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The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
by Bill Watterson
by Bill Watterson
I’ll never forget Monday, January 1, 1995. That was the day I opened up the comics section to find that CALVIN & HOBBES—my favorite comic strip, fourth from the top on the left side—had been replaced by (of all things) DILBERT. I was 11. I cried.
This book, which came out the following September, was a nice consolation (and still is, for those that can’t afford the three-volume hardback COMPLETE C&H). It’s sort of a greatest hits: Watterson picked out a book’s worth of his favorite comics and storylines and wrote up short blurbs (and some longer essays) to go along with them. It’s eye-opening to see what went into his career, his troubles with his syndicate, his musings on particular strips. (On a Sunday strip where six-year-old Calvin pilots an F-14 to bomb his school: “Boy, did I get letters about this one.”) For someone like myself, who had been a fan of the comic for as long as he could read and owned almost all the books already, these were brilliant insights into an already insightful strip.
And an insightful strip it was. While the other strips in the paper were content with sight gags and puns, C&H often tackled hard subjects like death, family, and the meaning of friendship. Calvin
encounters an injured squirrel, tries and fails to nurse it back to health. A burglar breaks into the family’s house while they are on vacation. Calvin plans to run away from home after he accidentally totals his parents’ car, trying to push it out of the driveway. But there are still the typical troubles of a young boy: In one storyline, Calvin forgets about a bug collection project for school—he frantically stomps insects on the sidewalk and puts them in a soggy envelope in a play to finish it before the bus arrives.
The Sunday strips are a special treat. While we’re all used to the rigid two-throwaway-panel format now, Watterson’s later strips were far more dynamic and beautiful, often using watercolors for the more outdoorsy backdrops.
The TENTH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION, then, is a fitting bookend to a brilliant comic strip. “It’s a magical world, Hobbes… Let’s go exploring!”
This book, which came out the following September, was a nice consolation (and still is, for those that can’t afford the three-volume hardback COMPLETE C&H). It’s sort of a greatest hits: Watterson picked out a book’s worth of his favorite comics and storylines and wrote up short blurbs (and some longer essays) to go along with them. It’s eye-opening to see what went into his career, his troubles with his syndicate, his musings on particular strips. (On a Sunday strip where six-year-old Calvin pilots an F-14 to bomb his school: “Boy, did I get letters about this one.”) For someone like myself, who had been a fan of the comic for as long as he could read and owned almost all the books already, these were brilliant insights into an already insightful strip.
And an insightful strip it was. While the other strips in the paper were content with sight gags and puns, C&H often tackled hard subjects like death, family, and the meaning of friendship. Calvin
encounters an injured squirrel, tries and fails to nurse it back to health. A burglar breaks into the family’s house while they are on vacation. Calvin plans to run away from home after he accidentally totals his parents’ car, trying to push it out of the driveway. But there are still the typical troubles of a young boy: In one storyline, Calvin forgets about a bug collection project for school—he frantically stomps insects on the sidewalk and puts them in a soggy envelope in a play to finish it before the bus arrives.
The Sunday strips are a special treat. While we’re all used to the rigid two-throwaway-panel format now, Watterson’s later strips were far more dynamic and beautiful, often using watercolors for the more outdoorsy backdrops.
The TENTH ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION, then, is a fitting bookend to a brilliant comic strip. “It’s a magical world, Hobbes… Let’s go exploring!”
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