"Calvin and Hobbes" has jolted the funny pages' consciousness for just about two decades now. With painstaking attention to detail and the promise that, for once, being different from everyone else was okay, Bill Watterson's unlikely couple nudged us a little bit and reminded us there was time to laugh at ourselves. Calvin was the socially awkward, the occasionally selfish, the unaccountably verbose lurking in each of us, as both kids and adults. He had no friends to speak of, was malcontent with his family and home, and regularly retreated into a vivid mindscape. Hasn't everyone, at some point or other, regarded the world as a forbidding place? Such are the times when a steadfast companion, with a predilection for simple truths, seems like all one really needs.
CALVIN: (Sitting with HOBBES in a field) If you wish for anything, what would it be?
HOBBES: A big sunny field to be in.
CALVIN: A STUPID FIELD?! You've got that now! Think BIG! Riches! Power! Pretend you could have ANYthing!
(HOBBES reclines blissfully on the grass)
CALVIN: (Looking at HOBBES) Actually it's hard to argue with someone who looks so happy.
Strips like these, so unequivocally spirited and sometimes poignantly thoughtful, attracted over 2,400 newspapers worldwide at its height. When Watterson retired, bloody victor of countless merchandising battles with his syndicate, it was like an old friend died. His principles to the art form that is the comic strip has therefore endured; save for two 16-month calendars, there have been virtually no commercial "Calvin & Hobbes" products. Disenfranchisement with the purity of the characters was never risked, perhaps the surest sign of his respect for the readers. A truly good thing, it's said, never dies.
As Watterson disappeared from a public eye he was never particularly fond of to start with, soon the art became the only thing left for the masses. As Calvin would have said, "Genius is never appreciated in its own time." "Calvin & Hobbes" has undoubtedly been, however, and it's not merely genius. There's quite a bit of whim, a pinch of political commentary and a huge helping of adventure. But Watterson's sweeping Sunday strips, versatility-avant-garde "Stegosaurus in Rocket Ship" pretty much says it all-and marked disdain of the "two talking heads in a box" strip set Calvin & Hobbes apart. As though watercolor canvas had splashed its guts onto a few meager boxes every Sunday, and some weekdays otherwise, Watterson had succeeded in marrying art and literature.
There's philosophy in every strip. Whether it was the exculpatory Calvinistic predestination or a Hobbesian "dim view of human nature," the boy and the tiger made it uniquely theirs, and ours. Readers found themselves puzzling over the duality of Hobbes. A stuffed tiger and imaginary friend, or a doll magically come to life in Calvin's company? There never were any straight answers, rather like how everything is somewhat gray in actuality, neither black, nor white. Believe whatever you wish, the strips always seemed to say; sometimes it's the only way to accept the harshness everywhere and spy the beauty lost in all that clutter. At the end of a horrible day, crawling into bed with the boy who's a bit like you and the tiger who questions your conscience makes a great deal more sense than everything else around.
As publisher Andrew McMeel prepares to release "The Complete Calvin & Hobbes" on Oct. 4, and to celebrate its inevitable ascension into bestsellers' lists, the temptation is to immediately own every strip ever published. Wait a little, though, for Christmas, when men are less skeptical of the wonderful, when sledding down Suicide Hill with your stuffed tiger is a time for rediscovery rather than ridicule.
"It's a magical world, Hobbes ol' buddy!" It truly is; Calvin and Hobbes showed us it only takes a bit of imagination.