After a several-year hiatus, Calvin And Hobbes is back in the comics pages. Maybe Bill Watterson ran out of money, or maybe the current crop of comics just passed the pointless threshold – whatever, I don’t care. It appears they’re re-running the whole series.
Calvin is sharply written, beautifully drawn, often deeply insightful, and utterly apolitical. It involves the fantasy life of a little boy – in this case, working a math “word problem” and trying to get the answer off of Susie’s paper. He often fantasizes that he is a detective, a spaceman, or a tyrannosaur.
In yesterday’s strip, his recurring detective character walks down a dark, rainy street, lights a cigarette, and muses:
“I stepped out into the rainy streets, and reviewed the facts. There weren’t many.
Two saps, Jack and Joe, drive toward each other at 60 and 30 mph. After 10 minutes, they pass. I’m supposed to find out how far apart they started.
Questions pour down like the rain. Who are these mugs? What were they trying to accomplish? Why was jack in such a hurry? And what difference does it make where they started from?
I had a hunch that, before this was over, I’d be sorry I asked.”
Yes, I said he lit a cigarette. In his fantasies Calvin performs dangerous stunts, uses firearms, and walks alone down the dark and lonely city street with cigarette smoke trailing his Fedora. Take that, whiny politically-correct turkeys!
In other words, his childhood fantasies are not shaped by the concerns of adults. Just like those of real children.
Welcome back, Calvin. I’ve missed you.
LOL yep, Calvin is back and about time. Now if Doonesberry would just quit again the Sunday Comic page would be a lot cleaner.
Calvin is to me now what peanuts was thirty years ago-semi political sometimes but always funny. Now if we just had POGO
Having Calvin back is like seeing a buddy who has been traveling, but now has returned home.
Our local paper moved DOONESBURY to the bottom of the Classified Ads, across the page from HEATHCLIFF (the cat). I like both of those, so I do go searching, but I wonder how many readers make the effort.
Actually, as far as I’m aware, he’s never gone away. Here in Detroit his strip has been in one of the two major newspapers all along. It’s been nothing but re-runs since Watterson put down his pen (and which he seems to have no inclination to pick up again), but it’s been there and on Ucomics.com since he quit.
I doubt Watterson is hurting for money. They just released The Complete Calvin and Hobbes not too long ago which has every single strip ever drawn in it.
Incidentally, you may find this Podcast by Jawbone interesting as it’s an interview with Bill Watterson’s mother.
Apolitical? Calvin and Hobbes is one of the best political strips I have read. Not political in the sense of Republican vs. Democrat but in a deeper sense of the word.