I thought I despised the Spartans from Michigan State University more than anyone possibly could. But then I realized I must not . . . because I don’t own a Calvin Peeing on MSU decal. EVEN IF I DID you can’t prove it anyway ’cause it’s not on the back of my car window at the moment.
After all, as we all know, in America the Calvin Peeing decal is the No. 1 best way (aside from Twitter) to show the world how you feel about things that are bad and wrong in your completely rational mind.
Surprisingly enough, the whole phenomenon of the beloved mischievous comic strip character relieving himself on (fill in something you dislike intensely here) indeed started with a college football rivalry.
That’s right—it wasn’t Calvin Peeing on Ford or Chevy or Dodge or any particular race car driver’s number, not at the beginning anyway. It was a Florida fan in the mid-’90s who wanted to tell Florida State fans in graphic, if not novel, detail just how he really felt about their fine institution of higher learning.
According to writer Phil Edwards’ account of the original story in his (what seems to be pretty close to as definitive as we’re gonna get) piece on the subject on Triviahappy.com, this is the case anyway. As for the image itself, no, in Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin never whizzed on anything; fans point to a 1989 strip in which Calvin, in the first frame, is filling up a water balloon at the spout on the side of a house, with that now infamous turned head and up-to-no-good smirk, as the genesis of the whole deal.
Maybe Florida ManFan wasn’t even the first, but he’s the first one we have an official news report about anyway. Who knows, he could have ripped it off from his neighbor, who had the brilliant idea of having Calvin wee on that dreaded Florida Gator and displaying it on his Monte Carlo’s rear window!
Anyway, we were off to the races from there, folks. It spread to NASCAR rivalries throughout the South. Then it multiplied like a cultural virus, making its way north and west and, maybe most notoriously, hitting the Big Three, whose most loyal adherents really took this thing, for better or worse, to the level of phenomenon.
As Edwards details, cops couldn’t stop it (but tried). Even Bill Watterson, the Calvin and Hobbes creator himself, couldn’t stop it (though lawyers for the comic strip’s parent company have tried over the years, or at least threatened to). Folks who make ’em, it seems, are mostly small-time operators—heck, you can buy them with “Your Text Here” under the, um, stream on any number of websites—and it is just too difficult, or not worth the effort ($$), to track/shut them all down.
So they live on, as long as there are cars on the roads of the USA. And a trolling spirit deep within our twisted souls.
(And I really was kidding—I don’t own a Calvin Peeing on Sparty decal. I do have an Ohio State one, though.)
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