Okay, so……. On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Calvin needed help from the “real” Hobbes in order to be able to push the car out of the garage. On Wednesday, the “real” Hobbes grabbed Calvin and prevented him from running into the street after the rolling car. And today, the “real” Hobbes is seen running after the car, together with Calvin, right behind Mom’s back. This raises the question: Does Hobbes actually become alive when nobody but Calvin is watching, or is all of this only in Calvin’s imagination? The answer is: Neither interpretation is correct, and both interpretations are correct.Bill Watterson intentionally leaves Hobbes’s real-vs.-imaginary reality as a mystery for the reader to try to sort out, which can never fully be explained.Here are a couple of excerpts from a 1989 interview with Bill Watterson. The interview was conducted just 2 months before Bill drew this week’s strips.RICHARD WEST: … Hobbes is implicitly, explicitly just a product of Calvin’s imagination.BILL WATTERSON: But the strip doesn’t assert that. That’s the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. Some reporter was writing a story on imaginary friends and they asked me for a comment, and I didn’t do it because I really have absolutely no knowledge about imaginary friends. It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up....RICHARD WEST: … Hobbes tied Calvin up to a chair. If you accept the rest of the fantasy that you’ve created — that Hobbes is imaginary — that’s an impossibility.BILL WATTERSON: Yeah, and Calvin’s dad finds him tied up and the question remains, really, how did he get that way? His dad assumes that Calvin tied himself up somehow, so well that he couldn’t get out. Calvin explains that Hobbes did this to him and he tries to place the blame on Hobbes entirely, and it’s never resolved in the strip. Again I don’t think that’s just a cheap way out of the story. I like the tension that that creates, where you’ve got two versions of reality that do not mix. Something odd has happened and neither makes complete sense, so you’re left to make out of it what you want.Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (December 5, 1987)
Okay, so……. On Monday and Tuesday of this week, Calvin needed help from the “real” Hobbes in order to be able to push the car out of the garage. On Wednesday, the “real” Hobbes grabbed Calvin and prevented him from running into the street after the rolling car. And today, the “real” Hobbes is seen running after the car, together with Calvin, right behind Mom’s back. This raises the question: Does Hobbes actually become alive when nobody but Calvin is watching, or is all of this only in Calvin’s imagination? The answer is: Neither interpretation is correct, and both interpretations are correct.Bill Watterson intentionally leaves Hobbes’s real-vs.-imaginary reality as a mystery for the reader to try to sort out, which can never fully be explained.Here are a couple of excerpts from a 1989 interview with Bill Watterson. The interview was conducted just 2 months before Bill drew this week’s strips.RICHARD WEST: … Hobbes is implicitly, explicitly just a product of Calvin’s imagination.BILL WATTERSON: But the strip doesn’t assert that. That’s the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. Some reporter was writing a story on imaginary friends and they asked me for a comment, and I didn’t do it because I really have absolutely no knowledge about imaginary friends. It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up....RICHARD WEST: … Hobbes tied Calvin up to a chair. If you accept the rest of the fantasy that you’ve created — that Hobbes is imaginary — that’s an impossibility.BILL WATTERSON: Yeah, and Calvin’s dad finds him tied up and the question remains, really, how did he get that way? His dad assumes that Calvin tied himself up somehow, so well that he couldn’t get out. Calvin explains that Hobbes did this to him and he tries to place the blame on Hobbes entirely, and it’s never resolved in the strip. Again I don’t think that’s just a cheap way out of the story. I like the tension that that creates, where you’ve got two versions of reality that do not mix. Something odd has happened and neither makes complete sense, so you’re left to make out of it what you want.Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (December 5, 1987)