Peeing Calvin meme is similar to peeing imp on 1870 map

Can the origin of the "Peeing Calvin" be traced to this gorgeous 1870 French propaganda map? Joshua Glenn thinks it's possible!

What is spiky-haired Sardinia/Corsica doing, with that evil grimace on his face? He’s dropped his pants! He’s peeing!

Mystery solved. The “Calvin Peeing” meme was inspired not by Calvin, but by a 19th century French satirical mapmaker’s caricature of Sardinia and Corsica. Or — more precisely — the “Calvin Peeing” meme is a mashup of the Sardinia-Corsica meme (I’m assuming this is just one of many examples out there, waiting to be discovered; I’d compare it to the “What Me, Worry?” kid meme) and Watterson’s comic strip character.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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rlkeith

The bit at the bottom says “un vrai Gavroche qui rit de tout” – a real Gravoche laughing at them all. Gravoche is a street urchin in Les Miserables.
shay simmons

Plus ҫa change, plus c’est la meme chose.
- robotnik
  
  You deserve many more “likes” for this one. Many.
Boundegar

No, the premise is nonsense. This French map is adorable, but it’s much too obscure to inspire NASCAR fans. Peeing Calvin probably descends from peeing fountain boys. I’ve also seen peeing-boy lawn ornaments that looked 50-100 years old. But they weren’t French political cartoons.
- Saltine
  
  The proper phrase, proposed the pedant, is “peeing putti.”
freshyill

Peeing Calvin is a meme? I thought it was just something that people who love Fords and hate Chevrolet put on the rear window of their pickup trucks.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OAUXAA362EXWLYVMPJOKLFB5JQ Incipient Madness
  
  It was an internet meme before there were internet memes, predating All Your Base photoshops by at least six years. And the very first version I saw was this “La Migra” version about a year before the Ford and Chevy versions.
  - JamesDondi
    
    In the real world outside of the internet, people use the term “fad” to describe this phenomenom
    - http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OAUXAA362EXWLYVMPJOKLFB5JQ Incipient Madness
      
      Pet Rocks were a fad. Peeing Calvin was a meme. It rapidly spawned multiple versions over a very short time.
    - http://www.gildedgreen.com/ Girard
      
      In the real world outside the Internet, people (including the inventor of the word who coined it in 1976, well before icanhascheezburger.com was registered, I can assure you) were using “meme” to describe things outside of the Internet.
theophrastvs

awwright, use this to threaten Watterson out of retirement (and his sad life of swimming through mountains of cash)
http://www.facebook.com/people/Christopher-Frelin/1424256620 Christopher Frelin

I made these a while ago in reaction to all of those stupid redneck Calvin stickers. http://automaticlifestyledispenser.com/2011/04/29/calvin-pissing-on-things-that-need-to-be-pissed-on/
raisenj

The map reminds me of the endpapers of Westerfeld’s Leviathan
GawainLavers

1870? Isn’t that retroactively back under copyright now?

Also, how is it that the peeing boy doesn’t represent Belgium?
michaelismichael

I think it’s sad, when all he was trying to do was fill a water balloon to throw at Susie…and people made that out of it.
http://profile.yahoo.com/QKZ4QYFTUSPZQ6CDTPPMUNRRWM Gg Gg

http://www.laboiteverte.fr/cartes-satiriques-a-travers-lhistoire/
franko

i hate these, but the ones that REALLY drive me up a wall are the ones where he’s kneeling and praying at the foot of a cross. it’s like saying they never read a single calvin & hobbes cartoon at all.
Gilbert Wham

What I get from that, is ‘Don’t fuck with Russia’.
http://jambeeno.com/ Jambe

The premise reminds me of Keith Thompson’s “CARICATURE MAP OF EUROPE 1914″:

http://www.keiththompsonart.com/pages/grandmap.html

The rest of his art is incredible, too.
http://occamsrazr.com Ike Pigott

There is very little that is new.

Insulting snark? Done that: http://occamsrazr.com/2009/11/25/social-media-is-history/

Negative social media reviews? Yep: http://occamsrazr.com/2010/03/24/antique-snark/
feetleet

Jive Turkey.

Orthodox France?
cmholm

The original French map led to a number of imitators, including a British Serio-Comic War Map, 1877, Kisaburo Ohara’s Russo-Japan War era (1904) “A Humorous Diplomatic Atlas of Europe and Asia”, and Keith Thompson’s previously mentioned map.