Spaceman Spiff

Spaceman Spiff, "interplanetary explorer extraordinaire," explores the outermost reaches of the universe "by popular request" in a red flying saucer with a bubble canopy. Despite his title as an explorer, he frequently engages in conflict with aliens, sometimes with seemingly far-reaching implications. He talks in third person. In the Calvinverse, he is played in motion capture by Oscar Isaac.

Spaceman Spiff's Missions

The galaxy in which Spiff travels is a cruel, rather lawless place, where Spiff is either shot down or captured by ferocious and disgusting aliens. (Some aliens, such as "The Hideous Blob," do not appear hostile.) In reality, these aliens are often people such as Calvin's mother and father, or Miss Wormwood.

Frequently, Spaceman Spiff becomes stranded on an unexplored planet due to alien attacks or merely unexplained malfunctions. Most of these planets seem devoid of advanced civilization, and often have hostile environments or alien predators. Spiff rarely lands on a planet without crashing or experiencing some technological malfunction.

Spiff's Weaponry and Equipment

Spiff carries a futuristic gun, originally named the Atomic Napalm Neutralizer. Later on, the name was changed to the simpler Death Ray Blaster/Zorcher, or just Blaster. It is difficult to say whether it was a replacement weapon or not, since both guns were similar in shape; Spiff also used similar weapons called the Atom Blaster, Mertilizer and Stun Blaster. In at least one strip, Spiff referred to what was apparently the same gun by 2 different names. Thus it might be that Calvin simply makes up the names for Spiff's weapons on the spot.

The Death Ray weapons and the Mertilizer had cooking-based settings such as "Shake-n'-Bake", "Medium Well", "Deep Fat-fry", "Frappe" and "Liquefy", yet they proved useless against almost every enemy Spiff faced. The real-life equivalent of these fantasy weapons often turned out to be Calvin's dart gun, water pistol or snowballs, explaining their ineffectuality. Spiff's other weapons include emergency-only Demise-O-Bombs and Hydro Bombs.

Spiif's saucer has just enough room for Spiff, and little else--and yet the craft is equipped with an astounding array of weapons, detectors and propulsion devices, many of which tend to malfunction. The design of the ship appears to be based on a toy spaceship of Calvin's, which appeared in one strip.

Spiff himself wears goggles, whose lenses change their shape according to his emotions. Spiff's ship always seems to be destroyed in crash landings, but it is capable of zooming into a space zone where "Time has no meaning."

Trivia

• Oddly, in Calvin And Hobbes: The Series, Spaceman Spiff is the only alter ego of Calvin not to have had an episode based on him.