There are plenty of comic strips about kids who have an adversarial relationship with school. Peanuts features both Sally Brown and Peppermint Patty, and early Bloom County was often set in a classroom where the teachers were not at all ready for the Michael Binkley experience. On the other end of the scale, Jason Fox is so good at school that he usually wrecks the experience for everyone else.
Calvin and Hobbes took a different approach. What set Calvin apart from most of his funny-pages peers, with the exceptions of Huey and Riley Freeman, was that school might've been the most uncomplicated villain in C&H canon. At best, Calvin spent his school time wrestling with boredom; at worst, he felt like academia as an institution was actively out to get him, and would occasionally fantasize about its destruction.
That, in turn, is arguably a big part of what made Calvin and Hobbes an instant classic during its original newspaper run. Because of Bill Watterson's love of vocabulary, Calvin was always shown as being much smarter than the average six-year-old, even if that was just because it was funny to put graduate-level verbiage in a first-grader's mouth. He was just a poor fit for public school.
If you're anywhere near Calvin's age, or just honestly remember that time in your life, it's easy to see your own school years reflected in him. School is a big focus of Calvin and Hobbes, so a full rundown of all the strips on the subject would take up a book by itself. Instead, here are five strips chosen as some of the highlights of Calvin's ongoing struggles with the traditional education system.
In retrospect, some of the older Sunday strips can be seen as Bill Watterson already chafing against the limitations of the format. He eventually got the chance to change up his style after his 1991-1992 sabbatical. Before that point, Calvin and Hobbes was restricted to the more flexible panel structure as every other strip, in order to allow local newspapers to change their page layouts as required.
The April 8, 1986 strip is a simple set-up for a basic punchline: Calvin's bored enough in class to imagine he's warped outside of basic space-time. It's not as free with its art style as later C&H strips would get, but it's still got a few good panels. Spiff's heroic grimace is fun, along with the strange blur of the sixth panel as he blurs into hyperspeed.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
