Paradoxes of the imagination
If the many-worlds hypothesis fails to eliminate all the paradoxes of the time-traveling chowderheads storyline, it does remove the more egregious of them. For our purposes, the interest of the many-worlds interpretation lies in the light it sheds on the nature of Calvin's imagination, and the interface between this and the reality inhabited by the strip's other characters.

The first thing to note is that Calvin's imagination is largely furnished from genre fiction. In this, Calvin resembles Snoopy, many of whose alter egos - the WWI flying ace, Joe Cool - are generic. In the 1960s, before he fell a little too much in love with his creations, Schulz presented this quality of Snoopy's imagination as an impoverishment. Snoopy is dimly aware that there is something lacking in his engagement with humanity, something about the real world that resists subsumation in his fantasy life. I would argue that a comparable deficiency can be discerned in Calvin. Many authors have toyed with multiverse solutions to the paradoxes of time travel. ⁶ But Calvin is far too ignorant to go down this route. As Watterson has put it, "Calvin is a great character to write for, because I only need to know as much as a lazy six-year-old" (Tenth Anniversary Book 95) The schemes Calvin concocts, the identities he assumes, are built up of the hoariest visual and linguistic clichés. Spaceman Spiff is Calvin as the lantern-jawed hero of 1930s space opera; Tracer Bullet is a hardboiled P.I. of the Raymond Chandler school, complete with a criminal record, a cynical attitude towards the fairer sex (and doubts about whether they are, indeed, fairer), and Philip Marlowe's improbably recondite vocabulary; Stupendous Man is an amalgam of DC / Marvel Comics masked avengers from the 1950s and 1960s. Calvin's flights of fancy are, then, nothing if not conventional. Given the generic circumscription of the comic strip format as Watterson found it, it is difficult to see how they could be otherwise. Right from the start (in fact, as Watterson explains, the Spaceman Spiff character predates Calvin and Hobbes by over a decade) Watterson was using the strip to draw attention to its own inherent conservatism. Or to put it another way: we neither expect nor, if we think about it, desire originality in six-year-old boys. Similarly, the average comic strip reader wants to be amused, not challenged, by the average comic strip.

Usually the generic limitations of Calvin's imagination work against him, as they do in the more pedestrian comic strips. Miss Wormwood can be counted upon to interrupt a Spaceman Spiff reverie; Stupendous Man will never vanquish Babysitter Girl or Mom-Lady; Tracer Bullet never succeeds in deflecting the blame for the outrages he is investigating away from Calvin, the perpetrator. Whenever the world of Calvin's imagination comes into conflict with the real world, the real world always wins. It is, after all, from the real world that Calvin draws the conventions that structure his imagination. His fantasies thus do not allow him to escape from the consequences of his actions in reality; at most they afford him a different angle from which to perceive that reality. But the facts of the matter remain unaltered, and the relief is, alas, almost always temporary.

On the other hand, there are cases where Calvin, despite himself, creates effects in the real world that transcend both his own restricted imagination and the conventions of the comic-strip form. The ethicator storyline is one such. Calvin's personality switch is genuinely baffling to his parents (in one panel his mother is pictured anxiously poring over child psychology textbooks). There are no facts accessible within their frame of reference that could even begin to explain it. Time-traveling chowderheads is another. Calvin's motives for saying what he says in [13], and his angry reaction to Hobbes' story in [14], will be forever opaque to the adults concerned. In a sense, the ruse has been so successful that Calvin himself cannot account for its success. It is, of course, Hobbes who both intuits the ludicrousness of the enterprise, and who comes up with a solution. But as we have seen, this is also not without its logical difficulties. In [10] one of the Hobbeses also flirts with a many-worlds perspective on what is going on, when he says "If the 7:30 Calvin is at all like the 6:30 and 8:30 Calvins, I'll bet he isn't going to write that story." It is clear to him, as it is not to the Calvins, that the Calvins are, if not different people, what philosophers call distinct agentive functions.

Some of Calvin's identities - Tracer Bullet, Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man - are adopted knowingly, and stay under his control. A cynic like his Dad would say that their sole purpose is to muddy the issue of Calvin's culpability in the crimes he has committed around the household. The duplicate, good Calvins are fully explicable to Calvin, but elude his efforts to control them. Here cynicism has less purchase; the duplicates' escapades, for example, create mayhem Calvin would have difficulty reproducing single-handed. The 6:30, 7:30 and 8:30 Calvins are in another class again; the full significance of what they are doing, and who they are, appears to be lost on them, although less so on the Hobbeses.

