Review: Exploring Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

In a completely unrelated bit, my review of the most recent UNIT set is up: Revisitations. I reckon it's the best one yet in this often inconsistent series. Plus also I take on The Seventh Doctor: The New Adventures, Volume One.

Comic trade paperback, 151 pages
Published 2015

Borrowed from the library

Read August 2018

Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue by Bill Watterson

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.

Review: Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages, 1985-1995 by Bill Watterson

Comic trade paperback, 95 pages
Published 2001 (contents: 1985-95)

Borrowed from the library

Read March 2018

Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages, 1985-1995: An Exhibition Catalogue by Bill Watterson

My mission to read every bit of Calvin and Hobbes not collected in the Complete Calvin and Hobbes continues with this, a slim volume that puts Bill Watterson's original linework alongside the colored versions that appeared in newspapers for a selection of his favorite Sunday strips. Watterson also provides commentary on most of them. It's all strips you've (probably) read before, and many anecdotes you've (probably) read before too. But the large size of the book shows off Watterson's artwork better than the Complete Calvin and Hobbes books do, and it's great to have Watterson's commentary on the the comics form. He was an unsurpassable artist on the Sunday comics page even before the format change, and this book provides insight into the mind of a master.

Review: The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson

Comic trade paperback, 208 pages
Published 1995 (contents: 1985-95)

Borrowed from the library

Reread October 2017

The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book by Bill Watterson

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.

Review: Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes by Linda Holmen and Mary Santella-Johnson

Hardcover, 188 pages
Published 1993

Borrowed from the library

Read May 2017

Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes
by Linda Holmen and Mary Santella-Johnson
illustrations by Jan Roebken

When I read The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, I became intrigued/interested in those things relating to Calvin and Hobbes not contained in the omnibus strip collection. One such related book is Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes, a Holy Grail among Calvin and Hobbes collectors. The cheapest copy on eBay is $700, though looking through "Sold listings" I can't find any that anyone actually paid for, so maybe Internet sellers value this thing much more than people will actually pay for it. I got my copy through interlibrary loan; Worldcat indicates that only twelve libraries worldwide have a copy, and I wasn't allowed to take my copy out of the library. If you're considering dropping some big bucks on this book, hopefully my comments below will give you a taste of what it's like instead. I haven't found anyone on the Internet who really talks about it in detail; it's usually just alluded to as one of the very few items of authorized Calvin and Hobbes merchandise.

What it is is a textbook, or perhaps more accurately, a repository of worksheets and activities, for grades 4-8, using Calvin and Hobbes as source material. There are five story arcs from the strip (dubbed "The Binoculars," "The Find," "The Christmas Story," "The Bug Collection," and "The Report"), each of which is followed up by a set of activities for students, almost always on similar patterns: vocabulary exercises (synonyms, antonyms, definitions, and such for words used in the story), comprehension activities (question about the what and the why of the story's events, always including making some kind of "story map"), behavior worksheets (questions about things like imagination or being nice to people or whatever, vaguely inspired by the stories), humor worksheets (questions about, for example, sarcasm or stand-up), suggested activities (even more vaguely connected things, like learning what an entomologist is to go along with "The Bug Collection"), and finally creative writing worksheets (usually asking students to retell the story in a different genre, or from the perspective of a new character).

Do kids really know this much about stand-up comics?

If you don't read every word (and there's no need to), you can get through the whole book in an hour or so. I don't know if grade schools still do activities like these in language arts classes (e.g., write a very formulaic poem), but this is the kind of stuff I remember doing all the time in the 1990s. It's sort of funny to pair it all with Calvin and Hobbes because so much of it is the kind of formulaic, uncreative learning that Calvin and Hobbes rails against, something driven home by the two stories about Calvin failing to complete school assignments. Like, one of the activities is to come up with a list of things you can do to "con" your teacher, and suggested ones are things like "Don't slam your books shut when you're finished reading" and "Smile and greet your teacher each day." Are kids really dumb enough to be conned into thinking practicing required (i.e., Suzie-style) behaviors is "conning" your teacher? Calvin wouldn't be! I get why after students read about Calvin's poor behaviors the book would want to model good ones, but it reveals how Calvin and Hobbes's anarchic spirit is a poor match for 1990s worksheet-style education.

Review: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Four: 1992-1995 by Bill Watterson

Comic trade paperback, 371 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1992-95)
Acquired December 2014
Read November 2016

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Four: 1992-1995
by Bill Watterson

Like in the third Calvin and Hobbes volume, there's a big gap in the middle of this one (the last one), as Bill Watterson goes on a sabbatical from April 3 to December 31, 1994, which mean that like in Book Three, you just get out of the winter strips and go straight back to them.

