Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for March 08, 2023

Before magazine quizzes, people chewed their gum in ignorant bliss.

Double bubble, toil and trouble…..

I wonder if the magazine mentions a world record for biggest bubble blown?

Please. Back in the day, I bought baseball cards solely for the rock-like gum.

If it exists, theres a magazine for it.

More importantly, does it lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?

Hobbes doesn’t look like he is being sarcastic! Or is he just plain hopeless?

Hobbes, you better take this ‘Are you getting enough out of your magazine quizzes?’ quiz.

Not to Calvin … the stuff included with trading cards,,, When it comes to the “gum included” and chewing it…. 1 word for you…. Don’t. Just Don’t!!!

And that’s just question #1!

Does it have the consistency of melted rubber? Then it’s probably already been chewed by your friend Hobbes.

It was called, stale.

Now it’s FB quizzes.

If you want to waste 15 – 20 minutes in sticky anger, chew gum with dentures!

Watterson hadn’t seen Buzzfeed when he wrote this.

And now we have the internet to tell us what to think. With magazines, you used to have to wait a whole week or month to get your misinformation. Now you can get it instantly and in surround sound.

What’s a magazine? An old kinda tiktok?

And now we have listicles!

There’s a top 8 listicles of all time somewhere…number 3 will shock you!

Before magazine quizzes there were IQ and common sense. Since then there is no way to prove either.

Oh, oh… Calvin is already becoming ‘entitled’ at his early age. Hobbes needs to step in with a reality check.

There’s something especially fascinating about when popular culture satirizes something that doesn’t exist anymore, or at least isn’t big the way it was. Like the old song “Doin’ the Raccoon”, a catchy ditty from the 1920s about how everybody was wearing raccoon coats.

Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?

Now those quizzes are called surveys, and I never take them

Good point, Hobbes!

Patience lad. (Silly to say considering it’s Calvin) Soon the answer to number three will shock you!

The Chewing magazine riffs may be Waterson satirizing smoking aficionado magazines supported by the tobacco industry along with a few pokes at big tobacco’s marketing to kids.

Present Calvin, this would be clickbait on your phone

So here’s a funny story involving lists: Back in my younger years, I was a skateboarding aficionado, and semi-regularly bought magazines related to such. One such magazine had a section showing responses to a reader poll, and at the bottom of a list of various demographics was the following response:

.

“I’m a hermaphrodite and I like to sk8”

.

So now, decades later, whenever I’m putting together some sort of list, I have to resist the urge to make the final choice “I’m a hermaphrodite and I like to sk8”.

Synch with Cul De Sac today.

Click bait before you had anything to click.

The bliss of magazine quizzes compared to the internet…

The quiz Calvin took 70 years later was very similar. “How hard is your - at the beginning”. He had to pick “C”.

Today the “clickbait” would be “10 different ways your gum is affecting your sex life”. :)

Wait until the web shows up

Good point Hobbes. To think how much dumber we could have been all these years… Oh! The things we’ve missed out on. It just astounds the mind.

They knew nothing.

At least magazines didn’t have click bait disguised as quizzes.

Bazooka bubble gum was always rock hard but you had to buy it if only for the superior bubbles it could produce and for the Bazooka Joe comics.

AW. This whole thing is all gummed up!

Calvin is entitled to performance enhancement already?

Does your chewing gum lose it’s flavor on the bedpost overnight?

I’ve been chewing the same gum back to high school. I guess I’m just fine with my gun.