That is just two years after I burst onto the page.
Calvin and Hobbes was a major part of my childhood - I loved it. For something casually consumed on the daily at the breakfast table, it was so earnestly, so obviously, smarter than the median cultural offering. Smarter also then the local nightly news broadcasts. Smarter also than the median educational intervention I experienced through elementary and middle school. It had finished by the time I was in high school.
I still love it, but my feelings now are mixed as well.
Calvin wasn't exactly a pro-social role model for me. He was the hero of the smartest media I was acquainted with - the sharpest mouthpiece for what was going on around me and how to be alive. It was vitally important for me to live up to his disdain for schooling, his aloofness, his contrarianism. Nothing horrified eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-two year old me so much as conforming (gross) to a Susie Perkins mode of existence - smart, but seemingly oblivious or indifferent to life's contradictions and hypocrisies.
Some thirty years later I understand that a person can move pragmatically, without self-harm or self-righteousness, through life's contradictions and hypocrisies without being oblivious or indifferent. Who knew?
I think Calvin was of a common archetype of that era. The sarcastic, mildly anti-heroic protagonist. And I think that archetype did all of us who grew up in that era and imbibed the culture were done a disservice. I, too, have found my way to respecting and admiring the pragmatic, the persistent, and even the earnest among us over the smart alecs and the sarcastic wits.
With regard to Cartman, that critique is valid. With regard to Calvin, he is there to be the foil to Hobbes, who dispenses the wisdom. Calvin and Hobbes is a transmission of wisdom. Moreso in the later years, admittedly, but even early on. There is such a thing as the fool archetype. Frodo in LOTR, Emmet in the LEGO movie, and so on. These characters who know nothing, and are demonstrably unfit for the tasks that life demands of them, are not meant to be admired for their ignorance, rather it is their ignorance that allows the writer to send them on a journey to learn a lesson that is valuable to the audience. This is a bit harder to pinpoint in Calvin and Hobbes due to the episodic nature of a weekly strip, where the plot resets each time and the punchline almost invariably involves Calvin reverting to some stubborn point of view or refusing to learn a lesson. Yet if you read the works from beginning to end in the anthology, you can see a progression in both Calvin's attitude and the subject matter on Watterson's mind. The theme is maturation. To critique Calvin for being all that you said is to miss the point. Which, if you were a child reading them at the time (as I was!) nobody can blame you for. It might have been recieved better if your parents had been party to the reading of the strips, so they could bring forward the subtext. But anyway, it is not accurate to say that Calvin and Hobbes glorifies the anti-hero, sarcastic, childishness. Calvin is constantly lampooned and presented as being the cause of his own suffering for refusing to learn.
I was going to comment something similar. I think I'm about the same age as the commenter grew up reading C&H, and also had a disaffected attitude. I don't think it was Calvin that made me that way, but the broader media at the time. Heck, most kids at my school did not read it but the general way to be cool was to be aloof.
I think it was a hangover from Gen-X and the 80's. Ferris Bueller was pretty aloof and angst'd to the gills wasn't he?
Huh, I'm basically the same age as you but only started reading it as a teenager. It was pretty obvious to me that Calvin thought too highly of himself and that Hobbes was the sensible one. Like, the punchline of many of these comics is him being wrong about something but too stubborn to admit it in a funny way.
I’m the same age and also read C&H voraciously. Looking back I was (to a point) blueprinted on the kid, but mostly by virtue of being a single child, smart and alienated from most of my peers at school. I wish Susie gave me the time of day. Calvin wasn’t a role model, he was an accurate portrayal. (To a point)
I see what you're getting at, and your sentiment is thoughtfully expressed, but come on... it's Calvin and Hobbes! It's part of that rarefied echelon of media that taps into something true about the human condition. Calvin doesn't need to be a manual for how to live your life - it's enough to be an island you can sometimes visit when you're in a Calvin mood.
Well said. In fact Calvin shouldn’t be a manual for life, I think. What makes it so funny is we know that Calvin is way off base all the time, but he’s got a great imagination and we’ve all struggled in the same ways, with the same things, and wish we could just wander off with our imaginary tiger and leave the world’s problems behind, too.
They’re not supposed to be pro-social. The characters are supposed to represent the philosophers, John Calvin (predestination) and Thomas Hobbes (man is an animal). Watterson is probably making fun of them.
