Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for February 17, 2016

“…and you can use the other foot on the clutch if you have a standard!”

And the brakes and clutch.

How about the bicycle pedals? Oh that’s right, Calvin’s bike is out to kill him. I forgot, briefly.

That’s a very old joke. I remember Dave Berg using the same joke in Mad Magazine, but I’m sure it is much older than that as well.

Yngvar   So old the original punch line was: “To kick the horse”!

Free-range Calvin? At 6?It also looks like mom just got back from town. He should have gone with her.

6 blocks from 1st grade on, crossing one very busy street.

10 miles, uphill both ways in a raging blizzard from Head Start through grad school.

Calvin’s got you Mom.

I agree with Ken in Ohio. I lived in Akron and jr. high was 1.7 miles away. You had to live 2 miles to get the bus. But we never worried, and the walks were a good time to think. The best part is it passed a library which was home away from home. Loved those walks (in retrospect!). The music was a little earlier than the Beatles, though. Anyone remember the Monster Mash?

I walked to school from day one, times sure have changed, and as been pointed out, not all for the better

Smartass.

Still waiting to hear from the fourth Yorkshireman!

Why walk when you can ride?

You can also hear “The Monster Mash” with the end credits for the CGI film “Monsters vs Aliens”.

Wow! Some monster she is…

I never rode a school bus until high school. It was 28 miles away. We were picked up at 6:45 and returned home at 5:15. Thus, no participation in after school activities.

My 6th grade teacher didn’t see the big picture. When she made me stay after school to write something 100 times on the blackboard, I missed the bus and had to walk over two miles to home.

Many of us remember such days, but who lets a 6 year old walk into town alone now? That’s a tragedy.

I not only rode my bike to school every day … about three miles…. but then four more miles into town to pick up my newspapers to deliver my route. In winter, I seldom got home before dark [and didn’t even have lights on my bike]. But my parents were never concerned. It truly was a far different world back then.

I walked a half dozen blocks to kindergarten. My mom had to “cross” me over the main street in front of our house, but at the side streets I’d “Look up, look down, look all around, before you cross the street.”From first grade on I had the options of walking the same six blocks to the bus stop, riding my two wheeler, or taking shank’s mare for exactly one mile to school.

I grew up in Brooklyn. You walked everywhere. Well maybe not. If it was more than a mile or two, you took the subway.…I never drove to school until my senior year in college.

is she encouraging her 6 year old son to walk by himself from the suburbs to the city? First of all suburbs are usually pointedly set up too far away from the city to casually walk to, and second of all you can’t let a 6 year old kid wander around by himself unless you have a really good picture of him to put on the side of a milk carton.

@wakeangel2001Read “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry and let me know if Calvin is anything short of Red Chief!

So she’d let him walk to town?

In other wards. Calvin could’ve left and done that. Oh wait, he does it all the time.

Ah, back in the day when kids could safely walk to town.

Mom looks so young in this strip. Just goes to show how having a kid will age a woman, even if the timeline doesn’t change a day.

That is the voice of Ginormica in the movie.

Never saw the film. It’s not really on my radar…

Nice comeback Calvin. I usually need a little bit more time to fight back like this, but at the end of the day, I always get away with everything.