This Calvin and Hobbes trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the whole ten-year run of Bill Watterson's strip and the odd, quiet decades that followed it. It starts with the basics - Calvin's age, the origin of the two names, the debut and the famous final sled ride - and works through the alter egos (Spaceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man), Calvinball, G.R.O.S.S., the cardboard-box inventions and the recurring cast: Susie, Miss Wormwood, Moe, Rosalyn, Calvin's dad and the monsters under the bed. The harder questions dig into Watterson himself: the college major, the newspaper that fired him, the cat behind Hobbes, the licensing fight and the fortune he refused, the sabbaticals and the Sunday-format standoff, the Reuben Awards, the Angouleme Grand Prix, the Pearls Before Swine guest strips and The Mysteries. About a third of the questions are warm-ups; the rest climb toward the kind of detail only someone who owns the Complete collection would know. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How old is Calvin throughout the entire run of the strip?
Six
Calvin never ages: the seasons and holidays cycle every year, but he and his classmates return to the same first-grade classroom each fall.
Q 02Which historical figures gave Calvin and Hobbes their names?
A theologian and a philosopher
Watterson called it a tip of the hat to his college's academic roots: a 16th-century believer in predestination and a 17th-century thinker with a dim view of human nature.
Q 03On what date did the first Calvin and Hobbes strip appear in newspapers?
November 18, 1985
The strip's ten-year run was so tidy that its debut and finale anniversaries fall in the same weeks each year, and the 2005 Complete collection was released in the same November window.
Q 04How many newspapers carried the very first Calvin and Hobbes strip?
35
Within a year it was in roughly 250 papers, and at its peak it ran in more than 2,000 newspapers worldwide.
Q 05Which syndicate distributed Calvin and Hobbes for its entire run?
Universal Press
The same Kansas City company syndicated Doonesbury, The Far Side and Cathy, and it merged with Uclick in 2009 to form what became Universal Uclick.
Q 06Calvin and Hobbes grew out of a rejected strip in which they were only side characters. What was it called?
The Doghouse
United Feature Syndicate liked the little brother and his stuffed tiger best, urged Watterson to build a strip around them, then passed on the result for lacking marketing potential.
Q 07What are the final words of the last Calvin and Hobbes strip?
"Let's go exploring!"
The pair sled off across fresh snow after Calvin declares it a magical world, and the line has been quoted in tributes ever since.
Q 08On what date did the final Calvin and Hobbes strip run?
December 31, 1995
It was a Sunday strip, giving Watterson a full color page for the sledding send-off, and it closed almost exactly ten years after the debut.
Q 09By one estimate, how much money did Watterson give up by refusing to license Calvin and Hobbes merchandise?
$300-400 million
Watterson's own summary of the situation: only thieves and vandals have made money on Calvin and Hobbes merchandise.
Q 10Which licensed character did Bill Watterson refuse to add to his strip, turning down an early syndication deal?
Robotman
The syndicate wanted a strip to sell an existing toy character; after Watterson refused, the job went to Jim Meddick, whose strip later became Monty.
Q 11How many colors were available to Watterson for Sunday strips when Calvin and Hobbes began?
64
By the strip's later years the palette had grown to 125 colors with the ability to fade them into one another, which is why the late Sunday pages look so painterly.
Q 12What tongue-in-cheek alternative name for the Big Bang did a 1992 Sunday strip coin?
The Horrendous Space Kablooie
Calvin complained the real name was not evocative enough; the coinage caught on informally among scientists and is sometimes shortened to the HSK.
Q 13Calvin's astronaut alter ego evolved from which mustached, cigar-smoking earlier Watterson character?
Spaceman Mort
Q 21The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, released in 2005, collected every strip in how many hardcover volumes?
Three
The slipcased set ran 1,440 pages and weighed enough to become a running joke; a four-volume paperback edition followed in 2012.
Q 22Which rare, officially licensed 1993 book about the strip has been called the collectors' 'Holy Grail'?
Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes
It was a children's textbook printed in a single run in Fargo, North Dakota, pairing story arcs with reading lessons.
Q 23In 2014 Watterson won the Grand Prix at which international comics festival?
Angoulême
The original was a Flash Gordon parody drawn in Watterson's college days; the alien deserts Spiff crash-lands in are based on real landscapes in the American Southwest.
Q 14Calvin's private-eye alter ego Tracer Bullet first appeared when Calvin put on a fedora to hide what?
A terrible haircut
Hobbes gave the haircut. Watterson rarely drew Tracer Bullet stories because their film-noir shadows were so time-consuming to ink.
Q 15Who made Stupendous Man's mask and cape?
Calvin's mother
Stupendous Man narrates his own adventures and claims powers including muscles of magnitude and a stomach of steel, yet Calvin insists the two are different people.
Q 16What everyday object does Calvin repurpose as a transmogrifier, a time machine and a duplicator?
A cardboard box
Watterson liked leaving the results to the reader's imagination, saying whatever they pictured would be more outrageous than anything he could draw.
Q 17Calvinball was introduced in 1990 after Calvin had a miserable time joining which school activity?
The baseball team
The game's only fixed rules are that it can never be played the same way twice and that everyone must wear a mask; it became a staple of the strip's final five years.
Q 18Calvin and Hobbes's sled has been described as the most famous sled in American arts since which film?
Citizen Kane
The wagon and sled rides let Calvin ponder life, death and God at speed; Watterson said it was more interesting than drawing talking heads.
Q 19What does the acronym of Calvin and Hobbes's treehouse club, G.R.O.S.S., stand for?
Get Rid Of Slimy girlS
The club has exactly two members and its meetings frequently devolve into fights over who holds the more impressive title.
Q 20How many official Calvin and Hobbes books were published between 1987 and 1997?
18
Eleven of them form a complete archive of the daily strips, missing only a single alternate strip that ran in some newspapers.
He was only the fourth American to receive the honor, after Will Eisner, Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman.
Q 24Which 2013 crowdfunded documentary on the strip's legacy did its reclusive creator decline to appear in?
Dear Mr. Watterson
Director Joel Allen Schroeder funded it through two Kickstarter campaigns and premiered it at the Cleveland International Film Festival; Watterson was invited but watched the DVD instead.
Q 25Which U.S. Supreme Court justice invoked 'Calvinball jurisprudence' in a 2025 opinion?
Ketanji Brown Jackson
The barb was that the game has only one rule, no fixed rules, while the Court seemed to have two: that one, and that the Administration always wins.
Q 26In which Ohio town did Watterson grow up, and which is widely assumed to be the strip's setting?
Chagrin Falls
Watterson used to sneak signed copies of his books onto the shelves of a local bookshop there until they started turning up online at high prices.
Q 27What did Watterson major in, thinking it would help him become an editorial cartoonist?
Political science
During his sophomore year he painted Michelangelo's Creation of Adam on his dorm-room ceiling, and his college newspaper cartoons included the original Spaceman Spiff.
Q 28Which newspaper hired Bill Watterson as a political cartoonist out of college, then fired him early?
The Cincinnati Post
He had never lived near the city and did not know its politics; the failure pushed him into four years of designing grocery ads while he worked up his own strip.
Q 29What was the name of Watterson's cat, whose looks and personality inspired Hobbes?
Sprite
The grey tabby gave Hobbes his long body and his feline attitude; Watterson kept that cat-like streak even though the humor came from Hobbes acting human.
Q 30In which year did Watterson take a nine-month sabbatical from the strip?
1991
When he returned he insisted Sunday strips be sold as an unbreakable half page, a format demand that angered editors and some fellow cartoonists.