Calvin and Hobbes

Click on a book's image or title to order from Amazon.com

Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book

No doubt by now you all are aware that the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip is scheduled to end on December 31, 1995 (I'm writing this in late December, so assuming Watterson doesn't change his mind, it will already have ended by the time you read this). Watterson says he feels too restricted by the comic strip format and would like to move on to try something new. (What that something new is, I don't know; hopefully it will not be as great a waste of time as Berke Breathed's post-Bloom County efforts).

This book came out in mid-1995, and it turns out to be a treasure-trove of information! Although all the strips reprinted here are old (and contained in earlier collections), they are all annotated by Watterson himself! What's more, Watterson has written a number of essays on his cartooning experience and the inspirations and source materials behind Calvin and Hobbes.

He discusses why he refused to allow his material to be marketed (he feels marketing cheapens the creation), why he took two vacations from drawing the strip (he was exhausted from the marketing battle, and his syndicate offered them to him), his cartooning philosophies (he writes and draws and even colors everything himself, and his favorite strips of days past are Peanuts, Krazy Kat and Pogo), and quite a bit of information about himself and the characters in the strip (he's married, has no kids, doesn't feel Calvin is much like he was as a child, but did base Calvin's father greatly on his own).

It's really a very worthwhile book, and I think helped me appreciate a lot of the older strips anew; taken without any background information, I think I eventually found the strips a bit homogeneous. As I often find is the case, knowing something about what happened behind-the-scenes helps me enjoy them all the more, and on a new and different level.