The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book

Rating:
Summary: A must have for every "Calvin and Hobbes" lover
Review: This book is a must have for peole who love the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic series. At the beginning of the book, Bill Waterson talks about the comics in general, his inspirations, and a few other things. Though some of this stuff can get very boring, it is good for people who are thinking about starting their own comic series for the newspaper. At the bottom or top of each little "episodes," there is a little pannel that talks a little bit about each strip. At the beginning of the book, Bill Waterson says a little bit about most of the characters in the whole series. That part makes this book good for readers who have just started reading Calvin and Hobbes comics and are thinking of getting more into the strip. It is also a delight for people who have been reading the strip for a while and have always wanted to learn a little more about their favorite charachter in the strip.

As far as the comics in this strip go, they are pretty good. Though he didn't write new comics for this strip, he did a pretty good job selecting the little "episodes" from all his other books for this one book. I think that it is the second best treasury collection book for the "Calvin and Hobbes" series as far as the selection of comics goes, and the best of the treasury collections information wise. Personally, I think it is 4th best in the laugh factor. This book, like all the other books made from this comic strip is great for people of all ages. Buy this book right now!!!

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Summary: Insightful but excessivly cynical
Review: I have always loved Calvin and Hobbes. It's so refreshing to dive into the books at the end of a hard day and just read for hours. When I got this book I was very excited and eagerly started reading. However, I was extremely dissapounted. At first I found myself always agreeing with Watterson and enjoying his commentary but as I read on he began to get very cynical, rude, and close minded. He constantly insulted anything he disagreed with and even some things that he doesnt realy mind, like biking, he was able to find some little thing about it and insult it (like when he talked about biking magazines). Maybe he was realy stressed out and just let it all out but this book caused me to disslike Watterson a lot. Ignorance IS bliss. I suggest you stay in ignorance and NOT by this book, you will be able to still read Calvin and Hobbes and not be reminded of Watterson.

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Summary: A MUST HAVE.
Review: GREAT. (I do not need the other 991 words).

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Summary: hobbez
Review: i am a huge fan of calvin and hobbes. i have a total of 5 calvin and hobbes book and i love them all this book isn't as good as the newer ones but if your a calvin and hobbes fan you'll still love this book.

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Summary: Bill Watterson's personality shows
Review: Bill Watterson decided to do a retrospective of his comic book series Calvin and Hobbes, although ten years isn't really a long life for a comic strip. In this book he talks about the kind of things you'd probably expect to read in a book like this: where his ideas come from, how the characters came to be, what strips he himself enjoys, etc, etc.

There's something that I've noticed, though, when he talks about taking sabbaticals. He says that sabbaticals are too self-indulgent, but then he turned around and took some lengthy sabbaticals two years in a row (notice there are no Christmas strips in The Days Are Just Packed). Okay, so first he comes off too arrogant and outspoken, and then he contradicts himself. Way to go, Bill.

And the snootiness doesn't stop there, people. He starts to get annoying when he's talking about licensing. If a musician licenses his work, for example, that means advertisers can use their songs for things like commercials and TV show theme songs. In this case, if a cartoonist licenses his work, the characters can be used in commercials, clothing and, probably most popularly, greeting cards. In this section, Bill makes it clear that he will never license Calvin and Hobbes. Now, licensing is a double-edged sword because if you DO license, you're a sellout, and if you DON'T license, you're a snob. (Personally, I'd be the sellout.)

But that's not really the part that annoys me. It's when he inadvertently criticizes the media and other people who DO license their work that irritates me. Does he think he's better than everyone or something? Maybe he didn't mean to do that, but regardless, that knocked my rating down from three-and-a-half stars to three.

I still enjoy reading Calvin and Hobbes books, although every now and then I'll find a strip that'll be hard to read without a dictionary nearby. But if Bill Watterson was going to keep dishing out that attitude and those self-contradictions, then maybe his retiring was a good idea.

Rating:
Summary: Less insightful than you'd like
Review: Yeah, Calvin and Hobbes was great. But you'll come no closer to understanding Bill Watterson's thought process after reading this book than you will before. It's not a total loss: the sources of some characters are interesting, and Watterson's account of his fight against commercializing the strip shows an admirable committment to principle.

But after that, there's really nothing. We get heaping spoonfuls of how the world (read: the syndicate, newspaper editors and other comic artists) was out to get Watterson, and how hard it was for him to do the strip, and how much he liked doing the new Sunday format. There's nothing about how he came up with the two characters, only a passing mention of earlier attempts to break into daily cartooning (and nothing on his brief editorial cartoon career) and little talk of how he came up with his revolutionary Sunday strip layout. He complains about standard panel restrictions, then treats his new format as if it suddenly came down from Mt. Sinai.

Watterson himself comes across as a dedicated but stubborn man slowly losing his sense of humor -- in the early strips, Calvin and Hobbes are mischievous co-conspirators; toward the end of the book (and the strip) Calvin is something to be scolded by Watterson (through Hobbes). The strip's preachiness was tolerable as long as Calvin and Hobbes was funny, but toward the end Watterson was treating it as his Sunday pulpit.

Knowing this book came out a month before the strip ended, his final words about having the honor of speaking to millions of people on a daily basis ring somewhat hollow. Then again, I don't understand Watterson's thinking. This volume got me no closer.

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Summary: Doesn't everyone love Calvin and Hobbes?
Review: Is there anyone who doesn't love these two screwball characters? The idea behind the original strip (a little boy with a stuffed tiger that only talks to him) is original, at least as far as I know, and remarkably clever. Watterson carried it off for a good long while, until the pressures of writing made things so unfun to him he hung up his pen. I notice that he's stayed retired, so I would assume he took his loot and scooted.

