Book Review: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Stars: 5 out of 5
Pros: More fun than exploding a potato in the microwave!

Cons: "There is no problem so bad it can't be made worse by guilt."

The Bottom Line:

Comes recommended

By household six-year-olds and

Tigers.  You will laugh

"I Try to Make Everyone's Day a Little More Surreal."

Ask any member of my family what the best comic strip of all time is, and without question you will get the answer Calvin and Hobbes. We can sit around cracking each other up quoting favorite strips we've read countless times before. The Essential Calvin and Hobbes collects the first year and a half or so of strips. While they are laying the foundations of the strip, they are still hilarious.

For those who have missed this gem (and cultural phenomenon), the strip follows the adventures of a six-year-old boy. Although Calvin isn't quite your typical six-year-old. For starters, he does poorly in school while showing incredible intelligence. I'm talking about analyzing the behavior of others in an adult way type of intelligence. Plus he has a very over active imagination. Which brings us to the other title character. Hobbes is Calvin's stuff tiger. To the rest of the world, he is a stuff tiger. But to Calvin he is alive, a real tiger, smart, and Calvin's best friend. Together, they have all kinds of adventures, from getting lost while hiking with the boy scouts, creating crawl spaces between floors of their house, to having serious life discussions while careening down a hill out of control in a wagon. And when it comes to brawls or sports, Hobbes always bests Calvin.

Of course, all this makes things hard on Calvin's longsuffering parents. Calvin's dad is an attorney who loves the outdoors. He's also got a bit of a mean streak and is rather sarcastic. (Actually, all the characters can be sarcastic.) Calvin's long suffering mom stays at home. Frankly, how she keeps Calvin alive is a wonder to me due to everything Calvin tries to do without her knowing.

The other regular characters are all introduced here as well. There's Miss Wormwood, his first grade teacher who has to deal with his antics which disrupt the class. Moe, the class bully, is street smart (which means he knows what street he lives on) but very slow witted. Susie Derkins, the only character to get a full name, is the class genius who lives just down the street from Calvin. The two are fascinated with each other yet Calvin does everything possible to drive Susie away. Finally, there is Rosalyn, Calvin's babysitter and the only character Calvin truly fears.

I always think of the later strips as the best because they offer some biting social satire. But before I picked this book up, I had forgotten just how funny these early strips are. These strips are more down to earth. Well, as down to earth as you can get with Calvin's imagination. He regularly turns life into a space adventure with him as the hero, Spaceman Spiff. The strip always ends with us discovering that the alien giving him a hard time is either his teacher or a parent, usually his mom.

One of my favorites from the book involves Calvin hammering nails into the coffee table. When his mom comes in, she demands, "What are you doing?" Confused, Calvin looks up to ask "Is that a trick question?"

And, of course, there is the classic where Calvin determines that popping popcorn on the stove without a lid is more fun that blowing up a potato in the microwave.

The strip is a mix of individual jokes and longer stories. Some of the stories include a family vacation (but not quite at the remote campground they'd visit later), Calvin taking swimming lessons from Rosalyn, Calvin loosing Hobbes, Susie inviting Hobbes (and Calvin) to her birthday party, and Hobbes giving Calvin a very bad haircut. We even get the first appearance of the Transmogrifier as Calvin "transforms" himself into a tiger (again, that imagination at work).

The strip does occasionally give way to a more serious subject. There are so rather pointed environmental strips, especially one Sunday strip where Calvin and Hobbes find a section of woods they play in cut down to make way for condos. And in one sad storyline, Calvin finds an injured raccoon only to have it die that night. But even when it turns pointed, it never stays that way long.

Another recurring feature that is introduced here is the political polls Calvin does. He never truly gets how his dad got his position and is always trying to influence him by sharing the results of polls with household six-year-olds and tigers. Of course, Dad never bows to pressure since he isn't up for reelection.

The only downside to the book is the age. While the humor is completely timeless, some of the references are dated. For example, Calvin repeatedly wants to rent a VCR and get all the cable channels. Since these strips originally appeared from 1985 to early 1987, that makes sense. Additionally, the drawings are a little cruder then they would become later in the strip's ten year run. Honestly, these are minor issues since I laughed the entire way through my recent reread of this book.

This is the first "treasury." As such, it contains all the strips from the first two, small books, Calvin and Hobbes and Something Under the Bed is Drooling. As a bonus, the Sunday strips are shown in color (they are in black and white in those early books.) Additionally, there's an illustrated poem detailing the monsters that almost get Calvin one night as he waits to go to sleep. If you don't have either of those smaller books, this is the way to go. If you've got the earlier books, you'll have to decide if that is enough enticement to buy this book.

Calvin and Hobbes was a treasure. It combined wildly imaginative strips with laugh out loud humor that can be enjoyed by everyone. And if you want to catch the fun from the beginning, you have to get The Essential Calvin and Hobbes.