Maybe I'm projecting, but there's a sense of the strip sort of winding down. This volume has no masterful extended imaginative storylines. I mean, there's some good stories, like Calvin making a terrible safety poster, Calvin expanding his brain with a thinking cap to do his homework, and Calvin's mom babysitting Susie for an afternoon. But the long, fanciful stories of previous volumes aren't to be found-- most of these stories are just a week or two at most.

There's also an increased cynicism, I think. I mean, Calvin and Hobbes has always been cynical, but there's more strips here from the perspective of Calvin's parents, with no Calvin in them at all, complaining about the media or being in grocery store lines or what have you. Without Calvin to leaven the mood, they just come across as old-guy-complains-about-the-world strips like you could see almost anywhere else on the comics page. All of this ads up to me thinking that Bill Watterson was getting tired. Though tired Bill Watterson is still better than most cartoonists, and there's lots to love here regardless.

All that said: Watterson's expanded Sunday strips are amazing. Maybe he wasn't so much losing his imagination as channeling his imagination into these masterpieces. The stuff he does with layouts and panel size is great; I want to reiterate what I said in my review of Book Three, that it's a shame he apparently stopped cartooning, because he could clearly do something amazing.

And: the oft-commented-upon end of the strip really is perfect. "...let's go exploring!"

Review: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Three: 1990-1992 by Bill Watterson

I am on an audio review ROLL. What if a cockney space con man was a Time Lord? Of course IT WOULD BE AWESOME. I review The Trouble with Drax. (Less awesome: the most recent Fourth Doctor Adventures series finale.)

Comic trade paperback, 371 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1990-92)
Acquired December 2014
Read July 2016

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Three: 1990-1992
by Bill Watterson

The third volume sees the last few ongoing elements of Calvin and Hobbes materialize: the Tracer Bullet strips (a pastiche of hardboiled noir conventions), the ever-changing game of Calvinball, and the format-busting Sunday strips. That last innovation is preceded by a nine-month hiatus for Bill Watterson; the strips collected here jump straight from May 4, 1991 to February 2, 1992, meaning we've only just gotten out of winter and suddenly it's snowing again! But after the hiatus, Watterson returned with more innovative page layouts that really let him show off his accomplished draftsmanship. It's a shame Watterson has largely eschewed comics since the end of Calvin and Hobbes, as the Sunday strips largely shift to  chronicling the varied contents of Calvin's imagination, the lavish detail and dynamic layouts lead me to conclude Watterson could so something fantastic with the canvas of a true graphic novel. Some metafictional cynicism starts creeping in, too, though, with a number of strips featuring Calvin ruminating on the tension between pure art and crass commercialism.

This volume features of a couple of the best Calvin and Hobbes storylines I remember from my childhood, such as Calvin's duplicator (Calvin creates five duplicates to do his work, only to discover his duplicates have his work ethic, meaning he now has six times the laziness to contend with) and the sequel about the moralizer (Calvin's ethical duplicate horrifies Calvin when it turns out he likes Susie). None of the collected editions my family had when I was growing up must have contained 1992, however, as all of the post-hiatus storylines were unfamiliar to me. I found the one where Calvin travels in time from 6:30 to 8:30 to pick up completed homework from his future self, only to discover his 8:30 self didn't do the homework in anticipation of receiving it via time travel, causing both Calvins to travel together to 7:30 to blame that Calvin for the problem, to be an utter delight-- as is, of course, most of this book, which yields at least one laugh-out-loud moment per page, whether is be a far-fetched storyline about deranged mutant killer snow goons or a slice-of-life story about Calvin's discovery of specialized magazines for gum-chewers or a simple gag about how Calvin's mom's job prepared her to be a stay-at-home mother.

Though my favorite strip is probably the one where Calvin's dad explains to Calvin that miserable vacations are that way on purpose, and better than a luxury cruise, as they make the whole rest of your life feel like a luxury cruise. I can hear my parents offering a similar explanation. (Though I note the family isn't actually seen to go on any miserable vacations in this volume.)

Review: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Two: 1987-1989 by Bill Watterson

Comic trade paperback, 351 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1987-89)
Acquired December 2014
Read January 2016

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Two: 1987-1989
by Bill Watterson

This volume picks up shortly before Christmas 1987 and carries through until the final day of December 1989, giving us just over two full years of comics, and three whole Christmases. The winter strips are some of the most iconically Calvin and Hobbes, of course; everyone who reads it remembers those horrific snowmen, and there's a lot of good stuff about Calvin's attempts to be good for bad reasons. I was surprised at a couple timeline references; it's specifically said to be 1988 at one point, and at another, Calvin recalls the horrific ever-raining camping trip of the previous year, both of which seem like they call attention to Calvin's unchanging age. There's also some subtle retconning going on in this volume: more than one reference indicates Hobbes has been around since Calvin was a baby, which was clearly not the case in Book One.

