Readers of newspaper comics (for the youths in the audience, they were like the Internet, printed on dead trees and thrown haphazardly at your house) in the 1990s will likely remember my three favorite strips: Gary Larson’s The Far Side, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes and, waaay out in front, Berke Breathed’s Bloom County. Larson’s madness is near-impossible to analyze in any meaningful way, but I always found that Opus the Penguin and Hobbes the Tiger had a lot in common in terms of their place in the narrative. Sure, one’s a flightless waterfowl, wearing tighty-whiteys, and the other’s possibly only real in Calvin’s imagination, but they were both comedic figures who could be sweet and touching at a moment’s notice, leading to today’s unfair and impossible query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) doesn’t always enforce this particular clause but, just as “none of the above” is not a legitimate answer to the MS-QOTD, today we cannot accept “both”, asking: Opus or Hobbes?
3 Comments
Hobbes all the way. He might not have all the answers or solutions, but he always sees the thousand yard view of any situation, especially if the situation’s about to go pear-shaped for Calvin.
You can have a strip with Opus without Michael Binkley, Milo Bloom, Steve Dallas, Cutter John, etc., etc., etc., but you can’t really have a strip featuring Hobbes without Calvin. Point: Opus
Opus is insecure and at times bristly, while Hobbes is very confident and can be quite cuddly. Point: Hobbes.
Tie breaker because “both” is not allowed: Hobbes comes first alphabetically.
Winner: Hobbes, by today’s rules of CalvinQOTD.
This … What he say……
Me
ps. i would add in that hobbes has a bit of a sadistic humour streak as well.