Catalogued

There is a wiki for Calvin and Hobbes. 

I found this out while trying to find an old Foxtrot strip about the then-recently released The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (a collection I now own). My googling presented me with some results from a wiki before I eventually found the strip in question on a lovely little fansite that hasn’t been updated in over a decade.

It shouldn’t surprise me that there’s a fan wiki for Calvin and Hobbes. There’s a wiki for everything, from a massive sprawling book series to Firefly. And wikis are good! Teenage me found Wookiepedia to be a wealth of knowledge when I was looking up those weird aliens in the Star Wars books I was reading, and even now I love getting lost on Tolkien Gateway. But somewhere along the way, Wikia became Fandom and good old enshittification happened and all those fan wikis started getting bogged down with ads and auto-play videos that make browsing the sites without an adblocker a nightmare. (Tolkien Gateway isn’t hosted by Fandom and is blessedly free of it — and also of much better quality than the Lord of The Rings wiki hosted on Fandom). They’re still a great source of information on various media — I use it when I’m double-checking stuff for this blog — but the site’s platform is unpleasant and individual wikis vary wildly in their quality. 

So of course there’s a Calvin and Hobbes wiki, but it’s still something I find odd. Wikis are all about categorizing and defining stuff, taking the lore of Star Wars and making it into a comprehensive encyclopedia. Calvin and Hobbes feels like something simpler, a serialized newspaper comic less concerned with developing a canon than with telling its story and having fun. Breaking characters down, cataloguing story arcs, and expounding on what exactly is meant by “the baby-sat” feels almost sacrilegious. Calvin and Hobbes is a rich text, but trying to analyze it encyclopedically robs it of its beauty. I don’t need an entry theorizing what exactly the noodle incident was to enjoy how the unspecific nature of the incident makes it funny. Maybe not everything needs to be catalogued and categorized.

But then, maybe I’m just odd. Heck, half of this blog is getting overly analytical about things, so why do I, someone who’s read way more of TV Tropes than he cares to admit, hold Calvin and Hobbes sacred? People engage with their media in different ways. Some people prefer to let things wash over them, some people write rants essays about pop culture, and then I guess some people enjoy seeing everything neatly arranged and categorized, no matter how minute. Perhaps that’s part of the fun of being a fan of stuff, getting to do things your way, and, with the magic of the internet, finding others who do too.

I did end up clicking around the Calvin and Hobbes wiki. It’s not awful; sure, there are spelling mistakes and it would probably benefit greatly from a styleguide (Wookiepedia, it is not), but I found some fun little tidbits about the making of the comic and was reminded of some wonderful old strips. I can concede that, sure, it’s got its purpose as a reference for Calvin and Hobbes, but as for me I’ll take thumbing through it at random or maybe one day going through the whole collection. I don’t need an encyclopedia to enjoy it, but hey, that’s fine, the wiki’s not for me.

That said, I can, and will, spend way too much time reading up on Fingolfin on Tolkien Gateway.