Watterson explicitly stated that the names have no relation to the characters' personalities or philosophical views. As someone familiar with John Calvin's views and writings, I can say safely that Calvin is not much in any way similar in personality or spirit to anything John Calvin ever taught or expressed. At best, Watterson is projecting the typical libertine caricature of John Calvin as a cantankerous and disagreeable curmudgeon onto the character. John Calvin was in reality quite progressive for his time, and by all impressions did all that he did out of love for those around them in line with a plain reading of scripture. But to see him that way requires nuance that seems to be lost on the anti-religious.
You know, your comment reminds me of something my wife and I were talking about. We have been starting to let our child have a little more screen time and choose what he wants to watch (within the parameters we set).
Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Then we wonder why kids adopt those attitudes. It's simply because mimic what they see. And worse yet, when they see it in movie/show form, they think those attitudes are cool and relatable.
Try the PBS Kids app. The shows are consistently cast with good role-model children and adults, without being preachy. Many episodes show how to resolve mistakes, frustration, and conflict in beneficial ways.
In comparison, the behavior in the kids shows from other producers (Disney, Nickelodeon, etc.) sometimes presents nasty behavior and name-calling as either inevitable, or something that's "someone else's problem": the instigator, if they're punished at all, might suffer the wrath of an authority figure, or simply bad karma.
My intent when choosing shows is not to hide the existence of bad behavior from children, but to teach them how to deal with it.
(My children also read Calvin and Hobbes. And watch those less-wholesome shows. And binge-watch MrBeast when I'm not around...)
I watched Home Alone last year and the characters call each other names constantly. It's funny for sure, but no wonder me and my friends had such filthy mouths as kids. You grow up on that and sitcoms where the characters just rip on each other. It's so strange to watch as an adult.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Although there are definitely a ton of kids shows that I find 100% garbage and would never let my kids watch under any circumstances, none of the 'name-brand' kids movies I've seen in the past 10 years struck me as unacceptably negative in the way you describe.
On the contrary, I get the impression that at least some of these movies are attempting to depict feelings and situations that some kids are feeling in a way that helps them understand 1) they're not alone and 2) their feelings or situations aren't wrong or abnormal.
Like, I took my kids to see Elio when it came out. BAM, right off the bat, dead parents. Anger. Frustration. Fear. Power struggles with parental figures.
This is all intentional—to the point that it's formulaic. A 2021 study found that slightly over 61% of the 155 animated kids features of the last ~80 years had no mention of the child protagonist's biological parents. There are a lot of reasons for this. The simplest are that it's way easier to come up with challenges and conflict for the protag(s) when their parents aren't around.
A more charitable reason is that there are all too many kids who, well, do have absent or fucked up parents. But it doesn't have to be that specific case either—any kid eventually has feelings of anger, fear and frustration, and seeing depictions of this in stories is important (for everyone, of any age, at any time).
I overall doubt that watching those stories causes kids to act angry and frustrated even when they're not angry and frustrated. I'm well aware of how profoundly mimetic human children are (and why that's important), but it doesn't happen with everything 100% of the time.
But this is also age-dependent in various ways. An 8-year-old can absorb a movie depiction of a fight between child and parent in a way that a 3-year-old can't. Are some toddlers going to act out because they watched that? Maybe? Probably?
Anyway, it's tricky to have these discussions because every child is different, even though there are broad anthropological patterns to humanity. But I've been more impressed than annoyed with lots of animated kids movies that I expected to loathe.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up.
I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
I don't have kids so I never thought about it from that angle, but I really dislike how yell-y so many modern animated shows are. Couldn't make it through a single episode of Rick and Morty.
I'd never thought how it might impact kids, but now that you mention it, I can only dislike the trend more.
Human beings yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards each other, seems like a human universal, rather than something children would only learn to do from watching recent tv and movies.
One thing I always notice after trips abroad is the extent to which American newscasters are practically yelling at their audience. This is a stark contrast to many European countries, where the tone is calmer and more measured.
from my familiarity with the writing of past generations and even past civilizations it seems reasonable to conclude that contradictions and hypocrisies are generally understood to exit. I don't think it's just down to the young people.
IMO, Watterson stopped at just the right time to preserve his legacy and keep the strip associated with childlike wonder and innocence. In the last years of C&H there was a certain curmudgeonliness creeping in, as Waterson started to mock modern commerce and art. I think the cartoonist was naturally growing older and more disillusioned, and his strip faintly started to sound like Calvin’s dad instead of Calvin.
