From the Bookshelf: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

[krpalmer]

At Christmas, my parents gave me the boxed set of "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes." My brother also received the exact same set from them, and something about buying two copies of the somewhat pricy set struck me as somehow peculiar... but it does, of course, seem ungrateful to question a Christmas present, so I've tried to remind myself that one or the other of us don't have to visit the other just to view the complete Calvin and Hobbes. At the time that it was running, I suppose I was tempted to see it as "the comic strip for my time"... now that it's well in the past, revisiting all of it at once was an interestingly different experience.

Boxed up together, the three volumes in the set make for a massive weight, and each volume seems perhaps about as big as it can get without being unwieldy. Having been picking up each volume of "The Complete Peanuts" myself, I do find myself thinking that the Calvin and Hobbes collection is a bit more understated and perhaps more "dignified" in terms of design, with the Sunday pages printed in colour and each daily strip picked out against a very subtle coloured background. I did notice, though, that when a story being told in the daily strips ran for more than a week, the Sunday pages that might have interrupted it are lumped together later on.

The three volumes actually seem to divide up in a neat fashion for me. In the first volume, I could see the art getting refined, a variety of familiar elements being established... but one peculiar thought did strike me. It's no doubt a good thing for someone to be able to see something of themselves in a fictional character, but somehow I had a sense of Calvin deliberately isolating himself through simple weirdness from the rest of the world, and that did remind me of my own childhood and how something like that came right back at me... Calvin, of course, stayed six forever. In any case, the second volume was a period of gathering maturity, Bill Watterson's struggles to keep his creation from being affected through being licensed only showing up in his work if you know what you're looking for. One peculiar yet somehow amusing thought that came to me in contemplating this important aspect of the strip's history was that Calvin would probably be as disbelieving as anyone that somebody wouldn't want to take all the "money for nothing" that he could get; Hobbes and Calvin's dad, of course, would have a better understanding of the issues. Another, somewhat more ambiguous, fresh thought I had was that the era of a comic strip being thought of as the mere advance notice of animated specials and plush toys and greeting cards seems to have in a large, if perhaps not complete, way passed. I also have to admit, though, that this point in the strip is where Watterson's sentimental moments seemed awfully syrupy to me, at the time and now. Too, I suppose I've wondered about the more misanthropic flashes of both Calvin and Hobbes, but that could easily be turned back at me with the comment "the truth hurts."

Watterson's introduction to the set actually surprised me when he said he had begun to consider his strip's days as numbered from pretty much right around the time he took his first sabattical, that he hadn't decided simply out of the blue to "quit while he was ahead" and "leave them wanting more." In any case, though, for all I know that continues to strike me because of the endless online smirking and nudging about how a different comic strip artist should obviously have also retired decades before... and yet, I am a Peanuts fan convinced there were always things of value to the strip. I did do a bit of figuring, and gathered that accounting for Watterson's sabatticals, Charles M. Schulz retiring after producing a comparable body of work would have meant him quitting some time in mid-1959. This would be before Rerun becoming a slightly frustrated kindergarten artist, Charlie Brown's uneasy philosophical thoughts in the night, Spike's peculiar desert world, the Beagle Scouts, Marcie, Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, the World War One Flying Ace, and the Great Pumpkin, leaving one single "psychiatric help--five cents" strip and maybe Sally as a baby. The world of Calvin and Hobbes may have formed fast, and Watterson left a whole volume and some extra pages at the back of the another of reclaiming at least a tiny stretch of the Sunday pages for art's sake, but I can wonder about a thought I saw a little while back about how the grandest moments of Calvin's fantasy world always seemed to include the punchline of dropping back into the "reality of others."

Of course, comparison and competition isn't that healthy in the end, and as shocking as it might seem, someone can like more than one thing... and no matter what anyone says about the two strips, it's much more pleasant to me than the people ranting about how much they hate every instant of For Better or For Worse. That gets pretty creepy to me.

Comments

[may-child.livejournal.com]

I think my all-time favorite C&H strip was when Calvin read aloud to Hobbes: "It says here that religion is the opiate of the masses." Then in the next panel, he says, "I wonder what that means," and they both walk off. Then in the final panel, the television in the background comes to life and says, "It means Karl Marx hasn't seen anything yet."

[may-child.livejournal.com]

I always found Calvin to be a mixture of misanthrope and bon viveur, while Hobbes alternated between being Calvin's fellow fantasist and being his foil. IIRC, they had many fairly heated disagreements, though Hobbes was certainly not the outright adversary that, say, Rosalyn the babysitter or Moe the bully were.

I don't include Susie Derkins in that group because she never quite had the hate-hate relationship that Rosalyn and Moe did with Calvin. She even helped him out a time or two when he'd gotten himself into particularly bad trouble. And every once in a while Waterston threw out the implication that Calvin and Susie secretly liked each other.

I will, for the sake of fairness, offer a criticism: I never particularly liked the passivity of Calvin's parents with regards to his antics. I realize that that was a necessary conceit, but even so, it never sat right with me. With some exceptions, all they ever seemed to do was scold him, no matter how dangerous or mean his stunts became.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I recall that in the "tenth anniversary collection," Bill Watterson mentioned how he thought he had played up a "quasi-romantic" relationship between Calvin and Susie a little too much in the first days of the comic strip. As for other characters, while understanding that Calvin and Hobbes didn't always get along, I don't think I ever equated Rosalyn and Moe together: Moe was an unprovoked drag on Calvin's life, but Calvin would launch straight into making Rosalyn miserable. ("Tonight--the revenge of the baby-sat!")

I don't know if I've ever viewed the comic strip in a "realistic" enough light to be really bothered by how Calvin's parents reacted or didn't react to what he was doing.

[may-child.livejournal.com]

Rosalyn and Moe were Calvin's adversaries for different reasons -- Moe because he was a big-but-dumb schoolyard bully, and Rosalyn because she simply had no patience for Calvin's antics. Rosalyn was kind of like an older version of Susie. Waterston clearly had great affection for Susie -- IIRC he said he patterned her after his wife.

The strip definitely wasn't big on realism -- after all, the central relationship was between Calvin and his stuffed toy tiger, who he fancied to be an actual, live companion. And I suppose Calvin's parents did, in their own way, recognize what a pill he was. Calvin's father repeatedly made references to wanting a daschshund rather than a child, while Calvin's mother was known to make occasional, half-joking reflections such as, "[Calvin], anybody but your biological mother would have left you to the wolves long ago."