Bill Watterson's iconic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes frequently featured jokes about so-called "high art," as young protagonist Calvin often found himself the mouthpiece for his creator's ideas about art and culture. Calvin often fancied himself something of an audience, leaving Hobbes to play the proxy for skeptical, bemused newspaper readers across the nation.

Watterson's commentary on artistic trends, and the role of the artis in contemporary society, are among the most detailed, nuanced ideas that the artist ever put into the mouth of the irreverent young Calvin, who typically veered off from Watterson's astute observations to arrive at a hilariously iconoclastic conclusion.

Throughout Calvin & Hobbes run, Calvin often dreamed of achieving both critical and commercial acclaim as an artist – but more often than not, found himself consigned to the sad fate of so many creative minds, to be misunderstood by those around him.

10 Calvin, Like Many Great Artists, Was Never Truly Appreciated In His Time

First Published: October 31, 1990

In the first of a sequence of hilarious Calvin & Hobbes comics, Calvin comes home dismayed that his teacher, Miss Wormwood, dismissed his art as not "serious." He rants to Hobbes, asking, "who set Miss Wormwood up as an arbiter of aesthetics anyway," and insisting that his drawing is "a beautiful work of power and depth" – which is only slightly undermined when Hobbes seeks confirmation that Calvin drew "a stegosaurus in a rocket ship."

The humor of this strip juxtaposes the childish content of Calvin's art with the mature language he uses to talk about it. This is a joke that Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson would riff on in increasingly elaborate ways over the next several strips, and would make great use of repeatedly over the years.

9 Calvin Realizes That He Is An Avante-Garde Artist

First Published: November 1, 1990

Continuing from the previous day's cartoon, this Calvin & Hobbes strip finds Calvin still stewing on Miss Wormwood's rejection of his stegosaurus drawing – leading him through a fit of convoluted logic and social-critique buzzwords to reach the point where he finally defines himself as "avant garde."

Hobbes might get the last laugh here, by asking Calvin if this means he will have to "wear silly clothes" – yet the overall joke of this comic comes by lampooning the popular concept of a pretentious artist, one who speaks verbosely about artistic theory so as to obscure that there is, in fact, little of substance to their work. Again, there is an added level of laugh-out-loud silliness to the fact that Bill Watterson depicting these sentiments coming from a child.

8 Calvin Quickly Abandons His Avant-Garde Ethos In Favor Of "Riches And Fame"

First Published: November 2, 1990

Having decided that he is an avant-garde creator, Calvin quickly turns to grappling with the complexities of being avant-garde in the contemporary artistic landscape. Just as quickly as he decided in the previous strip that he was on the cutting edge of art and culture, this cartoon finds Calvin giving up on his artistic ideals in favor of making money. As he explains to Calvin:

When an artist goes commercial, he makes a mockery of his status as an outsider and a free thinker. He buys into the crass and shallow values art should transcend. He trades the integrity of his art for riches and fame.

Immediately after making this point, Calvin adds "oh, what the heck, I'll do it" – to which Hobbes deadpans, "that wasn't so hard." Here, the joke is less at the expense of Calvin's momentary high artistic ideals, which do have merit to them, but rather at how fast he shirks them after contemplating commercial success, a moment that is as pure Calvin as anything in Calvin & Hobbes' history.

7 Calvin's Artistic Struggle Against "Miss Wormwood" Comes To An Unexpected Conclusion

First Published: November 3, 1990

In this Calvin & Hobbes strip, Calvin returns to his feud with Miss Wormwood one final time; after she once again dismisses one of his "dinosaurs in rocket ships" drawings, Calvin declares: "the arts are under attack!" However, when Hobbes finally questions why Miss Wormwood is so anti-dinosaur, Calvin reveals the truth of the matter – she is actually his math teacher, and he's been doodling when he should have been practicing arithmatic.

After all the build up over the course of several days worth of Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, Bill Watterson delivers a hilarious anti-climax here. For all Calvin's histrionics, the quality or the content of his art has never actually been challenged; rather, he has been using his position as an "artist" to justify not paying attention in Miss Wormwood's class.

6 Calvin Reveals What Makes His Snowman Avant-Garde

First Published: February 20, 1992

Once more, Calvin throws around the term avant-garde – French for "advanced guard," and used in artistic to signify unconventional, boundary-pushing, or innovative art – all the while scheming to strike it rich as an artist, two things that don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. In this case, Calvin shows off his "neo-Regional"-style snowman, meant to "appeal to popular nostalgia for the simple values of rural America 50 years ago."

