gets to the writing, it's his bedtime and he only ends up writing one sentence. The only reason he didn't fail the assignment is because his teacher took pity on him that time.
  • In yet another arc (although shorter this time), Calvin had an assignment where he had to make a shoebox diorama, but ends up only starting it the day after it's due. His mom was not happy when he told her that.
• Selective Obliviousness: For reasons unknown, Calvin never seems to comprehend that no one else sees the world like he does. He never seems to understand why no one else is threatened by an army of evil snow goons in his yard, or why no one seemed to notice he grew into a giant one day, or why the school still exists after he supposedly blew it up as Stupendous Man.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: A running gag. The author liked how he could precisely articulate stupid ideas.
• Slasher Smile: Sports this in several strips or whenever he's feeling particularly devious.
• Small Name, Big Ego: He likes to go on about what a talented genius he is. He's called himself "Calvin, Boy of Destiny", bragged about how his enemies hate him because they're jealous of his intelligence, and signed his homework "Calvin the Super-Genius." Though Calvin certainly is very intelligent for a kid his age (and can also be very imaginative and philosophical), in practice, he's regularly outsmarted by Hobbes or Susie, is a lazy and poor student, sometimes puts his pants on wrong or forgets to wear them altogether, and his plans pretty much always go awry because he didn't think them through. In general, Calvin thinks of himself as the most important person in the world but can't see the hypocrisy of this belief against some of his actions.
  Calvin: (gets dressed) I’m a genius, but I’m a misunderstood genius.
  Hobbes: How are you misunderstood?
  Calvin: Nobody thinks I’m a genius. (shown to have accidentally put his shirt and pants on upside down)
• Sore Loser: He doesn't handle losing very well.
  • One strip has Hobbes defeat him in a game of checkers. Calvin then throws a huge tantrum that lasts several panels, before an annoyed Hobbes finally says, "Look, it's just a game." Calvin responds, "I know. You should see me when I lose in real life!"
  • In a story arc where Calvin enters a traffic safety poster contest at school and ultimately loses to Susie, he claims the whole contest was rigged and wants his dad to call the school and declare fraud.
    Hobbes: Well, the important thing is that we tried our best.
    Calvin: The important thing is that we lost!
  • Subverted when Rosalyn defeated him in Calvinball, where he goes to bed as she ordered and was more surprised that anything about losing at Calvinball since it's a game with no rules or win/lose condition.
• Spiky Hair: Calvin's hairstyle. Hobbes lampshades this once.
• Stupid Evil: While more of a huge mischief-maker than outright malicious, many times his urge act like a brat while never thinking ahead get him into trouble when even doing nothing would have been better. This is best exemplified during the story arcs when he's being babysat by Rosalyn — he continuously antagonizes her to no benefit since he obviously gets punished every time when his parents come back home and hear from Rosalyn what he did.
