Bill Watterson. Four Calvin & Hobbes collections

     Bill Watterson. Four Calvin & Hobbes collections. Calvin, the real version of Dennis the menace, and Hobbes, his stuffed toy tiger, are no longer with us. Watterson gave up drawing the strip some years ago, and all we have now are these splendid collections, and more recent ones with the Sunday panels in colour. They repay repeated reading, with Hobbes’ wisdom contrasting with and complementing Calvin’s innocent mischief. Calvin’s only moments of evil occur when he is trying to get the better of Susy Perkins, his neighbour and classmate, who thinks him to be the weirdest kid she knows. But she likes Hobbes, so she can’t quite hate Calvin.
     Calvin embodies pure boy, Hobbes is his imaginary playmate. The strip is a mix of Calvin’s real and imagined adventures. He hates school, and goes to great lengths to avoid homework. Yet his imagination shows that he’s no dummy. Hobbes expresses what Calvin presumably knows to be the better, more mature, more realistic attitudes and insights, but he is also pure jungle cat, just a whiff and a whisker away from real teeth and real claws and a real appetite for juicy little boys. Calvin’s alter egos, Spaceman Spiff and Stupendous Man, are his escape from realities he doesn’t like. His imagined embodiments as a tyrannosaurus that eats and crushes his enemies give him some solace. The line between fantasy and reality is a thin one. The veil that separates the inner and outer worlds tears often. Calvin knows when he is fantasising, but he also wishes that his fantasies were real. And sometimes they come too close to reality for comfort.
      The strip’s charm arises from this mix of reality and fantasy, maturity and childishness, acceptance of what is and escapes into imagined worlds where little boys are heroes that fight for justice or prehistoric lizards exacting vengeance. The effects range from mild amusement through wry sadness and to spluttering, gasping hilarity.
Many comic strips merely illustrate the text. Watterson’s drawings and text merge perfectly. In fact, the drawings often expand and extend the text’s meanings. I like his work a lot. **** (2007)