At least based on some of the things he's written in some of the anthologies, it seems like a lot of that disillusionment was not just because of age, but rather because of his battles with the publishers and what not that were pushing him to make changes that he felt would compromise the integrity of the strip. A lot of the comics include subtle jabs about corporate greed, artistic integrity, etc. because he was actively fighting with the corporations that distributed his strip over such matters...
Still, 100% agreed that he stopped at the right time, both because of the creeping cynicism, but also simply because he was running out of fresh ideas...
I'm currently working through the Complete Calvin and Hobbes with my 9 year old, and he had these jabs at commercialism throughout, though it might have been sharper towards the end, but he was already jaded by art in 1985 as a 27 year old.
He had dreamed of being a cartoonist from childhood (when he was 8 he wrote Charles Shulz of Peanuts who wrote him back and it changed his life). He had actually majored in Political Science at Kenyon College (class of '80) because he thought that political cartooning was going to be his route in. It was not. He was a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post briefly before they fired him, then he worked for an ad agency and freelanced a bit before Universal Press Syndicate signed him on for Calvin and Hobbes. But, even at 27 when he started working for UPS, he understood the pressure of the professional art world and was cynical about it.
Apparently he lived a miserable life for the last few years of his work. He had been injured in a bike accident and it terrified him that he would be injured in such a way that he could no longer draw (1) so he basically stopped going out, stopped doing anything that could possibly harm his ability to earn money, stopped doing anything that might bring joy to his life. He lived a recluse for several years, before deciding to just quit, then he and his wife Melissa adopted a child and gave her a good life.
1: Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was the editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times when, in 1991, he crushed his right hand attaching a snow-plow to his truck, and he had to retire. I think that incident is what inspired this fear, the timelines match up. But of course, Watterson is famously private and so this is conjecture.
I looked it up in Merriam, it said origin, unknown. HOWEVER: cur, from the 13th-century, can mean: 'a surly or cowardly fellow'. THEN: dudgeon , from the 15th, can mean 'a fit or state of indignation'.
Why so often an older man? Need we look farther than Dickens' Scrooge?
Look up some crazy sounding 20+ character word, takes three steps, and then you get a definition of the sub-sub-sub word and it says ".... blah blah, derived from the Greek base <abc>- and then also the Latin base -<xyz>", and you realize you had no chance at getting it from any kind of first principles or anything.
George Carlin, in my opinion, followed a similar arc. In the end he was just ranting for an hour. I appreciated his perspective (and delivery) but it was a lot more nihilistic, less funny.
If memory serves, Waterson said the later years were colored by his feelings from dealing with publishers. One of the most memorable comics for me is one where Calvin ends up in bed after resisting his parents' bedtime commands. In the final panel he bitterly declares that clearly his desires have no impact on his outcomes.
I'm sure it was also for his own sake/sanity. He took two ~9-month sabbaticals toward the last half, which was not the norm for cartoonists at the time.
What a profound and beautiful comic. The art. The storytelling. The expanse of Calvin's vivid imagination.
Every day, I have a reminder to think of three things for which I'm grateful. I was just trying to find the third for today when I saw this headline.
I am grateful that I love my tattoos (and have no regret, which is the risk of tattoos), one of which is Stupendous Man. He was the first and it's because CnH holds such a special place in my heart. The comic largely shaped my childhood.
Bill Waterson had the integrity not to license his work, preferring that the reader not have the characters spoiled. He opted not to make boatloads of money in making this decision (cough, garfield, snoopy). He also declared that Sunday papers could print his comic unbroken or they could drop him and this allowed for truly magnificent art pieces where stories could be told in new ways. His integrity is legendary in the field.
"Calvin and Company" by DomNX, wherein Calvin and Susie have twins named after Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir --- art not fully realized/up to the task, and again, all a bit too obvious
There was also one simply heart-breaking one, where Calvin has cancer, gets a decrepit Hobbes out of storage, and gifts him to a troubled grandchild, but not finding it on searching....
The thing is, laughing at problems, while cathartic, isn't actually inspiring folks to actually understand/solve problems/make the world a better place.... I'm reminded of a comic from childhood where a child sees duck hunters as part of the reason why a forest is clearcut for a development, instead of the reason why such land is preserved (the Pa. State Game Commission manages over 1.5 million acres) or, maybe I'm just overly pessimistic this morning because of intractable problems where people choose wrongly, mostly through not understanding the problem/ignorance/lack of sympathy for others --- classic example, drivers in cars who get upset because following a cyclist causes them slow down on their way to a red light --- rather a shame that the strips featuring Calvin's father as a cyclist weren't didactic so as to show/discuss that sort of thing, rather than going for the laugh.