• Super Gullible:
  • Calvin will believe any ridiculous stories his dad tells him at face value, no matter how silly they get. The Sun is actually the size of a quarter and it lands in Arizona at night, and that's why the rocks there are red, and Calvin accepts this as fact.
  • A Running Gag is Calvin asking Susie for the answers on a test. Sometimes Susie will trick Calvin by giving a silly and blatantly wrong answer, such as saying the solution to a math question is "Eli Whitney and the cotton gin". Calvin is terrible enough at school that it always seems plausible.
• Sweet Tooth: He loves candy, popsicles, cookies, and, of course, his Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, but he doesn't enjoy his mom's cooking in the slightest. Once, he even made a bunch of sickened snowmen to signal his dislike of some eggplant casserole that his Mom made for dinner.
• Teacher's Unfavorite Student: Miss Wormwood, the one of Calvin's teachers we most often see, seems to have it in for Calvin, even going as far as to warn a substitute teacher about him. However, Calvin is often disruptive and by his own admission not exactly the most attentive student. On the few occasions Calvin is actually motivated to try to do something or excels, Miss Wormwood is fully willing to praise and congratulate him.
• Too Dumb to Live: He has his moments, like throwing a rock at a bee's nest or sticking an insulting note to Moe's back. One strip even has Hobbes about to pounce on Calvin the second he enters the house...only for Calvin to sneak behind him and shout, "I'M HOME!", scaring Hobbes, who then roughs Calvin up. He then comments, "I've got to start listening to these quiet, nagging doubts."
• Took a Level in Jerkass: As the strip went on, his egotistic and selfish personality traits got exaggerated to the point he would often cause problems for everyone else just for its own sake, and then get genuinely upset when he was punished for it because as the greatest creation on Earth, he should get special treatment.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Trope Namer for Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, and cookies.
• Trash of the Titans: His room is always a complete mess, and unsurprisingly, his mom is always telling him to clean it. In one strip, he imagines himself as a jungle explorer named Safari Al who gets grabbed by a gorilla and told to clean his room. Cut back to reality and Mom says, "You heard me. It's a jungle in here!"
• Traumatic Haircut: Played for laughs in a series of strips when he asks Hobbes to cut his hair, and ends up getting his head shaved nearly bald (but with small patches of hair still visible on his head.)
  Calvin: LOOK WHAT YOU DID TO MY HAIR! IT LOOKS LIKE IT WAS CUT WITH A WEED-EATER!
  Hobbes: Nothing a little tonic and combing can't fix.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Just look at his snowmen. Or his school essays. Or his Christmas lists. Or some of the things he does around the house that he claims Hobbes caused, if you consider Hobbes a figment of his imagination.
• Turned Against Their Masters: His living creations almost always end up turning against him, like the Snow Goons, his duplicates, and even his "good side" duplicate.