Hilariously, in the strip's concluding , when Hobbes scratches his head and asks "how is this avant-garde?" Calvin whispers to him that it is "secretly ironic." Here, Bill Watterson hilariously mixes insightful commentary about artistic trends with childish delusions of grandeur, and the ixture pays off in the form of a particularly memorable Calvin & Hobbes comic.

5 Calvin Proclaims "Fine Art Is Dead" And Embraces Popular Art

First Published: June 24, 1992

"Fine art is dead, Hobbes," Calvin tells his friend as they play with toys, adding that, "it's irrelevant in today's culture." Instead, Calvin argues, creating popular art is the only way to reach audiences. At first, his commentary comes across as Bill Watterson's thinly-veiled anxieties about being a contemporary artist – until this is brilliantly subverted in the third , when Calvin notes popular art is "the only way to make serious money, and that's what's important about being an artist," something that Watterson certainly didn't agree with.

Of course, this was the great thing about Calvin – so much of the humor of Calvin & Hobbes came from the young protagonist's ability to be unnaturally mature and reasonable up to a certain point, only to wildly veer off course and reach a conclusion that completely undermines everything he said before.

4 Calvin Continues To Discourse On The Divide Between "Fine" And "Popular" Art Forms

First Published: June 25, 1992

Building on the previous day's strip, this Calvin & Hobbes installment has Calvin further elaborating on "the problem with fine art" and the virtues of its opposite, noting that popular art offers people something familiar and comforting, as opposed to something new and challenging. This prompts Hobbes to ask "how are the move sequels this summer?" Calvin, in response, notes that none of them have offered him "some new plot" – thankfully, in his opinion.

Once more, Bill Watterson skillfully starts by actually offering a thesis on the division between "fine" and "popular" art – and then finds the humor in it by having Calvin take the complete opposite position from the one his creator would have. Again, this is Calvin & Hobbes' classic style of comedic inversion, or perhaps subversion, at play, and the result is an unforgettable entry in the comic's run.

3 Calvin Explains That "Style Is Exhausted" To A Bemused Hobbes

First Published: January 10, 1993

Calvin's ability to discourse eloquently about art was used to great comedic effect in a number of Calvin & Hobbes cartoons, and this is certainly among the most memorable. Yet again, Calvin brings Hobbes to look at his new snow sculpture – except that the young artist proclaims that the entire snow-white landscape is his art, grandly proclaiming:

Art is dead! There's nothing left to say! Style is exhausted and content is pointless. Art has no purpose. All that's left is commodity marketing.

What stands out about this is how viscerally readers can feel Bill Watterson's own anxieties about the futility of being an artist in modern society being framed as one of Calvin's many flights of fancy. Certainly, Watterson's own feelings are more discernable on the page the more readers become familiar with Calvin & Hobbes, but rarely is the creator's personal opinion as unvarnished by the pretense of humor as it is in this instance.

2 Calvin Explains The Difference Between "High Art" And "Low Art"

First Published: July 20, 1993

Calvin's preoccupation with the difference between "high" and "low" art returns in this cartoon, as he hilariously expands on the distinction for Hobbes' benefit. In a succession of s, he classifies a painting as high art, a comic strip as low – in a wonderful self-referential dig – and then, somewhat paradoxically, a painting of a comic as high. When Hobbes wonders aloud what "a cartoon of a painting of a comic strip" counts as, Calvin is quick to categorize it as "low art."

Of course, Bill Watterson is having fun here with the inherent precociousness of that distinction – as an artist working in a "low art" medium, but often instilling it with "high art" sensibilities, the Calvin & Hobbes creator knew as well as anyone that the true quality of art cannot be pre-ordained by its form, but rather has to be determined by its content. With Calvin & Hobbes, Watterson consistently elevated a form of "low art," calling into question the very value of the diffierentiation.

1 Calvin Disdains The Very Idea Of Working To Sustain His Art

First Published: July 14, 1995

In this Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, Calvin mourns the fact that "times are tough for us suburban postmodernists" lamenting that no one finds value in his "sidewalk drawings," and that neither the government nor any corporations want to fund his work. When Hobbes suggests that perhaps Calvin could find other income to his artistic ion, the young artist is indignant, scoffing: "What, you mean work?"

While on the surface the joke here is making fun of entitled artists, Bill Watterson's commentary in this comic has a deeper layer to it – that is, he is as dismayed as Calvin at the increasingly lack of institutional for artists in America, and he uses Calvin's "sidewalk art" as a vector to bringing that to readers attention, making this a stand-out example of a Calvin & Hobbes strip that was used to make a wide national audience think about something from a perspective they might not have considered before.