I'm Calvin's dad

Just learnt from Quizilla's "Which Calvin and Hobbes Character are You?" quiz that I’m Calvin’s Dad. Cool...he’s always been one of my favourite comic characters. We never learn that much about him, as Quizilla points out, but I’ve always thought of him as indispensable to the strip. It’s a fact not often acknowledged that Calvin and Hobbes derives much of its edge from the personalities of Calvin’s parents, from the fact that they’re both so utterly COOL in different ways. For all the brilliance of the Calvin creation, the comic strip would never had worked as well if his parents had been mere foils - vapid, doting picket-fence creations like, say, Dennis the Menace’s folks. (My standard image of Dennis's mom is with her hands perpetually on her cheeks in dismay.)

Calvin's parents complement their brat superbly. The mom is slightly less interesting - though I find her unalloyed bad-temperedness very funny. But the dad has a wicked sense of humour and manages to get the better of his precocious son so often - no mean task - that the reader gets a good sense of the genepool whence Calvin might have sprung.