I don’t want to make you feel old, old man, but Calvin and Hobbes hasn’t been in the newspapers in twenty years. One day soon, you’ll have a doctor born so late that he’ll never have read it in the funnies, and how can you trust a doctor that young?
This book is not a comic collection. Instead, it describes an art exhibition that took place in 2001, fourteen years ago and six years after Watterson ended the strip. Watterson’s Sunday work was rolled into an art exhibition, and this book describes some of the history of Calvin and Hobbes as well as some of the Sunday comics. Each included comic includes the rough sketch and the finished product along with some commentary about the comic. Readers also get insight into how the Sunday comic is structured–in many cases, the first line of a three line comic is expendable as editors might have to cut it out to fit it into a particular newspaper or they can be sold “as is” as a half page, wherein the panels can be sized differently than normal and won’t be cut (Calvin and Hobbes started as the former but ended as the latter).
It’s a good bit of information, and the cartoons themselves are timelessly humorous.
The cartoon has been gone twice as long as it actually appeared in the paper; however, that’s probably a good thing, as Watterson got to end it on his terms, and readers were spared the endless “vote which cartoon stays” sorts of polls pitting Calvin and Hobbes against the Boondocks or having to write letters to the editor to get it restored.
I’m glad these books appear, though, because my children are coming to enjoy the strip. To be honest, my oldest son borrowed this book from the library and I poached it.
Books mentioned in this review:
