Calvin and Hobbes form a secret club dedicated to excluding girls, but need a meeting place. Calvin wants to use the garage, but the car takes up too much room, so he tries pushing it out onto the driveway. Disaster ensues, and by the end, Calvin feels he has to try to run away from home.
Tropes
- Acting Unnatural: After pushing the car into a ditch, Calvin goes inside to pack supplies for running away, but is unable to behave normally while making sandwiches, making several suspicious comments to his mother. She's clued into him acting strangely, but doesn't figure out what happened to the car until after Calvin and Hobbes leave.
- Comedic Work, Serious Scene: Several of the strips after the car gets pushed in the ditch skip having a punchline, in favor of just letting the magnitude of Calvin's screwup sit front and center.
- Corrective Lecture: After he rolls the car into a ditch, Calvin's parents are relieved that no one was hurt and lecture him on asking for permission for things and not attempting to handle something like a car on his own. Hobbes notes that it's a lot calmer than the time Calvin left earthworms in his father's sock drawer.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: All future strips with G.R.O.S.S. would have their meetings take place in a treehouse. Justified due to the disaster that happened when they tried using the garage.
- Easily Forgiven: Calvin genuinely believes that his parents are going to kill him for rolling the car into a ditch, so he tries to run away. However, the parents both correctly understand that what happened was an accident, the car was ultimately not damaged, and no one was hurt, so neither of them even seem to get mad about it. Calvin gets a lecture about safety and asking for permission before doing things, and all is well. He's shocked at how easy he got let off the hook.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Calvin's mom calmly looks outside, and sees that all the cars driving through their neighborhood are slowing down as they drive by. She goes outside and sees a car in the ditch across the street. Then she wonders how it was backed into the ditch, as the only way it could have done that would be if it came right out their driveway. At this point, she's starting to put the pieces together, and takes off in a sprint towards the scene of the accident.
- Fun with Acronyms: Calvin's secret club is named "Get Rid Of Slimy girlS, or G.R.O.S.S. for short.
- Halfway Plot Switch: The arc starts with the formation of G.R.O.S.S., with Calvin and Hobbes plotting all sorts of cool things they can do for their club. When they want to use the garage as a secret meeting room and try to push the car out onto the driveway, however, the story completely forgets about G.R.O.S.S. and becomes about Calvin running away out of fear over what he did to the car.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Hobbes joins Calvin in chasing after the car until it rolls out into the road, at which point he decides to cut their losses and hold Calvin back from following it.
- Only Sane Man: Hobbes tries to convince Calvin to ask Mom to move the car out of the garage instead of pushing it out on their own. Most of the arc would not have happened, if only Calvin had listened.
- Ostentatious Secret: Calvin points out how everything in their new club will be secret.Calvin: Good news, Hobbes! I'm starting a secret club, and you can be in it!
Hobbes: Oh, boy!
Calvin: It'll be great! We'll think of secret names for ourselves, secret codes for our secret correspondence, a secret handshake... We'll have a secret club-house with a secret knock to get in, and we'll do big secretive things!
Hobbes: Why all the secrecy?
Calvin: People pay more attention to you when they think you're up to something. - Reasonable Authority Figure: While Calvin's actions represent a very serious lapse in judgement on his part, they are also clearly accidental and not in any way malicious, so Calvin's parents decide to just be grateful that no one was hurt and give Calvin a measured, fair lecture about safety and asking permission.
- The Runaway: Calvin plans to become one during this arc after rolling the family car into a ditch. Unlike most examples in the strip's run, which tend to be frivolous and fun adventures or him comically and incorrectly believing he's being treated unfairly by his family, this one is pretty serious, as Calvin feels what he did is so bad his parents will kill him when they find out.
- Unreliable Narrator: We see Calvin and Hobbes running away from home from their perspective, and it looks like they've gotten extremely far. At one point, they comment they must have made it across state lines with how long they've been running. However, Calvin's mom is able to easily track them down a little bit later, indicating that they obviously didn't make it very far at all, and probably barely got out of their own backyard. To be fair, little kids' perception of time is pretty off.
