Calvin's Alter Egos (Calvin and Hobbes) - General Characteristics

General Characteristics

Calvin often pretends he is someone else and often gets lost in imaginative landscapes. His hyperactive imagination leads him to envision himself as other characters with different abilities and goals to escape difficult situations such as school quizzes. The strips which portray these events blend fact and fantasy as Calvin morphs elements in the "real world" with his fantasies. On several occasions, Calvin has appeared as either a larger or a smaller version of himself, wreaking havoc like Godzilla or crawling across a book page as "Calvin, the human insect." More frequently, Calvin's imagination transforms him into a being of a different kind. In many comics which involve Calvin in an alter ego, the strip is heavily stylized to portray Calvin's environment from his imaginative point of view. Such strips often finish with the last panel or two back in the "real world," providing backstory or simply to show the real world consequences of Calvin's actions. (e.g., Spiff dousing an "alien" with a "Hydro Bomb" (i.e. a glass of water), who is revealed to be Calvin's father).