> There was also one simply heart-breaking one, where Calvin has cancer, gets a decrepit Hobbes out of storage, and gifts him to a troubled grandchild, but not finding it on searching....
Are you sure this was a comic? It's a story someone wrote, available on Scribd.
Gene Wolfe wrote a story titled Petting Zoo, and here is the introduction he wrote for it:
> Petting Zoo is a favorite story of David Hartwell's, the master editor who edited this book and most of my others. Do you like dinosaurs? I loved them when I was a kid, and I've noticed that Hobbes' buddy Calvin loves them at least as much. Perhaps David feels the same way.
The comic "Frazz" is also often compared to Calvin and Hobbes (as if Frazz the janitor is an adult Calvin), there's a long section on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazz
My wife and I will actually be going to an exhibition of Watterson's work this weekend—we're lucky enough to live not too far from Cooperstown, NY, where the Fenimore House Art Museum has the exhibition running all this fall.
As an '80s kid, Calvin and Hobbes ran for almost my entire childhood, and we have a number of the collections. I never fail to be impressed either by Watterson's talent, both in the art and in choosing the right words to say, nor by his integrity and restraint, both in refusing to allow his work to be merchandised and in choosing to stop when he did—when he felt he had said all he came to say.
Many more artists of all types could take so many lessons from him. Even some that are already great. He is a very humble man, but he stands among the legends of our time.
We were there a few weekends ago. The C&H exhibit had quite the crowd!
It is largely a collection of original strips. You won't see anything new or original, that is not in one or more of the books. But it is interesting to see his process, to note where he made mistakes, to listen to everyone chuckle at one strip or another, and to see the progression of the characters and artist as you walk through the lifetime of the comic.
You might as well torrent/etc the books, no sense with using web middlemen who get takedowns because they don't have the rights either. Direct piracy gives you a better experience than indirect piracy.
(You should also buy real copies if you still can, because they're great.)
Watterson serves as one of the symbols of an era when selling out was considered a great sin. It makes me laugh how thoroughly that idea - that selling out is bad - has been defeated.
That being said, I'm sure he would've done it the same way today.
Readit News
Calvin and Hobbes was a major part of my childhood - I loved it. For something casually consumed on the daily at the breakfast table, it was so earnestly, so obviously, smarter than the median cultural offering. Smarter also then the local nightly news broadcasts. Smarter also than the median educational intervention I experienced through elementary and middle school. It had finished by the time I was in high school.
I still love it, but my feelings now are mixed as well.
Calvin wasn't exactly a pro-social role model for me. He was the hero of the smartest media I was acquainted with - the sharpest mouthpiece for what was going on around me and how to be alive. It was vitally important for me to live up to his disdain for schooling, his aloofness, his contrarianism. Nothing horrified eight or ten or fifteen or twenty-two year old me so much as conforming (gross) to a Susie Perkins mode of existence - smart, but seemingly oblivious or indifferent to life's contradictions and hypocrisies.
Some thirty years later I understand that a person can move pragmatically, without self-harm or self-righteousness, through life's contradictions and hypocrisies without being oblivious or indifferent. Who knew?
https://imgur.com/a/semJX
:.)
I think it was a hangover from Gen-X and the 80's. Ferris Bueller was pretty aloof and angst'd to the gills wasn't he?
Deleted Comment
Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
Then we wonder why kids adopt those attitudes. It's simply because mimic what they see. And worse yet, when they see it in movie/show form, they think those attitudes are cool and relatable.
In comparison, the behavior in the kids shows from other producers (Disney, Nickelodeon, etc.) sometimes presents nasty behavior and name-calling as either inevitable, or something that's "someone else's problem": the instigator, if they're punished at all, might suffer the wrath of an authority figure, or simply bad karma.
My intent when choosing shows is not to hide the existence of bad behavior from children, but to teach them how to deal with it.
(My children also read Calvin and Hobbes. And watch those less-wholesome shows. And binge-watch MrBeast when I'm not around...)
Although there are definitely a ton of kids shows that I find 100% garbage and would never let my kids watch under any circumstances, none of the 'name-brand' kids movies I've seen in the past 10 years struck me as unacceptably negative in the way you describe.
