Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for May 23, 2016

Mom would not be doing her job if she didn’t point out it’s your fault.

Oh, Hobbes. We hardly knew ye.

I remember this one.

Nice going mom.

Bad, bad mommy.

Nice, mom. So comforting.

Calvin never would give up, draging Hobbes everywhere!! Calvin is not Calvin without Hobbes!!

If I was Mom, I’d be concerned about a vicious dog that’s running around terrorizing kids.

Too true, Calvin.

I look at the strip this way: that the point is not about whether Calvin’s mom is a good mom or not, but all that was simply to set up the sentiment expressed in the last panel. My guess is that Watterson thinks of Calvin’s parents as good parents and wants them to be seen as such but that sometimes, for either humor or other purposes, he has them saying or doing things that a good parent wouldn’t normally say or do.

As a parent to my then young child I would have helped to find Hobbes. My then young son did not have a stuffed animal for a friend. He had mini racing match cars.

Hobbes is going to fight his way free tomorrow.

Not only a lousy parent but an idiot to boot

Nowadays, if a 6-year-old said his best friend was a stuffed animal he’d be carted off to therapy to determine why he his social skills development wasn’t progressing. Not having friends his own age would be considered pathological and a sign of some sort of social disability. They’d probably put him on drugs, too, claiming he had social anxiety or some other nonsense.

If memory serves, Susie Derkins finds him and he joins a nice happy tea party…..which is a lot better than what my JRT did to her stuffed toy last week…..‘we hardly knew thee’…lol!

You have that right, Calvin.

We don’t normally see physical signs of affection for his parents from Calvin like we do in panel 2.

I’m slightly concerned for the Dog. Hobbs has shown an ability to take care of himself!

Poor dog! I love dogs. Hobbs will leave a gruesome death sight. There isn’t enough chalk in the world for this scene.

Now that’s parenting!

I carry my comb around with me all the time and there have been a few occasions when I have lost it and my Mum thinks it’s because I carry around with me all the time. I put it down somewhere and I forget where.xxx

Always a lesson to be taught by mom..no matter what the crisis.

No sympathy shown in the 3rd panel. :I

When this strip initially premiered 30 years ago, Bill Watterson received a lot of fan mail with expressed written concerns regarding Hobbes’s whereabouts, even though the story only lasted a week. He saw it as a good sign that the readers were bonding with the characters.

Did his mom just got home from her job as advisor? Because she probably is in job-modus.