Rating: 
Summary: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury
Review: Bill Watterson's first Calvin and Hobbes treasury "the Essential calvin and hobbes" includes cartoons from Calvin and Hobbes and Something Under the Bed is drooling. This treasury includes great poems written by Watterson at the beginning of the book. In this treasury you'll know how Calvin found Hobbes, when he first met Susie, etc. This is one of Watterson's best books! After "Homicidal psycho jungle cat" and "it's a magical World" I like this the most. If you love sarcasm, humour, and great colourful drawings you'll love to have this treasury. Some of the reasons why I love this book are the sarcastic jokes, normal jokes, the characters' expressions, and fiction stories and poems like Spaceman Spiff stories. Nightmares like monsters under the bed at night also lead to excellent jokes. You'll love Hobbes, Calvin, Calvin's parents, Rosalyn, Miss Wormwood, and Susie. I don't really like "Moe" but I like the thiongs Calvin does to avoid Moe. Bill's works on Calvin and Hobbes is fun to look at and read. The hilarious pictures help add more humour to the stories. This great treasury would be suitable for people of all ages. It might not be suitable for children under the age of "eight" cause they might not understand the humour!
Rating:
Summary: It's a good book
Review: Calvin and Hobbes is definitely the funniest comic I have ever read in my life. It is way funnier than Garfield and Peanuts. Anyways, about this book, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, it has to be one of the funniest books I ever read. This book features some of their funniest adventures including the one where Calvin uses the payphone to call his dad @ 3 A.M.(pg. 29) or the one where Hobbes dresses up like Calvin (pg. 47) or one of my favorites the one where Calvin and Hobbes go to Susie's birthday party(pg. 202). Calvin and Hobbes is a must read on a rainy day or in the car or anytime at all.
Rating:
Summary: Essential! What else can I say?
Review: Fans of Calvin & Hobbes who used to read the newspaper strip in the 80s and 90s will find great pleasure in reading this treasury of C&H comics. These witty comics about the 6-year old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes, named after the famous philosophers, will amuse people of all ages. The perceptiveness and humor of Watterson deserve the highest of cartoon awards, while his artistic creations exude hilarity. This cartoon is perhaps one of the most piercing yet funny critiques of modern society. This book covers the first two years of the Calvin & Hobbes strip. One can notice how Calvin used to look different in the beginning. His character though quickly adopted his unmistakable attitude. Here we see his first daydreams about Spaceman Spiff, his relationship with his parents and with Susie, his (mis-?) performance at school, and his first invention: the Transmogrifier. His attitude to life and his quick temper never ceases to entertain. This is the book you can read over and over and never stop from laughing. Note that there are two series of C&H collections: individual wide-format albums, each covering an entire year of strips (will call it "regular"), and the vertical aspect ratio "treasury series" which covers selected comics from two regular C&H books. Note that C&H ran for a year in newspapers, so there's 10 regular books and 5 treasury books. Though the cartoons are slightly smaller in the treasury collection, each treasury book is far thicker and contains more strips than a regular book, and is furthermore less expensive, so treasury books are a real bargain. "The Essential Calvin & Hobbes" is the FIRST book from the Treasury collection, first released in 1988.
Rating: 
Summary: Laugh-Out-Loud
Review: I have owned this treasury of Calvin & Hobbes ever since its first printing in 1988; that makes it the book I've owned for the longest time. And even after 15 years, I still look in here and laugh my head off at crazy Calvin's antics. He brings a microwave on a Cub Scout expedition (this is the only book where we see him in the scouts). He smokes his first (and last) cigarette. He turns into a 300 foot giant and terrorizes the neighborhood. He takes part in an educational school play and can't remember his line. Best of all, we see the first few "Rosalyn" episodes. Nothing like seeing Calvin drive his babysitter up the wall. And of course, where would Calvin be without Hobbes, his one and only friend? Hobbes makes the strip twice as good as it is already. In short, Calvin & Hobbes may have passed on into cartoon Heaven (where they play saxophone in an all-girl jazz band, or something like that), but their spirit lives on in this and other books. Also, check out the awesome pictorial poem, "A Nauseous Nocturne". It is cartoon gold! Get this and all the other C&H books, NOW!
Rating:
Summary: Comics make readers
Review: Newspapers these days seem largely devoid of comic strips. Thick-bound comic books like this one have replaced them. And fortunately, comics make kids into readers. I was delighted the other day when a neighbor gave me five Calvin and Hobbes volumes, including this one. The books have already encouraged hours of reading for each child. This collection opens with a 10-page poem narrated by a child--Calvin, it turns out--afraid to sleep at night lest monsters snatch him in his sleep. Only in the morning, he feared, would his parents "surmise/ The gruesomeness of my demise/ And see that my remains are in a heap!" (One parent, in this musing, appears with a bone in one hand, and a shrug of the shoulders, though the kid wakes up fine the next day.) Another 79 comic strips follow, ranging in length from one or two pages to five, and filling a total of 255 pages. Rare is the 250 page-book that a young boy or girl will gladly consume in one sitting. Trust me, this is one of them. In two recent evenings, our two kids have sat on our sofa, devouring this book one after the other, hooting and guffawing their way through. Ready, set, read. Alyssa A. Lappen
Rating:
Summary: Calvin And Hobbes Rule.
Review: Some of the early works of Bill Watterson. This is a great book tracing the irrepressible Calvin and his "pet" tiger, Hobbes. As he has explained, Bill Watterson will slowly develop this character in accuracy and style over the next seven years. Great repartie and pranks are pulled by this duo on the always weary Mom and Dad and a battle of wills with his steel hard babysitter, Rosalyn, makes a great couple of interludes.
Still, a great book and for Calvin and Hobbes fans, a must in your collection.
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic collection of early Calvin and Hobbes comics
Review: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, first published in 1988, is chock full of early Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. No cartoonist, not even Charles Schultz, has captured the magical essence of childhood the way Bill Watterson did in this strip, and it should come as no surprise (although it did to Watterson) that Calvin and Hobbes quickly developed an incredibly loyal following. This strip went way beyond mere popularity. While I was in college, the campus newspaper decided to stop running Calvin and Hobbes (I think this was during one of Watterson's sabbaticals) - this resulted in nothing less than a furor on campus, as countless students immediately demanded the return of C&H. In a matter of days, Calvin and Hobbes were right back where they belonged. How does a comic strip featuring a mischievous six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger attract a fiercely loyal following of adults? Most adults would love to be children again, to know the freedom and sense of wonder that somehow withers inside the human soul after the onset of puberty. Calvin and Hobbes vividly recreates the feelings and emotions of the very essence of childhood. It brings back memories of things we forgot far too long ago, and it thus reawakens the deepest parts of our ever-hardening souls. Reading this comic strip is the next best thing to being a child yourself. Calvin does everything you used to do: he takes time to stomp in mud puddles, he lets his imagination run wild to make thrilling adventures out of even the most mundane tasks, he ponders the same deep questions you are now, as an adult, afraid to ask, he goes for the gusto no matter what sort of risk is involved, he is in every way a perfect specimen of childhood. Who, as a child, didn't pretend to be a dinosaur, walk around with a hideous expression in hopes of your facing freezing that way, tease the girls (or boys) you claimed to hate, journey to distant worlds unseen by human eyes, etc.? Of course, Hobbes is just as important to the comic strip as Calvin. Hobbes is a tiger, Calvin's best and constant friend, a fellow partaker in the joys of childish innocence. To Calvin, Hobbes really is all that, and that is how we see him as well - until, that is, someone else comes into the frame, when he suddenly becomes nothing more than a stuffed animal. Watterson is a fantastic comic artist, and there is just something captivating about the way he draws Hobbes in his stuffed animal form. Everything about Watterson's art is fantastic, though, particularly the way it captures the emotions of its two principal characters. Sadly, we have only ten years of comic memories in the form of Calvin and Hobbes, as the inscrutable Bill Watterson retired (around the age of 37) in 1995 and quite obviously has no plans of returning to the public arena. Watterson is actually frighteningly private and seems to be living a life of unmatched solitude. I find this extraordinarily sad: here is a man who captured the essence of childhood so vividly in the form of Calvin and Hobbes, a world bursting with life and possibilities, yet now he seems to have withdrawn from life itself. We must be thankful we do have as much Calvin and Hobbes material as we do, and The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, with 255 pages of black and white daily strips and color Sunday strips, features much more than just a chunk of it in and of itself.
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic collection of early Calvin and Hobbes comics
Review: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, first published in 1988, is chock full of early Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. No cartoonist, not even Charles Schultz, has captured the magical essence of childhood the way Bill Watterson did in this strip, and it should come as no surprise (although it did to Watterson) that Calvin and Hobbes quickly developed an incredibly loyal following. This strip went way beyond mere popularity. While I was in college, the campus newspaper decided to stop running Calvin and Hobbes (I think this was during one of Watterson's sabbaticals) - this resulted in nothing less than a furor on campus, as countless students immediately demanded the return of C&H. In a matter of days, Calvin and Hobbes were right back where they belonged. How does a comic strip featuring a mischievous six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger attract a fiercely loyal following of adults? Most adults would love to be children again, to know the freedom and sense of wonder that somehow withers inside the human soul after the onset of puberty. Calvin and Hobbes vividly recreates the feelings and emotions of the very essence of childhood. It brings back memories of things we forgot far too long ago, and it thus reawakens the deepest parts of our ever-hardening souls. Reading this comic strip is the next best thing to being a child yourself. Calvin does everything you used to do: he takes time to stomp in mud puddles, he lets his imagination run wild to make thrilling adventures out of even the most mundane tasks, he ponders the same deep questions you are now, as an adult, afraid to ask, he goes for the gusto no matter what sort of risk is involved, he is in every way a perfect specimen of childhood. Who, as a child, didn't pretend to be a dinosaur, walk around with a hideous expression in hopes of your facing freezing that way, tease the girls (or boys) you claimed to hate, journey to distant worlds unseen by human eyes, etc.? Of course, Hobbes is just as important to the comic strip as Calvin. Hobbes is a tiger, Calvin's best and constant friend, a fellow partaker in the joys of childish innocence. To Calvin, Hobbes really is all that, and that is how we see him as well - until, that is, someone else comes into the frame, when he suddenly becomes nothing more than a stuffed animal. Watterson is a fantastic comic artist, and there is just something captivating about the way he draws Hobbes in his stuffed animal form. Everything about Watterson's art is fantastic, though, particularly the way it captures the emotions of its two principal characters. Sadly, we have only ten years of comic memories in the form of Calvin and Hobbes, as the inscrutable Bill Watterson retired (around the age of 37) in 1995 and quite obviously has no plans of returning to the public arena. Watterson is actually frighteningly private and seems to be living a life of unmatched solitude. I find this extraordinarily sad: here is a man who captured the essence of childhood so vividly in the form of Calvin and Hobbes, a world bursting with life and possibilities, yet now he seems to have withdrawn from life itself. We must be thankful we do have as much Calvin and Hobbes material as we do, and The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, with 255 pages of black and white daily strips and color Sunday strips, features much more than just a chunk of it in and of itself.
Rating:
Summary: The book that introduced me to a legend
Review: Watterson's talent is pretty hard to get over. What's the big idea, making a cartoon so consisently funny, explosively creative and accessibly brilliant that no other cartoonist could ever hope to match wits? When I saw the first Calvin strips in my paper several years ago, I knew it was something special. Here's a little kid more clever than most adults, whose stuffed friend comes to life and has philosophical debates with him while they careen down a gully in a wagon. Calvin and Hobbes is more than a comic strip, and that's what makes it so special. Far Side and Dilbert are clever and hilarious as well, but Calvin's creator has an artistic talent that will not be confined. The everyday life of his six-year-old protagonist is frequently spliced with daydreams--Spaceman Spiff, Dinosaurs, etc.--which are consistently staggering in their rendering. It's art good enough for Marvel but stylistically superior. In the later years he was arguing with newspapers for half- or full-page spaces that would do his work justice. What impresses me perhaps the most about Watterson, though, is his integrity. From the great beginning that is this book, up through the end, he refused to have his art form violated by commercialism. Calvin will be found ONLY on the printed page, not on TV, not on a baseball cap (save the amateur ones), not in a breakfast cereal, nor action figures, nor a fanclub, nor a box of fruit snacks. Watterson was true to the integrity of his character. What's more, he quit while he was ahead--before his strip could become repetitive, but after its potential had been fully explored. So buy this book, if you haven't already. In fact, do yourself a favor and buy every Calvin collection, because each is completely flawless. Calvin and Hobbes is the best cartoon that ever was, and it's the best cartoon that will ever be. I'd bet my sense of humor on it.
Rating:
Summary: Another anthology of laughter
Review: Whether the collection is the "Indispensible" or "Essential" or "Authoritative" Calvin and Hobbes, it doesn't really matter. Watching this hyperactive, hyperimaginative child and his willing though wise accomplice, Hobbes, take on evil babysitters, Susie Derkins, the class bully and all creatures (real or imaginary), is a pleasure and laughter without stop. "The Essential Calvin and Hobbes" is another in a long list of the great comic work of Bill Watterson. This is an indispensible/essential/authoritative collection for all Calvin and Hobbes and humor fans!
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