Ten years ago next month, a 6-year-old boy and his tiger went tobogganing into the abyss. Their ambition to explore had outgrown the medium in which they lived, and the comics pages haven't been the same since.
One-time failed political cartoonist Bill Watterson couldn't have known that "Calvin and Hobbes" — which launched Nov. 18, 1985, with Calvin's capture of Hobbes using a tuna sandwich as bait — would still be loved and mourned now that it's been gone as long as it was a daily presence in 2,400 newspapers. This was, remember, before Internet this and narrowcast that, a time that was perhaps the last earth-rumbling stomp of dinosaur mass media's power. "Calvin" collections have sold some 30 million copies and counting. And now — conveniently in time for holiday gift-giving — Andrews McMeel has released the three-volume "Complete Calvin and Hobbes," which reproduces every one of the 3,160 strips in a three-volume boxed set that weighs 23 pounds. If this thing were any heavier, it'd come with wheels. Lift with the legs, not the back, people. The first printing is 250,000. It will sell out.
Is it worth it? You bet. The strips are handsomely printed with a line of gold rule around them — they look like they've been pasted into the book — and Watterson's introductory essay answers a good number of questions. (Calvin's not based on Watterson's own child — he never had children — nor on his boyhood self.) The strips themselves are consistently delightful to a degree that's astonishing to recall. Only toward the end, after a hiatus and the winning of unprecedented creative control that still wasn't quite enough, did Watterson begin to flag, using his characters to decry the commodification of art, critique the state of comics or the limitations of the form itself. The man can hardly be blamed for exhausting the medium — he drew wonderful people and tigers, not to mention awesome dinosaurs piloting fighter jets and alien landscapes. Even his inanimate objects exuded detailed draftmanship and whimsy. And nobody's ever cartooned bug-eyed astonishment better. But toward the end, one gets the impression Watterson felt like he was trapped in a car underwater, trying to kick through the windshield.
"Calvin and Hobbes" was an unwitting elegy for a kind of childhood that isn't lived anymore. Especially in the first volume, the lack of technological advances is a reminder of all the things we got along just fine without. In Calvin's universe, people talk on phones with cords. The television has an antenna. Calvin's mom spends a great deal of time at a desk, writing. With a pen. The fact is, Calvin wouldn't have a stuffed tiger today. He'd have a PlayStation Portable.
If you happen to have been a child yourself sometime in the past, you may recall that not having 658 channels of digital cable, some of them devoted exclusively to product-pushing children's programming, was a catalyst for using one's imagination. You turned a cardboard box into a time machine. You daydreamed in school about being Spaceman Spiff. You went outside. So though everyone else sees Hobbes as a stuffed animal, to Calvin — casually insolent, mischievous and dangerously precocious — he's a real tiger, albeit one that walks on two legs and talks: "Beneath that soft exterior lie terrible mandibles of bone-crushing death," Calvin warns Susie, a little girl to whom he is absolutely not attracted. "He'll grind you to hamburger."
Absent siblings or other playmates, and moving in an orbit distant from his preoccupied (and, in the case of his father, seemingly ambivalent) parents, Calvin has Hobbes as his best and only friend. Hobbes pounces on Calvin daily upon the boy's return from school. They pass time by rating their arm flatulence. They are pirates and charter members of GROSS (Get Rid of Slimy girlS).
Being that they're named for for two philosophers, they also think deep thoughts on occasion. Calvin asks Hobbes what he thinks happens when we die, prompting this exchange:
"I think we play saxophone for an all-girl cabaret in New Orleans."
"So you believe in heaven?"
"Call it what you like."
Hobbes, of course, is wiser — not to mention taller — than Calvin, who's all mouth and id.
"Look! I caught a butterfly!" Calvin crows, provoking Hobbes' rueful reply: "If people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it."
Parents were entirely offstage in "Peanuts," the first cartoon about the psychology of children. In "Calvin and Hobbes" they're peripheral, existing primarily to tell Calvin no, he can't have plastic surgery or ride his tricycle on the roof — but that, in a somewhat daring strip, he can have a cigarette. Of the grownups, only baby-sitter Rosalyn strikes fear in our lad. The strategy leaves Calvin and Hobbes to negotiate the baffling and truly scary landscape of childhood on their own. They are alone a lot — even in the bathtub — but never lonely. Together they confront fears real and imagined. Sentient oatmeal is a threat Calvin can tackle ("You'll never escape, vile glop! Die! Die!"). Monsters under the bed, not so much.
Aside from what readers might infer from the strip — ever a dubious undertaking — little is known of Watterson, whose penchant for privacy, for conversing with the public on his own terms, makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. He's believed to have grown up in the deliciously named Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where his parents still live. He has a brother, Tom, who teaches at Austin High School. He's spent the post-"Calvin" decade painting. He is pleased, at long last, to have every "Calvin" panel ever published presented as he always wished. In the introduction, Watterson says he wrote and drew the strip "primarily to entertain my wife."
We can only presume he succeeded.
I can also report he's entertaining readers who were not even born when he retired from the funny pages. On a family vacation this year, we picked up a "Calvin" collection (not this one) for our boys, one 8 and the other — like Calvin — 6. It absolutely captivated them.
It also gave them ideas. The following day I heard our 6-year-old ask, "Mom, can I ride my tricycle on the roof?"