U-Z

• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • For how annoying or weird she finds him, Susie's pretty much the closest Calvin has to an actual friend outside of Hobbes. Calvin in turn pelts her with objects, calls her a "slimy girl", and in particularly extreme cases, fantasizes about killing her.
  • His good side duplicate is endlessly kind and hard working, taking all his responsibilities for him. Calvin treats him like a glorified slave, calls him a total sap, attacks him for showing a crush on Susie, and then brushes him off when the ethicator inevitably vaporizes him.
  • Calvin complains that the pie he has for dessert is too small for him. His mom says life could be worse and should be lucky he’s even getting any dessert. Calvin angrily replies that life could be a lot better, too. This gets Calvin sent up to his room with no dessert.
• Unreliable Narrator: He often narrates the strip as the adventures of Spaceman Spiff or Stupendous Man, but the readers eventually get shown what he's doing in the real world. This is also a possible interpretation for the more fantastical sequences; did they really happen exactly as told or are we seeing it through an overly imaginative lens?
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: He can be lazy, mischievous, and even antagonistic for its own sake at times. This allows the audience to laugh when Calvin fails or messes up.
• Walking Disaster Area: There goes the resale value of that house. According to Susie, nobody has sold a house on their street in six years because of Calvin.
• Weirdness Magnet: Assuming it's not actually all happening in his imagination, lots of strange events happen to Calvin, and only Calvin, without rhyme or reason. He's been abducted by aliens at least three times, replaced by a robot replication, he once grew larger than the Milky Way galaxy, gravity stopped working on him twice, inanimate objects like soap, baseballs, and piles of dead leaves have tried to kill him, he shrinks to bug-size on a semi-regular basis, and his best friend is a talking anthropomorphic tiger who either appears as a stuffed animal from everyone else's perspective or transforms into one when they aren't looking.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: He proposes that since he has a "natural inclination toward evil" and it's harder for him to do good deeds than it would be for a naturally kind-hearted child, his own good deeds should count for more when it comes to Christmas presents.
  Calvin: I think one good act by me, even if it's just to get presents, should count as five good acts by some sweet-tempered kid motivated by the pureness of his heart, don't you?
• Warrior Poet: With snowball fights. This backfired on him once when, after giving a speech about the importance of craftsmanship while meticulously assembling a single snowball from just the right kinds of snow (and signing it), he was creamed by Susie, who had used the same time had to amass a massive snowball arsenal. Another time, he stated that he only throws consecrated snowballs. To wit:
  Oh lovely snowball, packed with care,
  Smack a head that's unaware!
  Then with freezing ice to spare,
  Melt and soak through underwear!
  Fly straight and true, hit hard and square!
  This, oh snowball, is my prayer.
• Would Hit a Girl: One of his favorite hobbies is tormenting Susie with water balloons and snowballs, and he'll often threaten her when angry. He also wrestled Rosalyn as Stupendous Man and managed to put up a decent fight.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Zigzagged. He's amazingly articulate for a six-year-old kid, and has a pretty firm grasp of philosophizing what he wants. However, most of what he wants or thinks about are the things normally desired by six-year-old kids, like wanting the whole universe to acknowledge that he's amazing.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: In one Sunday strip, he received a letter from Santa Claus encouraging him to be as naughty as he wanted, because the naughty-nice laws were being reversed and presents were now being given to bad children instead of good children. And then he woke up.
  '/I hate being good
  (or trying to fake it).
  Six days until Christmas!
  I don't think I'll make it.''
  