On the contrary, I get the impression that at least some of these movies are attempting to depict feelings and situations that some kids are feeling in a way that helps them understand 1) they're not alone and 2) their feelings or situations aren't wrong or abnormal.
Like, I took my kids to see Elio when it came out. BAM, right off the bat, dead parents. Anger. Frustration. Fear. Power struggles with parental figures.
This is all intentional—to the point that it's formulaic. A 2021 study found that slightly over 61% of the 155 animated kids features of the last ~80 years had no mention of the child protagonist's biological parents. There are a lot of reasons for this. The simplest are that it's way easier to come up with challenges and conflict for the protag(s) when their parents aren't around.
A more charitable reason is that there are all too many kids who, well, do have absent or fucked up parents. But it doesn't have to be that specific case either—any kid eventually has feelings of anger, fear and frustration, and seeing depictions of this in stories is important (for everyone, of any age, at any time).
I overall doubt that watching those stories causes kids to act angry and frustrated even when they're not angry and frustrated. I'm well aware of how profoundly mimetic human children are (and why that's important), but it doesn't happen with everything 100% of the time.
But this is also age-dependent in various ways. An 8-year-old can absorb a movie depiction of a fight between child and parent in a way that a 3-year-old can't. Are some toddlers going to act out because they watched that? Maybe? Probably?
Anyway, it's tricky to have these discussions because every child is different, even though there are broad anthropological patterns to humanity. But I've been more impressed than annoyed with lots of animated kids movies that I expected to loathe.
My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up.
I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
I'd never thought how it might impact kids, but now that you mention it, I can only dislike the trend more.
Still, 100% agreed that he stopped at the right time, both because of the creeping cynicism, but also simply because he was running out of fresh ideas...
He had dreamed of being a cartoonist from childhood (when he was 8 he wrote Charles Shulz of Peanuts who wrote him back and it changed his life). He had actually majored in Political Science at Kenyon College (class of '80) because he thought that political cartooning was going to be his route in. It was not. He was a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post briefly before they fired him, then he worked for an ad agency and freelanced a bit before Universal Press Syndicate signed him on for Calvin and Hobbes. But, even at 27 when he started working for UPS, he understood the pressure of the professional art world and was cynical about it.
Apparently he lived a miserable life for the last few years of his work. He had been injured in a bike accident and it terrified him that he would be injured in such a way that he could no longer draw (1) so he basically stopped going out, stopped doing anything that could possibly harm his ability to earn money, stopped doing anything that might bring joy to his life. He lived a recluse for several years, before deciding to just quit, then he and his wife Melissa adopted a child and gave her a good life.
1: Bill Mauldin, the Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist who created Willie and Joe, was the editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Sun Times when, in 1991, he crushed his right hand attaching a snow-plow to his truck, and he had to retire. I think that incident is what inspired this fear, the timelines match up. But of course, Watterson is famously private and so this is conjecture.
curmudgeonliness: The state or condition of being curmudgeonly.
okay, let's look up curmudgeonly:
curmudgeonly: Characteristic of a curmudgeon; churlish
nearly there:
curmudgeon: An ill-tempered person full of stubborn ideas or opinions, often an older man.
Why so often an older man? Need we look farther than Dickens' Scrooge?
Look up some crazy sounding 20+ character word, takes three steps, and then you get a definition of the sub-sub-sub word and it says ".... blah blah, derived from the Greek base <abc>- and then also the Latin base -<xyz>", and you realize you had no chance at getting it from any kind of first principles or anything.
Every day, I have a reminder to think of three things for which I'm grateful. I was just trying to find the third for today when I saw this headline.
I am grateful that I love my tattoos (and have no regret, which is the risk of tattoos), one of which is Stupendous Man. He was the first and it's because CnH holds such a special place in my heart. The comic largely shaped my childhood.
Bill Waterson had the integrity not to license his work, preferring that the reader not have the characters spoiled. He opted not to make boatloads of money in making this decision (cough, garfield, snoopy). He also declared that Sunday papers could print his comic unbroken or they could drop him and this allowed for truly magnificent art pieces where stories could be told in new ways. His integrity is legendary in the field.
Check out his recent work, The Mysteries.
https://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-novel-review-bill-watters...
The boxed collection is wonderful, and one of my favourites.