As already suggested, one position on the first and second of these kinds of identity is that they are defense mechanisms, by which Calvin seeks to avoid obligations to others, and the consequences of his own behavior, in "reality." Because they are convention-bound, and because reality supplies the conventions, they are not as a rule successful. I do not think this is wholly adequate, but it does help us to appreciate what Watterson was trying to achieve with Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin's energy and pig-headedness obscure the underlying sadness of his predicament, which is quite as profound as Charlie Brown's. Calvin is the more attractive figure, lacking as he does Charlie Brown's dolour, but he is also much less self-aware. Charlie Brown knows what he is up against. Calvin refuses to acknowledge his helplessness before the forces that would tame/educate/exclude/clean him. But the weapons at his disposal are paltry, and Watterson has no compunction about showing us this.

Something more is needed, though, because Calvin's retreats into the world of his imagination are not invariably thwarted. This is not what happens in the time-travelling chowderheads story. Seen as an exercise in identity-formation, rather than time travel per se, the time travel stratagem is successful. Calvin ends up looking like a fool, but the story gets an A+. (Hobbes: "Maybe I should send this to the New Yorker.")

Why is it that here, where the 7:30 and 8:30 identities (and maybe the 6:30 identity as well) are adopted unknowingly, the outcome is positive for Calvin⁷, whereas his utilizations of the more fully realized personalities of Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man etc end in failure? It is not as if Calvin's motives are any purer in this story-line than they are when he is Tracer Bullet, or in the ethicator storyline. One would anyway hesitate to ascribe to Watterson the view that there are good acts of the imagination and bad acts of the imagination, and that the former deserve reward and the latter punishment. That is not how things work in the real world, and it is not how they work in Calvin and Hobbes either.

There is a more general problem. We know, because he tells us at great length (via Hobbes), why Calvin wants to escape reality into the realms of his imagination, but we do not know why he needs to escape so urgently. Watterson suggests one answer, when he has other characters go so far as to doubt Calvin's sanity. For Calvin's parents this is a measure of the love and exasperation they feel as they struggle with the task of bringing up Calvin. With Susie, addressing the problem of Calvin's patent weirdness is part of the cut-and-thrust of an intense, largely antagonistic, relationship. But when Calvin's other classmates - who, unlike Susie, do not really know Calvin or have anything in common with him - recommend that he be sent to a psychologist or a special school, the effect is heartbreaking. Calvin's helplessness is never more acute than when he is facing the incomprehension of children en masse. They, rather than the adults, are his true enemy. Calvin's parents love him, for all that he puts their love to the test; Miss Wormwood seems to rather like, or at least respect, him; even Roselyn makes efforts to be nice to him. But Calvin is despised by his coevals - the characters whose admiration, not to say subservience, he so craves. Moe the school bully is the one truly malign character in the strip. (Watterson: "Moe is every jerk I've ever known. He's big, dumb, ugly, and cruel.") There are some poignant moments when Susie, who is as anxious about acceptance as Calvin, but more orthodox in her efforts to secure it, feels compelled publicly to disown him. (We feel for Susie as much as for Calvin because in disowning Calvin, she is disowning the better part of herself, and smart girl that she is, she knows it.)

Watterson does appear to view social norms, particularly norms imposed in educational settings, as means of coercing and alienating unfortunates not deemed normal. (He comments on one of his early Sunday strips: "I've never understood people who remember childhood as an idyllic time." And on another, in which Calvin daydreams about blowing up his school at the controls of an F-15: "Some readers thought it was inexcusable to show a kid fantasize about bombing his school off the face of the earth. Apparently some of my readers were never kids themselves.") Calvin, like Charlie Brown and to an extent like Linus, is a victim of this type. Watterson gives readers little choice but to take his side against his (mainly vicious) antagonists. But just as Charlie Brown often seems to deserve, even desire, all that is coming to him, we have to ask: are Calvin's detractors right? Isn't there, maybe, something a little pathological about Calvin?

Works Cited

Thompson, David. "Peanuts and the Poetry of Defeat." Culture, Ideas, Comic Books.
       11 July 2009.

Watterson, Bill. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. 3 vols. Kansas City, KS: Andrews
       McMeel, 2005.

---. The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. Kansas City, KS: Andrews
       McMeel, 1995.

Contributor's Note

Henry Atmore is an academic. He trained in the History and Philosophy of Science and is currently Associate Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies in Western Japan.