Calvin's Alter Egos

In General

There are several of these, due to Calvin's rampant imagination, including Wonga-Taa, King of Jungle (an obvious Captain Ersatz of Tarzan) and an unnamed, enormous carnosaur known to science only as the Calvinosaur. The most common personae, however, have their own folders below.

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• Affectionate Parody: Of quite a lot of things. Tracer Bullet, for instance, is this for the Film Noir genre, whereas Spaceman Spiff parodies the space heroes of the Raygun Gothic era.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: One of Calvin's most frequently recurring fantasies/personas is of himself as a rampaging Tyrannosaurus, messily devouring anything that happens to be in sight—cavemen, schoolchildren, city people, other dinosaurs, etc.
• Cliché Storm: Calvin's alter egos are very straightforward in their intentions. Tracer Bullet is a stock Film Noir detective, Spaceman Spiff is a Raygun Gothic superhero, and Stupendous Man is a straightforward Super Hero. The only exceptions with any of them is that they're frequently depicted as Failure Heroes because of Calvin coming up short. The trope is invoked, because this is all Calvin knows about any of these genres.
• Dragons Versus Knights: Calvin's dragon fantasy focuses on him roasting a knight that came to challenge him in his lair.
  The knight is fried to a crunchy crisp... his armor fused into a solid piece! The dragon circles overhead, daring other fools to come after him!
• Elephants Never Forget: In a story included in the beginning of The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin turns himself into an elephant with the transmogrifier to make learning his English homework easier, reasoning that since elephants never forget he can just look through it once and remember it perfectly afterwards. This works perfectly well, as Calvin's new memory is just as strong as he expected... until he has to turn back into a human, at which point his memory is no better than it usually is and he forgets most of what he memorized, forcing him to go through it again once his dad quizzes him and finds him unprepared.
  Dad: So let's hear one of the vocabulary words you learned.
  Calvin: Ok. Um, let's see... one was... uh, hmm... well, uh...
  Dad: I think you'd better spend a little more time with your book after dinner, hmm?
  Calvin: No, no, I remember them when I'm an elephant! I just don't know them now! Don't worry, I'll transmogrify myself before school tomorrow and I'll do fine! Really!
• Fantasy Sequence: Unlike with Hobbes or certain characters such as the bicycle or the snow goons, where their magical natures are left ambiguous, these are unequivocally presented as being Calvin's imagination at work... although Calvin really gets into the acting role.
• God Is Evil: One particularly memorable strip sees Calvin imagine himself as an all-powerful deity who despises his own creations and demands human sacrifices from them.
• Our Dragons Are Different: One strip sees Calvin imagining himself as a fierce, fire-breathing dragon that utterly destroys a knight foolish enough to challenge him in his lair.
• Power Fantasy: For Calvin. They're his way to pretend to fight back effectively against people and things he dislikes.
• Rent-a-Zilla: The Calvinosaurus is able to eat an Ultrasauros in a single bite. For comparison, an Ultrasauros is more than a hundred feet long... which is also about the same size as Godzilla.
• Terrifying Tyrannosaur: Calvin fantasizes about being a Tyrannosaurus rex so much that it's practically an alter ego in and of itself. He also imagines himself as an Allosaurus periodically, another large carnivorous dinosaur.
• Tentacled Terror: One strip had him fantasizing about being a large octopus devouring humans. In reality, he simply grabbed at his Mom's leg under her chair.
• Third-Person Person: All of them except for Tracer Bullet, for whom the Private Eye Monologue is employed.

