Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995
By Bill Watterson
Published by Andrews McMeel Publishing
It's rarefied air amongst the best humour strips in history: Peanuts, Krazy Kat, and Calvin and Hobbes almost certainly define three of the top five.
Krazy Kat has never really gotten the popular attention it merits, but the new collections from Fantagraphics will hopefully go toward remedying that at least a bit. Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes collections, of course, have historically filled shelves at bookstores everywhere, and that's how I nearly missed this historic, incredible new volume.
Browsing the humour section of a local Waldenbooks, I saw the usual selection of Calvin volumes. Having an enormous admiration for the imagination and art of Bill Watterson, I stopped twice to read the title on the spine. This was something I hadn't seen before, and something that promised to hold up Watterson's art in a way utterly appropriate, and yet one that newspaper editors for years refused to do. This most recent volume, then, is a celebration of the innovative way Watterson held sway on the Sunday funnies page for years, captivating the minds and hearts of all who read it: This is how Calvin and Hobbes should be seen.
What this is is a collection of just a few dozen of Watterson's best, most innovative and unusual Sunday strips, published in full-colour, with the facing page of each strip featuring the original art of the same strip. Not just a black and white version of the colour page, but a photo of the actual art -- every whited-out mistake, every registration mark, and every taped-down copyright notice is there. It's absolutely the next, best thing to holding the original art of these strips in your hand.
These strips were originally chosen for an exhibition of the creator's work at Ohio State University. Watterson provides commentary on most of the pieces, giving insight into his creative process and ongoing struggle with editorial conformity that finally brought him to take a hiatus while he re-imagined what the strip should be. The final half of the book sees Watterson free of fears that the first two panels would be removed or that the entire strip would be rearranged, say, as a series of vertical panels. It's after a new deal was struck with the syndicate and a new, unchangeable format was agreed on that you see Watterson's experimentation with design and form really explode. It is fairly spectacular to see, and even more wonderful to have Watterson's comments every step of the way.
Most revelatory are the strips here that spring from the premise that the laws of nature have been rewritten. A number are included, and each is a delight, delving deep into Watterson's capacity for stretching the artform to its very limit in just a handful of panels. One of these, in which the world is reduced to black and white, also served as Watterson's reply to those who felt he was being inflexible about how his artwork was presented.
Have no fear about any dating of these strips. Even the one that kinda, sorta comments on Reagan-era war-mongering still manages to provide a timeless, snarky commentary on the utter stupidity of violence. All these strips have a timeless feel, with even the earliest showing the creator stretching his visual wings and brilliantly illuminating the character of everyone in the strip within a panel or two.
My favourite strips here are the ones that show Watterson really exploring the outer boundaries of the strip's potential; Spaceman Spiff battling amid devastatingly rendered space backgrounds, for example, or dinosaurs piloting fighter planes. The best of these, both visually and in terms of utter imagination raw on the paper, is a soap-opera parody so convincing that you actually might have mistaken it for a real soap-opera strip among the rest of the strips on the Sunday that it originally appeared. The artwork is a masterful switch in styles for Watterson, and the irony presented in the punchline is a delicious and bitingly apt depiction of male-female relationships at their most absurd.
Fittingly, the book closes on Watterson's final Sunday strip, an evocation of bright future possibilities for a boy and his tiger who earned a happy retirement from the comics pages. From the narration, it sounds like Watterson is enjoying his new life of painting and music. I'm thankful he took the time to put together this new volume, a wonderful, unexpected love letter to readers who remember and appreciated Calvin and Hobbes for the short time it was in the cultural spotlight; it's also an extraordinary glimpse at the creative mind of one of the best cartoonists in history. Grade: 5/5