Oddities

Oddities refer to errors or inconsistencies in Calvin and Hobbes.

• In a dinosaur Sunday strip from 3/13/88, Calvin imagines that he is a fierce T-Rex attacking and eating a Triceratops as grotesquely as possible. He is then brought back to present day when his parents reprimand him for eating messily. Throughout the strip, everything is an off-putting, greyish shade of green. It should be noted, though, that the strip is only miscolored in a few editions. Most books have a 'normal' color that fits to the scheme of the other strips, so this was not intended by Bill Watterson.

  

  The miscolored strip. Notice how the Triceratops' outline is broken up in panel three, and the greenish hue of the family's skin.

• The other cartoon from 11/28/85 is also an oddity.
• The strip from 5/23/87 that featured Calvin making ice tea was in The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, but not Something Under the Bed is Drooling. See Missing strip.
• In a Sunday strip from 5/10/87, Calvin's shirt is white in the second panel.

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  The extra duplicate is on the right, circled

  In the first duplicator story arc, featured in Scientific Progress Goes Boink?, the strip for January 26 shows a sixth duplicate partially, wearing a plain shirt. This was never altered in reprinting. The extra was never again mentioned, and as such is most likely an error on Bill Watterson's part. 

• In The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, the strip from January 7, 1987 features alternate dialogue. In the first panel, it says "Was I genetically engineered or cloned?" rather than "Was I adopted?" The alternate dialogue omitted references to adoption and the trade of children. Curiously, it did not omit references to cannibalism and child labor.
  • Also in The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, the strip from November 25, 1988 has a change in dialogue: both mentions of Calvin's "biological mother" are changed to "a good mother," again omitting references to adoption.
• In The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, the strip from November 24, 1987 features alternate dialogue. In the second panel, referring to Calvin's dad's explanation for why the weather seems to be getting colder, it says "He says it's colder because our hemisphere is tilted away from the the sun now." rather than "He says it's colder because the Earth's orbit is taking us farther from the sun." The new, alternate dialogue provides the correct scientific explanation for the existence of seasons like winter. The original dialogue reflects a commonly held but scientifically incorrect misconception.
• In Calvin and Hobbes, the strip from 12/15/85 has the tenth and eleventh panels reversed. This is fixed in later books.
• In the 11/19/89 strip, Calvin's jacket is pink in the third panel, when in fact it should be blue.
• While the original strip shows Calvin catching Hobbes by means of snare, the August 1, 1989 strip has Hobbes saying, "I seem to recall you spent most of the time burping up." in the fourth panel, implying he had been with Calvin when he was three.