Stupendous Man

...Impossible?? Why, nothing's impossible! Not for... STUPENDOUS MAN! Bum ba ba daa dum bum ba ba daa dum...

Calvin as a superhero; a parody of both Superman and Batman with the Large Ham qualities amplified.

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• The Adjectival Man: The Stupendous one, to be precise.
• Anti-Hero: He only ever uses his powers to help himself, never for anyone else in need.
• The Cape: Parodied. Stupendous Man is Calvin's idea of what a superhero is like, although the reader can clearly see he has no actual heroic qualities and exists to justify Calvin's selfish desires by framing them as heroic, like "liberating" cookies from the top of the pantry, or vaporizing the school because giving Calvin three pages of reading for homework is "tyranny".
• Characterization Marches On: He first appears in a one-off strip roughly a year before Calvin begins wearing a cape and hood to "disguise" himself, and his original appearance in Calvin's fantasy simply consists of a Domino Mask and a cape as opposed to the full superhero costume Calvin imagines himself wearing later on. He also apparently cannot fly in his first appearance, as it shows him worried about getting off a high building (in real life, Calvin is on a slide at the playground and is reluctant to go down it)
• Commuting on a Bus: Invoked by Calvin's mother whose treatment of the Stupendous Man costume depends on how much trouble Calvin causes with it. She takes it away for good at the end of the arc where Calvin becomes Stupendous Man at school (although we see it once more in a one-off appearance after that).
• Composite Character: Has flight, strength and red underwear like Superman, and a mask, dark aesthetic, and a wealthy alter ego like Batman.
• Disproportionate Retribution: As a result of most challenges Stupendous Man has to overcome being stuff that only Calvin would consider "crimes". For example, Calvin is given three pages of reading to do for homework, but he finds it too boring, so as Stupendous Man, he uses a giant telescope lens to focus the Sun's rays to vaporize the school to avoid having to do his homework.
• Doomed Moral Victor: Referenced in one story arc when Hobbes asks if Stupendous Man has ever won a battle. Calvin says that they're all "moral victories".
• Expressive Mask: During his fantasy sequences, his mask will frequently move along with his eyes to help show his expressions. This sometimes even occurs in-universe when Calvin puts on his costume, such as when Stupendous Man tries to defeat his babysitter Rosalyn, making exaggerated expressions as if she was infecting him with a Mind Control virus.
• Extreme Omnivore: Apparently has a "stomach of steel".
• Failure Hero: Lampshaded when Hobbes asks if Stupendous Man has ever won a battle.
  Calvin: Well, they're all moral victories.
• Flying Brick: He has the classic combo of flight and super strength in a normal human body.
• Fun with Acronyms: "'S' for Stupendous! 'T' for Tiger, ferocity of! 'U' for Underwear, red!" Unfortunately, despite his immense vocabulary, Calvin isn't good at actually spelling things, so he never finishes the acronym.
• The Ghost: Stupendous Man's "rogues gallery" are never depicted and only shown as their real counterparts(Mom, Miss Wormwood, Susie, Rosalyn).
• Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue": He's Calvin if he was a Flying Brick that has Super-Strength, Super-Senses, Super-Speed, Super-Intelligence, and a "stomach of steel". Even his alter-ego is described as a "mild-mannered millionaire playboy". Despite all this, Stupendous Man has never won a single battle (or according to Calvin, "they're all moral victories").
• Informed Ability:
  • Stupendous Man is said to have a myriad of superpowers such as Super-Intelligence and Super-Strength, but aside from early appearances, he's no stronger or smarter than Calvin (such as when he uses Stupendous Man's vast intellect to speed-write a test, but he still flunks in the end), since he usually only appears as a costumed Calvin in the real world.
  • Played for Laughs When he says his alter-ego is "mild-mannered" Calvin. Calvin is a lot of things but "mild-mannered" is not one of them. Then again, the "mild-mannered" comment is meant to be from an outside perspective, so when Stupendous Man's out of costume, he could be mild-mannered (or at least when compared to the real Calvin).
• Large Ham: Like you wouldn't believe. Nearly everything he says is some form of hammy bragging about how awesome he is.
• Minimalist Cast: Stupendous Man is the only visible character in these daydreams. Other characters are alluded to (Mom Lady, Babysitter Girl, Crab Teacher) but we only see them when the POV switches back to the real world.
• No Guy Wants an Amazon: Mom Lady, Babysitter Girl, and Crab Teacher are all bigger than him - and he hates them for it.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Calvin thinks his hood and cape hide his identity, when they actually don't.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Heavily implied, as all the "supervillains" he fights are women. Not that his acts of "heroism" are at all heroic to begin with.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: All the "villains" that Stupendous Man fights are antagonistic only from Calvin's point of view, for "crimes" such as giving him some homework, making him go to bed, or being a girl.
• Superheroes Wear Capes: A flowing red one longer than he's tall.
• Super-Intelligence: In one story arc, Calvin bought his costume to school in order to use Stupendous Man's intelligence to pass a test. He flunks it anyway.
• Super-Senses: Has both "Stupendous Vision" enabling him to see Susie while high in the atmosphere, and "high-speed vision" which seems to allow him to read very fast.
• Super-Strength: Such so that one strip, he returns the planet to a previous point in its orbit to basically extend the year by one day.

