Abstract
This essay decodes the parodic connections between Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, American pulp science fiction (abbreviated throughout as either sci-fi or sf), and childhood imagination. Drawing on the work of Linda Hutcheon's notion of the parody, I demonstrate the textual, visual, and narrative ties between Calvin's recurring science fiction alter-ego, Spaceman Spiff, and the pulp heroics of 1930s Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comics, as well as the paintings of artists Hans Waldemar ("Wesso") Wessolowski and Frank R. Paul for pulp science fiction magazines like Astounding Stories and Weird Science. What emerges is a complicated view of Watterson's comic, revealing a celebration of masculinist heroics through a recirculation of pulp sf heroes like Rogers and Gordon alongside criticism and recoding of pulp sf's problematic foundations, racialized alien figures chief among them, through textual, visual, and narrative parody.
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