Ohhkay, yeah, I’m Calvin alright, at least in the later years of this strip.
I had and read (and adored) all of the early Calvin and Hobbes books when I was young, but stopped reading comic strips in general sometime during junior high, since I had convinced myself by then that I had outgrown “kid’s stuff”.
So I missed the later books.
Reading a few parts of a couple of them yesterday floored me. Holy Jeebus, it’s the same stuff, all over again- the comic is just drenched with stuff that specifically references my own memories. And I mean, it gets very specific. It’s too close for… comfort, or at least too close for my feeble attempts to convince myself that there might be some parts of this media complex of ours that aren’t me.
Unbelievably, Calvin and Hobbes even gets into Anti-Christ stuff!! There was a sequence of strips in one of the books I read that reference Calvin being a “person of destiny” and other jokes about how he will “run/lead the world” that echo very closely my own… knowledge, I guess, of my own future.
Kinda… incredible.
At any rate, perhaps this explains why I identified with Calvin so strongly when I was a kid, with his crazily overactive imagination and intricate fantasy worlds, his distinctive sense of humor, his extremely high (but very unusual) intelligence, etc. And “Hobbes” might be my old imaginary friend crossed with my Mickey Mouse doll.
I don’t know. But the latter books are very specific in more than a few references, and… difficult for me to say aren’t me. Perhaps it’s a matter of my memories of my teenage self being fresher, and more clear, than my childhood memories.
But… wow. Crazy, utterly crazy, and kinda overwhelming.
So, uh… this isn’t how other people live, right? I mean, all the media they consume isn’t just… tailored to them, specifically, yes?
Right?
Yeah… uhm… well… crazy stuff, lol.
Wow.