Spaceman Spiff

His stabilizers useless, his fuel about to explode, our hero careens out of control over a strange, unexplored planet! Yes, it's just another typical day for the incredible Spaceman Spiff!

A space adventurer and hero who explores strange planets and unknown parts of space, and fights all kinds of alien monsters (who tend to want to kill him, or capture and interrogate him.)

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• Art Shift: The Spiff fantasies have more realistic landscapes. The fact that Calvin sees real life as cartoonish by comparison really says something about how he thinks.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: One short shows him exiting his ship to fix it, with no Explosive Decompression or air being sucked out of him.
• Bold Explorer: Spiff is a bold interstellar explorer, who constantly gets captured by bizarre alien life forms (usually Calvin's parents or his teacher).
• Bolivian Army Ending: A majority of his stories end with him about to be executed, eaten, or stranded with no hope of escape on an inhospitable alien planet.
• Captain Crash: Many Spaceman Spiff episodes involve his ship getting hit by alien death ray fire and crash-landing on some unknown alien planet. "SPACEMAN SPIFF IS GOING DOWN!!!" is practically his catchphrase.
• Captain Space, Defender of Earth!: An obvious send up of this archetype, Spiff is an intrepid space explorer.
• Chronically Crashed Car: Very, very often, Spiff's adventures begin with his little red spaceship hurtling down on some random planet in flames and out of control and ending up as smoking wreckage after plowing onto the surface. In one strip, Spiff notes his "very high insurance premiums."
• Defiant to the End: Spiff never breaks... except once.
  Torturer Dad: Let's see how you withstand a calm discussion of wholesome principles!
  Spiff: AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!
• Distressed Dude: Spiff is constantly captured by aliens that want to eat him, interrogate him, torture him or use him as forced labor.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Spiff is constantly running into aliens that want to kill or eat him.
• Expressive Mask: His goggles change shape to reflect his facial expressions.
• Expy: The character Spiff has its origin in two comic strips Watterson made in school; one called Raumfahrer Rolf, a two-page story drawn for a high school German class, and Spaceman Mort, which he drew in college. After graduating, Watterson reworked the concept into a strip called Spaceman Spiff, which he tried to sell to the newspapers, to no success. After Calvin and Hobbes took off, Watterson reworked the character a final time, creating the version we all know.
• Failure Hero: Most of his stories start with him crashing his spaceship onto A Planet Named Zok and end with him captured by aliens.
• Fantastic Racism: Many of Spiff's adventures show him preparing to kill aliens - even ones who haven't attacked him or don't even know he's there. At one point, he prepared to execute a lower life-form In the Back because it was so stupid he felt pity for it.
• Feels No Pain: In one Sunday strip, Spiff declares that he is "impervious to pain" so torture is completely ineffective against him. Whether this is actually true is never shown, because the aliens have a punishment far worse than physical torture... a calm discussion of wholesome principles!
• Genre Throwback: An obvious homage to Raygun Gothic pulp stories. Complete with a bubble-domed flying saucer, Space Clothes, all sorts of wacky Starfish Aliens, and of course an actual Ray Gun. Originally (when Spiff was going to be a standalone comic strip), he was even going to have a zeppelin-like spaceship.
• Guns Are Worthless: His "death ray blaster" never, ever works against the aliens he fights because its real-life equivalent is a snowball, suction dart pistol, rubber band, etc.
• Informed Ability: We're told that Spiff is a famed ace pilot, but nearly every appearance has him hurtling out of control towards some desolate planet. In one case, he didn't even know what the "E" on the fuel gauge stood for.
• Large Ham: Hams it up a lot, usually shouting all his dialogue with a heavy overtone of narration.
• Large Ham Title: "Spaceman Spiff, Interplanetary Explorer Extraordinaire!"
• No Indoor Voice: At times, he is pretty loud. One comic consisted of him doing nothing but screaming.
• A Planet Named Zok: Most planets Spiff visits are named something like Zorg, Bog, Quorg, Zortak, or, yes, Zok.
• Planet of Hats: Where he frequently travels to. Generally, the hat seems to be that of an evil alien conqueror.
• Shout-Out: Watterson has said that Spiff's narration is a spoof on Flash Gordon.
• Single-Biome Planet: More like Single-Biome Galaxy. Every single planet that Spiff visits (with only two exceptions) is a rocky desert based on the deserts of Utah.
• To Serve Man: It's indicated that humans are considered a delicacy in Spiff's universe and a few times, Spiff is captured by aliens that want to eat him.
• Unexplained Recovery: Many of his stories end with Spiff trapped on a hostile planet with his ship wrecked, or about to be executed by some alien warlord, but he'll right back in the thick of it by the next appearance. Of course, the in-universe reason is that Spiff is only an extension of Calvin's imagination.
• The Worf Barrage: You could probably count the number of times his gun hasn't backfired on him or proven ineffective against his target on your one hand. Then again, considering Calvin's weapon in reality is a suction dart pistol/snowball/rubber band, and the aliens often represent his real life enemies, it's clear that his imaginary weapon's effectiveness is equivalent to his real weapon's.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: After Calvin escapes from school, Spaceman Spiff escapes from his dungeon, but when Calvin's mother finds out, Spiff's ship comes under attack.

Tracer Bullet

I got eight slugs in me. One's lead, and the rest are bourbon...

A hard-boiled private investigator in an unnamed big city.

