ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 30, 1997 TAG: 9703290004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANK AHRENS THE WASHINGTON POST
The Rev. Robert Short uses the comic strip to bring the Gospel to children who might never hear it.
A classic, wonderful kid moment happened at Falls Church, Va., Presbyterian Church on Sunday evening. Author Robert Short was delivering a packed-house lecture - ``Short Meditations on Calvin and Hobbes and Christ''- and illustrating it with slides of the comic strip.
As Short flipped through the slides, he read the dialogue aloud, portraying both characters. In one exchange, Hobbes - the stuffed tiger brought to life by Calvin's imagination - is attempting to deflate Calvin's cynicism about the world, going on and on about how beautiful the sky is and so forth. Hobbes's homily is well-meaning but heavy on the saccharin.
A slide appeared with no dialogue. In it, Calvin stares at Hobbes, unable to grasp his rosy worldview. There's no telling what he will do next. In the audience, two teen-agers in a back pew tittered. They knew a pregnant pause when they saw one.
``Wouldn't it be awesome if Calvin just, like, started beating on Hobbes?'' one whispered to the other. Much giggling. If Calvin had heard the teen-agers, he probably would have been annoyed he hadn't thought of physical violence himself.
The teen-agers' response was decidedly un-Christian - and authentic. Bill Watterson - who drew ``Calvin and Hobbes'' from 1986 to December 1995, when he stopped it abruptly - ``got the reporting right,'' said ``Doonesbury'' artist Gary Trudeau in an interview. He said Watterson drew childhood ``as it actually is.'' That makes the defunct strip a ready vehicle for Short, pastor of a Presbyterian church in Monticello, Ark., to convey the Gospel to children who might never hear it. Many churches have begun to use popular culture in trying to make the Bible's ancient messages relevant to today's youth.
In 1965, Short's ``Gospel According to Peanuts'' was a No. 1 bestseller. In it, the oft-Christian themes of the comic strip by artist Charles Schulz, were analyzed as scriptural literature. ``It rains on the just and the unjust, Charlie Brown,'' Linus once told his disconsolate loser friend, paraphrasing St. Matthew.
Now Short is delivering his ``Calvin and Hobbes'' lectures in churches and on college campuses.
But there will be no ``Gospel According to Calvin and Hobbes,'' Short said. Watterson, who refused to license his characters for use as stuffed dolls, coffee mugs and other amazingly lucrative paraphernalia, won't allow it. Short has mailed Watterson a copy of his lecture but has received no comment.
For Short, Calvin is a representation of imperfect man, laden with original sin. He endears himself to us at nearly every turn. Yet he is unsatisfied and selfish. Jesus instructed that faith should be ``childlike,'' not ``childish,'' and Calvin epitomizes spiritual immaturity, Short told his audience.
The beatific Hobbes is the Christ figure. He often speaks in enigmatic parables. Where Calvin is a question, Hobbes is a suggested answer. Tigers, moreover, are symbols of grace and power, which Short said is a perfect definition of Christ. He quotes T.S. Eliot's poem ``Gerontion'': ``In the juvescence of the year/Came Christ the tiger.''
If all of this seems like ridiculous overanalysis of comics consider that scholars have traced the proto-cartoon art form to the 15th century and the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris, where arcade walls depicted the ``Danse Macabre,'' or ``Dance of Death.''
On painted panels, the recently dead warned the living to mend their ways before it was too late. Each panel was accompanied by a story in written text; think of them as word balloons. Literate guides read the panels aloud.
Since medieval times, stained-glass windows in churches have used images to portray Bible stories to the illiterate. The windows often told a story in sequence, like panels in a cartoon strip.
In his lecture Sunday, Short focused on a series of strips in which Calvin finds a wounded baby raccoon and attempts to nurse it back to health. When it dies, he wrestles with his - and our - scariest fears and biggest questions: Why couldn't Mom save the raccoon? Why did something so little and seemingly innocent have to die? Was it born just to die? Are we all born just to die? What's the point?
Short said Watterson has, intentionally or not, essentially drawn the final scene of ``King Lear,'' where the few characters left alive wander off stage, shrugging their shoulders at the mystery of it all. Just as Calvin does, as he slouches over a hill with Hobbes, discovering, ``What a stupid world.''
``When Calvin says, `Now he's gone forever,' he's almost quoting word-for-word what Lear says when he's holding Cordelia's body in his arms,'' Short said.
Short used the raccoon strips as a jumping-off point to talk about salvation. Calvin, because he was mortal, couldn't save the animal's life. But Christ's all-powerful love for mankind never goes away, Short told his audience. If Calvin, like Lear, sees life as futile and pointless, it is because he has not awakened to God's message of grace.
This is Short's way of following Christ's instruction in Mark 2:22 that ``new wine must be put into new wineskins.'' He interprets this to mean that the Gospel must be framed in relevant terms for new or younger listeners. Hence, the lectures on ``Calvin and Hobbes.''
``Jesus's parables were familiar, fascinating and sometimes fun to consider,'' Short said. ``Watterson uses the strip like Jesus used parables.''
The audience of 150 adults and kids ``got a big dose of New Testament tonight, and I don't think they would have taken that much without `Calvin and Hobbes' to make it relevant,'' Short said.
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Calvin epitomizes spiritual immaturity, says the Rev.by CNBRobert Short, author of ``Short Meditations on Calvin and Hobbes and
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