The regular vacation storylines are joined by a number of more imaginative storylines in this volume, such as the sequence where Calvin and Hobbes travel to Mars, or (one of my favorites), the one where in the course of an evening of attempted math homework, Calvin's gravity reverses and then he expands to be larger than the Earth. But despite these flights of fancy, many of the volume's standout storylines are more mundane: Calvin failing to write a report on bats ("BATS AREN'T BUGS"), Calvin anticipating a beanie from cereal proof-of-purchases, and Calvin's uncle visiting (I think he never appeared after this, which makes sense, because his character didn't really offer anything other authority figures in the strip didn't). Best of all are a number of babysitting storylines, culminating in the epic one where Calvin locks Rosalyn out of the house for the night. This volume also sees the debuts of Stupendous Man, arch-nemesis of Mom-Lady, and the secret society of G.R.O.S.S. (Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS).

There's also an increased focus on Calvin's parents as individuals, who I am more interested in now that I read this as a thirty-year-old married man instead of a ten-year-old kid. We see that Calvin's mother feels like her husband does very little work around the home. We also get a number of Calvin's dad's terrible explanations for things, like where the sun goes when it sets, or why old photos are black and white. And his claiming the family will just steal another family's Christmas tree after New Year's to save money is hilarious. There's also the storyline where the family home is broken into while they're on an overnight trip to a wedding; Calvin gets some focus, since Hobbes was left at home and can't be found at first, but much more of the storyline is about the unsettling feeling of your home being invaded, and (unusually) we get several Calvin-less strips in a row as his parents deal with these feelings.

Watterson's art also increases in quality here: there are some good uses of shading in the daily strips. Furthermore, he begins experimenting with combining panels, especially in the Sunday strips, which gives much more room for his artwork to shine. I know later this becomes commonplace, but here it's restricted to three or four Sundays-- all of which make an impact.

As always, these are consistently laugh-out-loud entertaining. It was also striking to me how much less saccharine Calvin and Hobbes was than many of its modern tributes and imitators; a number of the strips are devoted to how Calvin would rather watch cartoons than do anything imaginative or interesting!

Review: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book One: 1985-1987 by Bill Watterson

Comic trade paperback, 359 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1985-87)
Acquired December 2014
Read August 2015

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book One: 1985-1987
by Bill Watterson

Calvin and Hobbes is one of those things I don't ever remember not knowing. The strip began syndication only five months after I was born, and I remember both reading it in the newspaper-- my parents always said it was the only thing on the comics page worth reading-- and having a number of collections lying around the house. I don't think we had a comprehensive collection, though, so I was curious to see if reading the first volume of the complete strips-- a gift from those same parents-- would reveal any I didn't remember. There were some, but not a lot.

Anyway, this was a total delight. Surely some of that is nostalgia, but most of that is that these really do hold up: Bill Watterson is consistently funny. There are a lot of other good things going for these comics, but more than anything else, the frequency with which I laughed out loud-- once per week of strips at least-- is the most noteworthy. It's amazing to think that they're almost thirty years old now because no newspaper comic strip I've read since comes even close to matching the regular humor of Calvin and Hobbes.

Watterson treads a fine line with Calvin as a character, and it's impressive how he never descends into caricature. Calvin has an active imagination on one hand-- but on the other, he refuses to read in favor of the television. This is no overdone romantic idealization of childhood; in many ways, Calvin is really rather awful!

It's interesting to see the strip begin to take shape here: Calvin is a member of the Cub Scouts (which I think gets dropped later on), Calvin and Hobbes play actual sports, albeit creatively (there's no Calvinball yet), and the large, fanciful storylines I remember so well only really begin to emerge near the end of the book. Though the cardboard box makes some early appearances as a time machine, it's nowhere near as extended as what we'd see later; in fact, the biggest storyline here is (I believe) a miserable camping trip undertaken by Calvin and his family where it just rains nonstop-- this is one of the few occasions in the book where the Sunday strip is smoothly integrated into the storyline. (Nicely, the book places Sunday strips out of publication order occasionally to improve reading experience.)

It probably would surprise no one who knows me that on this reading I had a great appreciation for Calvin's long-suffering parents, especially his father, who reminds me of my own with all of his off-kilter explanations about how the world works and his claims that any form of suffering is justified because it builds character. I look forward to seeing the strip as it develops; even if I've read them all before, I know I've never read them all in the proper order, and it's a great journey to undertake again for the first time.