Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes (1982ff)

     Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes (1982ff)
     Calvin and Hobbes (1987); Something under the Bed is Drooling (1988); Yukon Ho! (1989); The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book (TLSB) (1989) Revenge of the Baby-sat (RBS) (1991); Scientific Progress Goes Boink! (SPGB) (1991); Attack of the Deranged Mutant Snow Goons (1992); The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes (TIC&H) (1992; compilation of RBS and SPGB).
     There will be no more Calvin and Hobbes; Watterson stopped writing the strip in shortly after 1992. Like Berke Breathead, he had mined his vein; and there was no more ore. He knew that repetitions would not do; variations on his themes had already begun to appear, as is clear when one reads all of these books at once, and Calvin could not stay six years old forever. But while it lasted, C&H was one of the best available.
     Some people thought of Calvin as merely an updated Dennis the Menace (whom Dairy Queen has quietly removed from its graphics). Calvin was more than that. He was both as silly and naive as any six-year-old can be, and wise as only children can be. Watterson did sometimes yield to the temptation of putting his own views into Calvin or Hobbes’s mouths, and occasionally the strip descended into sentimentality, but overall it was bizarre, surreal, clear-eyed, satirical, truthful, and accurate. It was never cynical, though it came close. It worked not just because of the graphics (Watterson is especially good at facial expressions and fuzzy tigers), but also because of the language. Watterson was a writer as well as an graphic artist. The full page renderings of Spaceman Spiff in TLSB show that he could be a great comic book or illustrated novel writer. The verses in TIC&H show his talent for wordplay, a talent that also shows up in his brilliant parodies of PI stories (written to show Calvin’s struggles with math tests.), and in Hobbes’ epigrams. And Spaceman Spiff is a loving rendition of the SF fantasies of the 1950s and 60s. Worth rereading more than once. **** (2002)