What’s wrong with this picture?
If you’re thinking it looks eerily like an adult Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes, you’d be right. Two bloggers have drawn their version of the grown-up troublemaker as a father. That’s Calvin with his WIFE—who happens to be Susie (yes, that Susie).
I can’t decide whether to be amused or disturbed. Sure, the comics are pretty funny (there’s two total, here and here), and Hobbes makes a welcome return. Calvin, in truly ridiculous form, has even named his kid Bacon (what’s that short for, Begonia)?
But it also feels profoundly weird and a little bit wrong. We don’t expect comic strip heroes to ever get older. In fact, most of the comics only work because the characters never age. You’d hardly expect a teenage Calvin to run around with a stuffed tiger, and Zits relies on its everlasting adolescent-parent wars.
In that sense, comic strips seem exempt from the basic laws of storytelling (not to mention time). If the characters never age, then there are limits to how much they can mature and change. Week after week they rely on the same tricks: Garfield is always ravenous, Paige Fox will always like shopping, Alix Stone never runs out of energy…the same formula when applied to books quickly gets boring (just think Sweet Valley High or The Boxcar Children). So why does it work for comics? Is it because of their brevity? Their humor? One of the few comics to break that trend—Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse—never worked for me. It often got me to smile but rarely a laugh. Maybe I just didn’t like its style; or maybe it’s because the characters kept aging, changing too quickly, it seemed, before I could get a grasp on them. What do you think? Why do most comics keep their characters in stasis, and why doesn’t it bother us?
Actually, comic strip characters who age have a much longer history than you allude to. The oldest version to date would be Frank King’s Gasoline Alley, whose primary character has aged from an infant to (at present) a 90-year-old.
Another good example is Chic Young’s Blondie, who though eternally in her mid-30′s has two children who were actually born in the strip and have now aged all the way up to high school teenagers!
Bill Conselman’s and Charlie Plumb’s character, Ella Cinders, also aged, going from a spindly hard-luck young girl to a married woman. Although Ella’s aging took place over several decades, she does count.
While aging characters are somewhat rare within the field of comics, Lynn Johnston’s FBoFW did not invent it.
Thanks for these other examples. I didn’t assume that Lynn Johnston invented the aging comic strip character…I note that it’s one of the few to break the trend, as ageless characters dominate the funny pages. And for something like Calvin and Hobbes, which thrives on kid Calvin’s wackiness, that makes it even funnier (or disturbing) to imagine him as an adult.