Calvin & Hobbes (1985-196) by Bill Watterson
REVIEW BY GENE KANNENBERG:
"Funny kid" comic strips have been a mainstay in newspapers for over a century, and Calvin & Hobbes was one of the best. As Gary Trudeau wrote, "[Bill Watterson delineated] childhood as it actually is, with its constantly shifting frames of reference". Calvin the uncontrollable dreamer, Hobbes the romantic, occasionally pragmatic, predator-cum-stuffed tiger: Such was the stuff of dreams. Calvin's personality, like his vocabulary, benefited from an adult perspective which exaggerated ideas in order to explore them. Flights of fancy walked side by side with willful manipulation, brutal honesty, and manic energy.
The artwork, too, had energy, especially the physical characterisations; the words gave us punch lines, but the pictures sold the jokes. Calvin & Hobbes also easily brought its comic and narrative timing into longer, multi-week story arcs without endless repetition or plodding action. We admired Calvin's broad imagination, but it was Watterson's artwork which made that imagination real.
Watterson's temperament also marks his work as significant. His refusal to merchandise the strip was probably financially foolish but artistically admirable. After his first (gasp!) sabbatical, he successfully campaigned to alter drastically the format of the Sunday strips. Today, many cartoonists thank Watterson for having an open (if often small) canvas on which to produce comics which won't undergo editorial reformatting. Few, however, have used this space as productively or imaginatively as did Watterson himself. The final Sunday strip, a paean to the joys of childhood winter excursions, utilised chiaroscuro and abundant negative space to convey that it is, indeed, a magical world.
Intelligent, charming, uncompromising, and beautifully rendered, Calvin & Hobbes remains a benchmark by which humour strips should be judged.
REVIEW BY FRANK MILLER:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #209, December 1998)
...this is going to sound simplistic, but I think it's one of the essentials of what makes comics work, and one of the reasons they translate so poorly into film, is the sheer joy of seeing good cartooning. A perfect example of that is Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. I can't imagine that in any other form, because even more than the humanity or humor in the strip, the drawing is such a joy to behold. It charms my eye enough to make me slow down and really pay attention. I feel a stream of pleasure from looking at drawings like that...
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