Daily newspaper comics usually make a point of being seasonal. It's a rare gag-a-day strip that doesn't make sure to touch upon all the major holidays, particularly Valentine's Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. When you've got to get a joke out there once a day, every day, you take inspiration wherever you can find it.
On a Halloween reread of Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, one of its more remarkable qualities is that it usually doesn't bother with that. There are a few seasonal strips and arcs scattered across its nine-year run, sure, and Calvin's struggle with staying good before Christmas is an annual tradition. But as a whole, C&H is less concerned with the holiday calendar than one might expect, particularly in its late, post-sabbatical era.
Halloween in particular is remarkable by its absence. In the full run of Calvin and Hobbes, there are less than a dozen Halloween-themed strips, all of which are done-in-ones. Granted, Calvin already spends a big part of the strip in fantasy scenarios and/or various costumes (i.e. his alter ego Stupendous Man), which removes some of the obvious hooks for a Halloween story.
Much like adult horror fans, Calvin lives his entire life like it'll never stop being Oct. 31. Still, there are a couple of good Halloween jokes in Calvin and Hobbes. I'm particularly fond of the strip from Oct. 31, 1995, in which Calvin's "costume" is some kind of baby-boomer terror archetype.
"I'm yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood," Calvin cheerfully tells an unnamed adult, "poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak!" It's a good joke, even if it does sound like your oldest and most cynical uncle is telling it. It also appears to have inspired half the editorials in the Wall Street Journal for the last 30 years. Still, it's worth a laugh.
If you want to talk about the scariest Calvin and Hobbes strip, however, there's one in particular that sticks out to me. It's not one of the most common running jokes in the strip, but Calvin enjoys superhero comics. His favorite is the often-cited, never-seen Captain Napalm, but there's a whole universe of costumed characters lurking just off-panel.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
