I really didn’t want to like this. I’m 100% in line with the consensus that the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes is a transcendent and perfect work of art that will resonate for as long as there are imaginative children and adults who wish to reactivate that magic. Detourning, parodying, or otherwise fucking with it is done at one’s peril. So that being said, it’s pretty astonishing that this worked: An imgur user and obvious MST3K fan going by the name DrForester has shared a baker’s dozen Calvin and Hobbes strips wherein Calvin’s face is replaced with Donald Trump’s.
The effect is spot-on. Strips selected typically show Calvin at his most toxically self-centered, making them perfect fodder for the bottomlessly loudmouthed and narcissistic GOP presidential candidate, though the strips have a more sophisticated vocabulary than your typical Trump stump. I checked a few random selections from the detourned strips against the originals, and in the ones I was able to find readily for comparison, the original strips’ dialogue bubbles are entirely untouched. Compare the lead image at the top of this post to the original:
DrForester doesn’t seem to be the strips’ creator, but rather an aggregator—there’s a Reddit thread full of these that dates back to last winter, and the oldest I found—the one above—was uploaded by a user named eucalyptusfire. A lot of them are simply uncanny in their reflection of Trump’s ethos.
More after the jump…