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Comic trade paperback, 151 pages Borrowed from the libraryPublished 2015 Read August 2018 |
Finally, my attempt to read every Calvin and Hobbes book comes to an end; like Sunday Pages, this is a collection based around an exhibition at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University. A lot of it is original artwork for the strip, which I'm sure is cool to see in person, but in book form is not much different to seeing the finished art in the regular books. There isn't much commentary on the strips, though it is nice to see oldies and goodies again.
What does make the book interesting is the interview and the non-Calvin and Hobbes strips. The book opens with a 35-page interview with Watterson, which digs into some stuff I hadn't seen covered before-- biographical details, mostly, like thoughts about his youth, and a particularly harrowing story of the time he ran out his buffer of completed strips, and how he had to be disciplined enough to build it back up again. In some ways it seems like the ten years of Calvin and Hobbes was a particularly miserable time in his life, in that it left him with no time to do anything but create the strip. I also liked seeing the non-C&H art, which is a combination of strips that influenced Watterson (with his commentary) and Watterson's early, pre-C&H work. I would have liked even more of this, to be honest, but the couple pages we got was neat: editorial cartoons, pitches for other comic strips, and ur-forms of C&H itself. Also as a Cincinnatian, I was pleased to see Jim Borgman included as one of Watterson's influences (they overlapped at Kenyon) and to see Watterson discuss his Cincinnati Post days a little.
So, a decent book with some new stuff. I'd say about a third of its 150 pages will reveal something new to the Calvin and Hobbes aficionado.
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