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• The Alcoholic: He's fond of his hip flask, and goes out to get a drink when he's having trouble solving the "Jack and Joe" case (which translates into Calvin going to the water fountain while solving a math problem).
• Art Shift: Noir art, which is almost completely black with some white so you know what's going on. Watterson mentions he did it purposely to make it harder to look at, as the eye, being lazy, favors blank white spaces.
• Butt-Monkey: Gets beaten up near the end of both of his arcs.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: He never breaks from his flowery similes even when he's being held at gunpoint or in the middle of a beatdown by some hired goon. Justified, since the "danger" is only happening in Calvin's imagination.
• City Noir: The unnamed city where his adventures take place: it seems to be entirely made of alleys and overbearing skyscrapers, it's always raining, and the strips it appears in are drawn in a photo-realistic style that emphasizes shadows.
• Cliché Storm: Watterson admitted he wasn't really familiar with noir or detective stories, so he just spoofed the genre's cliches. Possibly counts as an In-Universe example.
• Companion Cube: He occasionally talks about his gun and alcohol as if they're people.
  "I'd planned to take the day off and spend time with a couple of buddies. They travel light and they're fun to have around. One travels in a holster, and the other in a hip flask."
• Complexity Addiction: Tracer Bullet in the first arc results in this. Calvin is asked to solve a basic math problem, but Bullet "solves" the case as though the numbers are people (that is, that he was solving a "numbers racket" a la gangster movies). He ends up blaming it on "Mr. Billion" and answering the problem as "1,000,000,000."
• Crapsack World: From what little we see of it, Tracer's world ain't a friendly or happy place. Pretty par for the course for noir, really.
• Deadpan Snarker: He stays calm a lot, even when he snarks.
• Detective Patsy: In the second arc, he was hired solely for "the Dame" to have someone to pin her crime on.
• The Faceless: Everybody except Tracer was like this in his strips. Most character are off panel and the only two that aren't only have hands visible.
• Family-Friendly Firearms: Zig-Zagged. Tracer has an actual gun that shoots actual bullets on-panel, but he always misses all of his shots, and outside of Calvin's imagination, the weapon is merely a dart gun.
• A Friend in Need: The ending of the second arc, where he doesn't admit the truth to the authorities because the culprit is a friend of his, i.e. Hobbes.
• Functional Addict: He's a heavy drinker and smoker, but it doesn't seem to affect his ability to solve cases.
  "I have two magnums in my desk. One's a gun, and I keep it loaded. The other's a bottle, and it keeps me loaded."
• Gory Discretion Shot: Both times he gets beaten up. His shooting the dame in the second arc.
• Hardboiled Detective: Or an exaggeration/parody thereof. His Private Eye Monologue bubbles have him making exaggerated and tortured metaphors which depict Tracer as a Knight in Sour Armor, believing himself to be beaten down by his job and how he never seems to crack any cases.
• The Masochism Tango: According to him, he and "the Derkins dame" have this going on as well.
  Me and Susie had never hit it off, though we did occasionally hit each other.
• Noir Episode: Although Watterson admitted he wasn't a big fan of noir, he actually got the look and feel of the genre down surprisingly well.
• Not-So-Badass Longcoat: Though he definitely sees himself as a badass, Tracer is a Failure Hero like the rest of Calvin's alter egos. The one time Tracer got in a gun fight, he missed with all three shots, shown by Calvin trying to shoot at somebody with a rubber plunger toy gun and missing every time.
• Perpetual Frowner: Never cracks a smile. His face is set in a perpetual, hard-boiled grimace.
• Private Eye Monologue: The only actual text in his strips is his lengthy internal monologues, which Calvin is shown thinking "aloud" when the strip switches back to the real world.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • Watterson says that the main reason Tracer made so few appearances was simply because the Noir-ish art took too long to finish. If it hadn't, we might've been given more Tracer Bullet cases to enjoy.
  • In-universe, Calvin is first seen using the Tracer Bullet fantasy when he is covering up a bad haircut with a fedora.
• Smoking Is Cool: Constantly puffing cigarettes, and is a hero (or at least in Calvin's imagination he is).
• Talks Like a Simile
  ''I didn't like the way this story was shaping up, so I decided to write a new ending with my .45 automatic as co-author. My friend is an eloquent speaker. He made three profound arguments while I excused myself. I always leave when the talk gets philosophical. Just as I finished putting all the puzzle pieces together, the dame's hired goon jumped out of nowhere and practiced for his chiropractic degree."
• This Is Gonna Suck: What he thinks when something bad is about to happen, or when he gets a case when he had something else planned at the time.
• Unwitting Pawn: The second arc, where Tracer Bullet is hired to investigate a broken lamp. Calvin's mom thinks he did it when it was actually Hobbes, so Bullet's POV depicts it as "the dame" just getting him at the crime scene so she could blame the crime on him.
• Would Hit a Girl: In the second arc, after Tracer realizes that the dame that hired him just wanted to pin the crime on him, he has no problem taking out his gun and shooting at her. (Outside of the fantasy it’s just a suction dart toy gun.)

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