The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Their goal is to lead him away from who he truly is They seek to dampen Calvin's imaginative life by trying to force him, an unusually shaped peg, into a square hole. The other authority figures at the school are portrayed with equal disdain These characters represent censorship, they embody the idea of institutional control and loss of self. This devil's job is to keep his human charge on a course that will ultimately lead him away from God and into the awaiting arms of the devil. Wormwood's name is borrowed from the apprentice devil in C.S. I think she seriously believes in the value of education, so needless to say, she's an unhappy person.'

'We see hints that she's waiting to retire, that she smokes too much, and that she takes a lot of medication. 'I have a lot of sympathy for Miss Wormwood,' Watterson admitted in his interview with The Comics Journal. This makes the origin of Calvin and Hobbes' names fairly clear now for Miss Wormwood's. However, Hobbes was definitely a tip of the hat - and perhaps a bit of a smirk at - his political science degree from Kenyon. The strip did not come from the idea that both characters would be named after philosophical thinkers. 'The linking of the two names wasn't natural. Or that's what Watterson would have you believe. He later told an interviewer in 1987 that the names Calvin and Hobbes were 'a tip of the hat to the political science department at Kenyon College.I thought it was funny.' Calvin was named after the sixteenth-century Protestant theologian who believed in predestination, Hobbes after the philosopher a century later who once observed that 'life is nasty, brutish, and short'. Looking at the Amazon preview/Google book preview of Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson, it says (From the Wikipedia article unfortunately this particular section is only cited by a dead link to a personal autobiography.) In The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson stated that Calvin is named for 'a 16th-century theologian who believed in predestination,' and Hobbes for 'a 17th-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature.' Later, when Watterson was creating names for the characters in his comic strip, he decided upon Calvin (after the Protestant reformer John Calvin) and Hobbes (after the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes), allegedly as a 'tip of the hat' to the political science department at Kenyon.

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson