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Comic trade paperback, 208 pages Borrowed from the libraryPublished 1995 (contents: 1985-95) Reread October 2017 |
The only thing to dislike about the excellent Complete Calvin and Hobbes is that it has no room for the content of this book. Published for the strip's tenth anniversary (Watterson actually ended the strip during year ten, but the book refers to the strip in the present tense throughout), the book selects a number of individual strips and storylines from across the lifetime of Calvin and Hobbes with commentary from Bill Watterson on how he wrote and drew the strip. The commentary is great: Watterson explains how he devised the characters and their world, discusses his battles with the syndicate over what the strip could be, and goes into the minutiae of panel placement in Sunday strips (a thing I have remembered from this book since I read it at age 10).
Calvin and Hobbes really is a perfect comic strip: it's hard to imagine it working in any other medium even if the medium mostly produces crap these days. In a way, the book is Watterson's passionate defense of the possibilities of the medium, which makes it even more jarring when he slams comic books as "incredibly stupid" (171). Like, dude, your whole thing is finding art in a "low culture" medium, to the extent that there's a whole strip about it, where you say, "I would suggest that it's not the medium, but the quality of perception and expression, that determines the significance of art" (202).
But anyway, the delights to be found here are many and manifold. Many of the best storylines, and it's interesting to see what Watterson perceives as the best ones, versus what ones popular consensus has latched onto. And it's nice to see one-off strips get some prominence, since they're easy to forget. Calvin and Hobbes is four months younger than me, so I've loved it my entire life, and I imagine I will continue to do so, and this book is a nice reminder why.
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