Review: Let’s Go Exploring. Calvin and Hobbes
[image error]I got a chance to peek under the hood at the newest Calvin and Hobbes book! Click the read more to check it out!
So, it’s more of a Bill Watterson book than a Calvin and Hobbes book, but I was excited nonetheless. Michael Hingston’s Let’s Go Exploring is an interesting peek at the inner battles between the famously reclusive Bill Watterson (one of my personal heroes) and the monstrous men in black, the corporate suits that controlled the evil comics’ syndicate.
It’s maybe not as black and white as all that and really came down to one man standing up to the corporate machine and refusing to sell out his principles. While I really wish there were more Calvin and Hobbes coming, there are not. Watterson is far too principled a man to allow such a thing. Hingston’s book shows us some of the inner workings of that syndicate and the pressures that they famously exerted to try and milk the tiger for every penny while Watterson stood in their way, unwilling to budge.
Truly, his principles may have galvanized the late gen-xers such as myself into the generation that so often refused to sell out.
I proudly own paperbacks of every Calvin and Hobbes book ever printed and have dog eared them and passed them on to my children. They might very well be the best philosophy books to have emerged in the 20th century.
Hingston draws most of the information in his text from both personal experiences and from public records and other widely known sources as he weaves a narrative depicting many struggles: Watterson’s conflicts with the syndicate, his struggle to maintain Calvin’s wonderful world, and his personal fight against a world that sought to exploit the very thing that he had created (as well as keep his mental sanity as the media tried to rob him of the very things that made Watterson unique and which trickled down into Calvin like bottled lightning.)
It’s an interesting book. I got a free copy as an advanced review. You should get a copy—it just came out (literally, just today)! Get it on Amazon by clicking here.
