Tracer Bullet
Created by Bill Watterson

"The dame said she had a case.
She sounded like a case herself, but I can't choose my clients."
-- Tracer Bullet (Calvin) confronts his mom. It all has something
to do with a broken lamp in the living room.

TRACER BULLET is simply one of the best spoofs of the hard-boiled eye to hit the comics page since Snoopy dragged his typewriter on top of his dog house to write the Great American Detective Novel.

Tracer, of course, is the alter-ego of Calvin, the precocious and hyper-imaginative six-year old of Bill Watterson's classic Calvin and Hobbes strip. Other alter-egos of the pint-size daydreamer over the years included Stupendous Man and Spaceman Spiff, which allowed Watterson to lampoon the superhero and space hero genres respectively, and as with Tracer, a great amount of gentle affection.

Tracer made his first appearance in a story arc in which Calvin receives an extremely unfortunate hair cut by Hobbes, his stuffed (and possibly imaginary) tiger. Of course, Calvin panics. "If Mom sees this, she'll blow her blood vessels!" he proclaims.

After Hobbes' styling suggestions pan out ("Let's try parting your hair from ear to ear.") he tries to convince Calvin to first wear a kerchief and then a fedora. It's the wearing of the fedora that triggers Calvin's P.I. fantasy, and he adapts the persona of Tracer Bullet, a down-on-his-luck gumshoe in a rundown office.

He didn't make a return appearance until 1990, when he showed up in an arc that had Calvin daydreaming in the middle of a classroom math quiz, and his final appearance was a year later when he tackled the "Case of the Broken Lamp."

Evidently, although he made only three brief appearances, Watterson always had a fondness for Tracer. In the intro to The Tenth Anniversary Book of Calvin and Hobbes, regarding the first Tracer arc, Watterson mused "Would that I could write like this more often. He also confessed that the sight of Calvin's haircut was one of the few times his own work made him laugh out loud..But he alsonoted that the "Tracer Bullet stories are extremely time-consuming to write, so I don't attempt them often. I'm not at all familiar with film noir or detective novels, so these are just spoofs on the clichés of the genre. Cartoonists don't use black much anymore (the eye, being lazy, is attracted to empty white space, especially when the panels are so small), and we miss some dramatic possibilities that way."

Calvin and Hobbes ran for just over ten years, from November 18, 1985 until December 31, 1995, and at its height appeared in over 2,400 newspapers.

COMICS

• CALVIN & HOBBES
  (November 18, 1985 until December 31, 1995)
  Written and drawn by Bill Watterson

• "The Haircut" (May 11-21, 1987)
• "The Math Quiz" (February 5-10, 1990)
• "The Broken Lamp" (February 25 - March 2, 1991)

COLLECTIONS

• The Complete Calvin and Hobbes (2005)....Buy this book
  Sure, it's pricey, and it weighs a ton, but this three-volume collection (a surprise best-seller!) of ALL the daily and Sunday strips is the only one that gathers together all three Tracer Bullet arcs.

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Image taken from Calvin & Hobbes, copyright ©1985-1996 Universal Press Syndicate.