Welcome to March, 1986! Metallica releases Master of Puppets! Beatles albums are finally available to buy in Russia! Georgia O’Keeffe dies along with her vagina flower paintings.

Calvin doesn’t buy Metallica or Beatles records, nor does he paint vagina flowers. Not yet, anyway.

March 1, 1986 – Dad’s juking the stats.

Much to Calvin’s chagrin, Dad is starting to wise up to the political game and he’s fighting dirty. Behind the scenes, Mom and Dad packed the courts and now they’re overturning every case they can get their hands on, including, but not limited to, Dad v. Calvin. You can’t spoil a baby, they always say, but now the little shit’s spoiling days are over!

Dad doesn’t write the rules, he just enforces them. He also writes the rules! Sorry for that red herring.

March 5, 1986 – Rent a VCR? How much does Dad make in 1986 that he can’t afford a fucking VCR? Buy a fucking VCR.

First there was The Cuisinart Murderer of Central High, then there was Vampire Sorority Babes, and now it’s Attack of the Coed Cannibals. Calvin and Hobbes sure like their family-friendly coming-of-age teen films, don’t they. There’s a lot to learn from these works of educational fiction. I wish I could’ve had such movies during my own tender childhood. Calvin’s a lucky little lad.

March 9, 1986 – Calvin is going them a favor selling that hunk of shit. Get a grenade launcher AND a fucking VCR.

I’ve always wondered what Mom does for a living. Dad is clearly a patent lawyer, and obviously not a very good one, but Mom works at home. Long before COVID, Mom was doing it right! She always seems to be writing things down on pieces of paper. Perhaps she’s like Andy Fox from Foxtrot and writes a regular column for the newspaper! Or, perhaps, she’s really the Unabomber and she’s perfecting her manifesto. Either way, it’s productive work.

March 15, 1986 – Topical! Looking forward to what the funny papers have to say about Halley’s Comet in 2061 when I’m hopefully long dead.

There’s no topic more humorous in the Sunday Funnies than the topic of existential dread! I’m not sure of there was any creepy cult shenanigans going on with the 1986 Halley’s Comet approach like there was with the Hale-Bopp Comet, but I’m sure many people had the same thing on their mind about harbingers of doom. Imagine some 16-year-old depressed kid, terrified of the world ending in his mushy little skull, trying to seek solace in his favorite comic strip on March 15, 1986, and he gets a face full of this macabre shit. He probably slit his wrists before 60 Minutes came on that night.

March 20, 1986 – Dad’s Panel 2 smug satisfaction didn’t last nearly as long as it took you to read this very sentence.

Calvin’s muppet mouth in Panel 3 makes this for me. Dad might weigh 45 pounds, but you can tell he had no problem getting out of his car, rolling the sleeves up on his noodly arms, and hoisting the fruit of his loons by the scruff and throwing his ass into his bedroom.

It’s Calvin who will get the last laugh, though, when he turns on the fireplace with the flue closed at 2am and then books it to Alberta.

March 25, 1986 – Getting your ass kicked by a girl is the 1st Grade equivalent to third base.

Hey Calvin, wanna see a magic trick? Double-cross Susie Derkins and you’ll be at the hospital for the next three weeks pooping out your teeth.

March 30, 1986 – RIP Calvin Whatshislastname. 11/18/85 – 3/30/86. He died doing what he loved: ruining the rose bushes.

Talk about hitting the reset button and returning to status quo after every strip. Calvin obviously died here pretty violently, bleeding out among the thorny thickets of Mom’s treasured rose bushes after leaping from his second story bedroom window. You hate to see it.

This won’t be the last time Calvin dies! I recall a story arc where Hobbes ties Calvin to a chair as part of a Houdini magic trick and he ends up splitting his head wide open on the floor. Look forward to that and more in the next edition of Attack of the Coed Cannibals! I mean, Cruisin’ Thru Calvin and Hobbes!