No, Calvin.
pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603
The Complete
Calvin and Hobbes
Bill Watterson
Andrews McMeel, $150
http://www.statesman.com/hp/content/life/stories/11/29calvin.html
One-time failed political cartoonist Bill Watterson couldn't have known that "Calvin and Hobbes" — which launched Nov. 18, 1985, with Calvin's capture of Hobbes using a tuna sandwich as bait — would still be loved and mourned now that it's been gone as long as it was a daily presence in 2,400 newspapers. This was, remember, before Internet this and narrowcast that, a time that was perhaps the last earth-rumbling stomp of dinosaur mass media's power. "Calvin" collections have sold some 30 million copies and counting. And now — conveniently in time for holiday gift-giving — Andrews McMeel has released the three-volume "Complete Calvin and Hobbes," which reproduces every one of the 3,160 strips in a three-volume boxed set that weighs 23 pounds. If this thing were any heavier, it'd come with wheels. Lift with the legs, not the back, people. The first printing is 250,000. It will sell out.
Is it worth it? You bet. The strips are handsomely printed with a line of gold rule around them — they look like they've been pasted into the book — and Watterson's introductory essay answers a good number of questions. (Calvin's not based on Watterson's own child — he never had children — nor on his boyhood self.) The strips themselves are consistently delightful to a degree that's astonishing to recall. Only toward the end, after a hiatus and the winning of unprecedented creative control that still wasn't quite enough, did Watterson begin to flag, using his characters to decry the commodification of art, critique the state of comics or the limitations of the form itself. The man can hardly be blamed for exhausting the medium — he drew wonderful people and tigers, not to mention awesome dinosaurs piloting fighter jets and alien landscapes. Even his inanimate objects exuded detailed draftmanship and whimsy. And nobody's ever cartooned bug-eyed astonishment better. But toward the end, one gets the impression Watterson felt like he was trapped in a car underwater, trying to kick through the windshield.
"Calvin and Hobbes" was an unwitting elegy for a kind of childhood that isn't lived anymore. Especially in the first volume, the lack of technological advances is a reminder of all the things we got along just fine without. In Calvin's universe, people talk on phones with cords. The television has an antenna. Calvin's mom spends a great deal of time at a desk, writing. With a pen. The fact is, Calvin wouldn't have a stuffed tiger today. He'd have a PlayStation Portable.
If you happen to have been a child yourself sometime in the past, you may recall that not having 658 channels of digital cable, some of them devoted exclusively to product-pushing children's programming, was a catalyst for using one's imagination. You turned a cardboard box into a time machine. You daydreamed in school about being Spaceman Spiff. You went outside. So though everyone else sees Hobbes as a stuffed animal, to Calvin — casually insolent, mischievous and dangerously precocious — he's a real tiger, albeit one that walks on two legs and talks: "Beneath that soft exterior lie terrible mandibles of bone-crushing death," Calvin warns Susie, a little girl to whom he is absolutely not attracted. "He'll grind you to hamburger."
Absent siblings or other playmates, and moving in an orbit distant from his preoccupied (and, in the case of his father, seemingly ambivalent) parents, Calvin has Hobbes as his best and only friend. Hobbes pounces on Calvin daily upon the boy's return from school. They pass time by rating their arm flatulence. They are pirates and charter members of GROSS (Get Rid of Slimy girlS).
Being that they're named for for two philosophers, they also think deep thoughts on occasion. Calvin asks Hobbes what he thinks happens when we die, prompting this exchange:
"I think we play saxophone for an all-girl cabaret in New Orleans."
"So you believe in heaven?"
"Call it what you like."
Hobbes, of course, is wiser — not to mention taller — than Calvin, who's all mouth and id.
"Look! I caught a butterfly!" Calvin crows, provoking Hobbes' rueful reply: "If people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it."
Parents were entirely offstage in "Peanuts," the first cartoon about the psychology of children. In "Calvin and Hobbes" they're peripheral, existing primarily to tell Calvin no, he can't have plastic surgery or ride his tricycle on the roof — but that, in a somewhat daring strip, he can have a cigarette. Of the grownups, only baby-sitter Rosalyn strikes fear in our lad. The strategy leaves Calvin and Hobbes to negotiate the baffling and truly scary landscape of childhood on their own. They are alone a lot — even in the bathtub — but never lonely. Together they confront fears real and imagined. Sentient oatmeal is a threat Calvin can tackle ("You'll never escape, vile glop! Die! Die!"). Monsters under the bed, not so much.
Aside from what readers might infer from the strip — ever a dubious undertaking — little is known of Watterson, whose penchant for privacy, for conversing with the public on his own terms, makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. He's believed to have grown up in the deliciously named Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where his parents still live. He has a brother, Tom, who teaches at Austin High School. He's spent the post-"Calvin" decade painting. He is pleased, at long last, to have every "Calvin" panel ever published presented as he always wished. In the introduction, Watterson says he wrote and drew the strip "primarily to entertain my wife."
We can only presume he succeeded.
I can also report he's entertaining readers who were not even born when he retired from the funny pages. On a family vacation this year, we picked up a "Calvin" collection (not this one) for our boys, one 8 and the other — like Calvin — 6. It absolutely captivated them.
It also gave them ideas. The following day I heard our 6-year-old ask, "Mom, can I ride my tricycle on the roof?"
No, Calvin.
pbeach@statesman.com; 445-3603
The Complete
Calvin and Hobbes
Bill Watterson
Andrews McMeel, $150
http://www.statesman.com/hp/content/life/stories/11/29calvin.html
