Killing Calvin

I want to be more like Bob Dylan, and I want to get it right, so I study him like my life depends on it. I pore over every word, study him like holy men study the words in red. A recent example. The day after iconic songwriter Kris Kristofferson passed away, Dylan logged the hell on as fast as he could to tell us he just learned Bob Newhart had died a couple months ago and he was sad about it. There’s a lesson in there, one I’m trying to internalize: just write whatever, it’s fine, I’m Bob Dylan.

A couple weeks ago I saw a disgusting thing and I stared at the disgusting thing for the better part of an afternoon. It was on the level, truly, of those old internet shock photos where men do things to their bodies that feel vaguely illegal, but then you look at the law books and find out they don’t really get into the weeds about grotesquery. And somehow I hadn’t seen it before.

It’s been bothering me ever since I saw it and the feeling that there’s slow-activated poison in my body hasn’t gone away. So I’ll explain it now as pure bloodletting. I won’t link to it, don’t worry. Basically, it was a fan-made epilogue for the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes. No drawings or anything, no personal kinship to the material, no sense that this was tribute. Just an obnoxiously long prose finale to the strip, which of course ends with the protagonists continuing to do the stuff they always did. Outside of time. Being themselves. Signing off and encouraging us to be imaginative.

When Calvin & Hobbes promoted imagination, it usually meant, like, going to Mars or fighting monsters or turning into dinosaurs. What this epilogue thing does is dare to imagine that Calvin is a decrepit old man dying in a hospital bed. Presumably in the 2070s, though it provides no commentary on the future as such. It’s just a regular hospital, not a space hospital or anything.

For some reason Calvin, in the last stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or emphysema or good ol’ cancer, it never really gets into the medical details, never uses the hospital setting, is married to the first girl he ever met and he’s probably still in his old hometown. He’s got like two or three minutes to live and he’s surprisingly cognizant of this. Not on too many sedatives. He chokes out a few words to his wife about how he wants his stuffed animal from 70 years ago and how he wants her to leave while he talks to it. 

I guess the painkillers kick in and the stuffed animal comes to life like in the comic strip and tells him some shit like “it’s been a hell of a ride, old chap” and “you certainly look familiar, but oh my, we’ve aged, haven’t we?” Then Calvin starts crying and says some shit like “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I hope you find it in that broken heart of yours to forgive me” and then Hobbes is all “I never forgot about you. I never stopped waiting for you, my dear friend.” You know, like in the sad part of a legacy sci-fi sequel where a marquee actor wanted too much money to keep doing the character. 

So they reminisce about the glory days, all gone now, lost forevermore, dust in the wind, and Calvin’s wife is outside on her cell phone or whatever, and remember it looks different because it’s 50 years from now, the bevel might have a different grade and they’ve got this whole new process for the glass, and she’s probably questioning whether she should have obliged somebody who’s too close to death for any meaningful decision-making or true catharsis. Precious moments where she could have made eye contact, which is the most important part of comforting the dying, just thrown in the garbage for a stuffed animal.

Then the grandkids all run in there and one of the grandkids takes her grandpa’s antique stuffed animal and Calvin dies, gets out of his bed and throws away his cane and shuffles off to heaven or whatever. The end. They don’t get into detail about the funeral arrangements or anything like that. No clue whatsoever what kind of car his wife is gonna drive home in or how the grandkids are dressed. No real visual sense of the environment or what kind of drugs and gizmos they got in that hospital. 

It was the worst thing I’ve ever read and that’s fine because I grew up on bad stuff. I remember email forwards. The reason it bothers me is that a bunch of people worldwide read it and said it made them cry and feel all the feels even though it reads like your aunt forwarded it to you in 1997. (A zillion people have since come out of the woodwork to say the author should be shot out of a cannon on the moon, but for all I know that was the intended effect.)

It’s a very old school variety of mawkish internet drivel that you’d think would only apply to people who still think people driving at night without their headlights are going to murder you in a gang initiation. We spent an entire generation on the internet humiliating people who fell for that stuff, and I thought it was a crowd that was literally dying off. I didn’t know it could still work. 

Never mind why it was written. Best case scenario is it was a 4chan nihilism thing so I’ll give the writer the benefit of the doubt. I’ll even compliment how many things about the strip it gets wrong. In the strip Hobbes is actually just a guy, there’s no secretly sad gimmick about innocence. And Calvin is an anarchistic smart kid who’s basically normal and knows a lot of ten dollar words. He’s not a dying old man in the future.

But it’s ultimately the fact that its breed of bottom shelf quick-hit gas station sentimentality is still a force in society. You see it all the time online. You see it constantly in politics. We live on a planet where there’s a Ghostbusters sequel that positions Dead Harold Ramis at the intersection of Santa Claus and Jesus Christ and it made more than zero dollars. 

It’s not dissimilar to being a Disney Adult or crying at a Pixar movie even though those little bugs and robots aren’t actually real, they’re computers. That Calvin & Hobbes fanfic stuff, it’s emotional pornography. It’s bad for your dopamine and neural pathways. It’s too easy. 

Yeah yeah yeah. Calvin & Hobbes was important to me growing up (I am very smart and I’m the noble kind of lonely). Bill Watterson has a lot to say about authorial integrity and copyright and merchandising. By the numbers, the strip isn’t actually that sentimental. If you pay close attention it’s actually funny. Krazy Kat and Ignatz. It’s a completed art project with intent, and walled off, and outside the wall are barbarians with Calvin pissing on like a box that says “liberalism.” That was pretty well covered before the strip was even finished. Don’t need to watch reruns.

It’s just kind of remarkable that these radio transmissions from the bad old internet of 1997 can still work on people. AI slop, which this fanfic may as well have been, is the same thing. You churn it out in 5 seconds and think wow, I can’t believe that worked. It legitimately is horrifying how many people are susceptible to this craven emotional manipulation, this “what if a late Rob Reiner movie was even worse” nonsense. It looks for all the world like internet literacy, critical reading, critical evaluation of images, suspicion of the intent of any anonymous author, ability to detect con artists, hasn’t gotten any better since I was a kid. As AI or crypto scams get easier and the internet gets faster and more ubiquitous, those defense systems should be taught more. 

And for all the people who still make sad adult versions of comic strips, go reconcile with your parents or jog. You’ve spent too much time on the computer. It’s too late for me but you can still go outside.

Note: if you like this newsletter, consider a paid subscription. Money encourages me to actually make it instead of being a bum.