For folks who want a bit more, there have been a couple of homages:
"Hobbes and Bacon": https://imgur.com/gallery/all-hobbes-bacon-by-pants-are-over... --- a bit too on-the-nose for my taste, which doesn't really add anything
"Calvin and Company" by DomNX, wherein Calvin and Susie have twins named after Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir --- art not fully realized/up to the task, and again, all a bit too obvious
There was also one simply heart-breaking one, where Calvin has cancer, gets a decrepit Hobbes out of storage, and gifts him to a troubled grandchild, but not finding it on searching....
The thing is, laughing at problems, while cathartic, isn't actually inspiring folks to actually understand/solve problems/make the world a better place.... I'm reminded of a comic from childhood where a child sees duck hunters as part of the reason why a forest is clearcut for a development, instead of the reason why such land is preserved (the Pa. State Game Commission manages over 1.5 million acres) or, maybe I'm just overly pessimistic this morning because of intractable problems where people choose wrongly, mostly through not understanding the problem/ignorance/lack of sympathy for others --- classic example, drivers in cars who get upset because following a cyclist causes them slow down on their way to a red light --- rather a shame that the strips featuring Calvin's father as a cyclist weren't didactic so as to show/discuss that sort of thing, rather than going for the laugh.
I believe the Zen Pencils one is one of the better ones... it's not Calvin and Hobbes, but rather about Watterson himself.
http://www.zenpencils.com/comic/128-bill-watterson-a-cartoon...
https://www.gocomics.com/phoebe-and-her-unicorn
Ordering the first boxed set for my daughter's birthday next year.
Are you sure this was a comic? It's a story someone wrote, available on Scribd.
This one?
https://www.scribd.com/document/848787362/Calvin
> Petting Zoo is a favorite story of David Hartwell's, the master editor who edited this book and most of my others. Do you like dinosaurs? I loved them when I was a kid, and I've noticed that Hobbes' buddy Calvin loves them at least as much. Perhaps David feels the same way.
Petting Zoo can be read here:
https://archive.org/details/yearsbestsf30000unse/page/n9/mod...
Bill Watterson also guest-drew a few precious strips for Pearls Before Swine.
https://slate.com/culture/2014/06/bill-watterson-does-pearls...
https://toostupidtotravel.org/2014/06/07/ever-wished-that-ca...
is 404.
And it still holds up for kids of today. My son is a second gen Calvin and Hobbes kid.
Cul de Sac (https://www.gocomics.com/culdesac)
Wallace the Brave (https://www.gocomics.com/wallace-the-brave)
As an '80s kid, Calvin and Hobbes ran for almost my entire childhood, and we have a number of the collections. I never fail to be impressed either by Watterson's talent, both in the art and in choosing the right words to say, nor by his integrity and restraint, both in refusing to allow his work to be merchandised and in choosing to stop when he did—when he felt he had said all he came to say.
Many more artists of all types could take so many lessons from him. Even some that are already great. He is a very humble man, but he stands among the legends of our time.
Edit: realized it would be good to add a link to the exhibition: https://fenimoreartmuseum.org/future-exhibitions/calvin-and-...
https://featureassets.gocomics.com/assets/318702d0df96013172...
(I am genuinely considering a trip to Cooperstown now.)
It is largely a collection of original strips. You won't see anything new or original, that is not in one or more of the books. But it is interesting to see his process, to note where he made mistakes, to listen to everyone chuckle at one strip or another, and to see the progression of the characters and artist as you walk through the lifetime of the comic.
Well worth the trip!
Gocomics seems to go after everyone who posts these comic strips on a regular basis.
The C&H sub-reddit stopped posting some time ago. [0]
The only C&H Search out there is not allowed to show the strips and instead redirects to Gocomics. [1]
Here's a blog post by S. Anand detailing some background on the takedown notice he received, although he doesn't mention who sent it. [2]
I feel saddened that the one comic strip that resisted commercialization has to have its fans face this.
But I suppose that's the nature of the web now.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/1m8j09a/th...
[1]: https://michaelyingling.com/random/calvin_and_hobbes/
[2]: https://www.s-anand.net/blog/the-calvin-and-hobbes-search-ta...
(You should also buy real copies if you still can, because they're great.)
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Calvin-Hobbes-Box-Set/dp/074...
I got this when it came out. It's absolutely amazing, filled with commentary from Bill Watterson.
I've read the whole set twice, but it's been at least 15 years. I should read it again.
Seeing a strip which I'd forgotten was an even more pleasurable bonus!
And I do own the books as well.
That being said, I'm sure he would've done it the same way today.
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I'm sad that whatever went on with McGruder and the media gatekeepers prevented him from Schultzing it up through to the present day. We need him.