This collection contains some of the most outrageous of the cartoons, but it also has a good deal of commentary by Watterson himself. He tells you what basis the characters have in reality, from Calvin's parents to Miss Wormwood and Susie Derkins. He also discusses the various trials and tribulations he went through as a cartoonist producing the strip for a syndicate, and the evils of said syndicates as far as he's concerned. There's a lot that hints at why he quit. He also includes explanations of what Calvin's talking about, or alternatively, what the strip is supposed to be saying. Lastly, he talks about characters he has removed from the strip, or things he did that he didn't think worked. I loved this book, and of course wish he would produce more stuff now that he's retired from the pressures of doing it day to day.

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Summary: The Best Ever!!!
Review: This is by far the best Calvin and Hobbes yet. The colors are great, and the expressions from all characters are greatly done in every aspect, and the strips are laugh out loud funny. If you are into comics at all, buy this book! Truly a masterpiece from Bill Watterson.

Rating:
Summary: Best retrospective collection
Review: The announcement last November that Bill Watterson would be retiring his comic strip Calvin and Hobbes at the end of the year should not have surprised anyone--at least, anyone who has read the recently released The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. Like Gary Larsen's Pre-History of The Far Side, this volume provides a retrospective collection selected by the author, with notes on the origin and evolution of his creation. Both cartoonists annotated the books themselves, explaining the writing process and the business of cartooning. Larsen, though, as happy with his medium--his retirement was a factor of creative burnout rather than frustration with the limitations of the comics page of today's newspaper. That frustration with the four panel strip was the reason for Berke Breathed's early retirement, and is quite likely the reason for Watterson's as well. Watterson believes in the comic as a real art form--and in his hands it often was--but the dynamics of the business, both the physical limitations on the drawing and the way the economics is split between artist and newspaper with a syndicate go-between, restricted the full expression of his art.

The Tenth Anniversary Book is not a depressing collection, although it is quite serious in its examination of the ten years of the strip. Watterson reveled in his creation, and the work that he produced was always of the utmost quality. This collection has some of the most joyful moments of the past--Spaceman Spiff is there, as well as Stupendous Man, the Replicator, and the dreaded Babysitter. The amazing thing isn't that Watterson is retiring, but that he could spend ten years producing such work as fresh and imaginative as his debut.

While I am sad to see Waterson and Calvin and Hobbes retire, I have hope that we have not seen the last of either. The rise of the "graphic novel" and its acceptance in the United States (the form has always been popular in Europe [Tintin, Asterix] and Japan [magna too numerous to list]) offers Watterson the format that he deserves, where he can be enjoyed and appreciated as one of the most innovative sequential artists of the later 20th century.

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Summary: Tiger, tiger - forever burning bright
Review: No doubt it would be redundant to repeat that "Calvin & Hobbes" was the greatest comic strip ever written. Even though it was.

I miss the strip terribly and wish as much as anyone that Bill Watterson would come out of hibernation after almost seven years to crank up new adventures for his philosopher toonheads. I even partly believe that Watterson let down his readers by "quitting" on us.

At the same time, one of the reasons that we miss the strip so much is that it didn't lose its freshness after ten years. Compare that to other well-known strips which lasted FOREVER, i.e. "Peanuts" and "Dennis the Menace", and which we ultimately turned to out of habit, rather than anticipation. And how much longer can Jim Davis continue to run with that gluttonous, self-centered cat?

Watterson left us wanting more and perhaps it was better thus. Moreover, his artistic integrity was such that he resisted what must have been a HUGE financial temptation to allow his characters to be licensed for merchandising (those auto decals that show Calvin watering the lawn from beneath his waist are "bootlegs"). This also prevented over-exposure.

This book is easily the best of all "collections" because it's a cumulation of highlights from the strip from beginning to end, interspersed with Watterson's commentary about the art of cartooning, the practical issues that arise when artistic license clashes with syndicate control, his own life experi-ences, and how they affect his work.

Watterson was not afraid to take on issues, and his favorite one appears to have been "television". Biting attacks on the medium were as much a staple of "Calvin & Hobbes" as attacks on "the Church" were of the Monty Python troupe.

And why not? The more bloated, the more all-powerful, the more arrogant, lethargic and unchanging an institution appears, the more inviting a target it is for comedy. It still takes wit, timing, and incisiveness to do the job right, and Watterson was never found lacking. I still scream over the strip where Calvin, in humble supplication, presents as an "offering" to his TV set a bowl of lukewarm tapioca pudding representing his brain.

For all his audacity and integrity, however, Watterson still occasionally runs afoul of that old devil, political correctness. As he runs through his list of characters, he is COMPLETELY UNCRITI-CAL when, chirping brightly, he describes Susie Derkins as earnest, serious, and smart - the kind of girl that he eventually married.

Susie is indeed everything that Watterson says and more so. If the destructive Calvin is "Everyboy", Susie is "Everygirl" - OVERLY earnest, serious, and smart - a conformist to an educational system that we hated as kids. In "1984", Orwell postulates that women are the keepers of all of the State's smelly little orthodoxies, and Susie's repeated whining invocations to the school authorities suggest that she's starting early.

It's why we don't really mind Calvin's seemingly unprovoked snowball and water balloon attacks on her, even though as the skulking aggressor, he is unquestionably being cast as the "bad guy".

We can be certain that, on an artistic level, Watterson is well aware of ALL of these things. But in this book, he goes out of his way to avoid saying them. It's a testament to the power of political correctness and also to the truth of the bromide that the tale often speaks more loudly than the author.

But sometimes the author speaks louder. The Sunday supplement in which Calvin envisions himself as a vengeful god, creating worlds so as to have the savage pleasure of destroying them, seems to "work" very well from the reader's standpoint, but Watterson's complaint that what he had intended was completely ruined by the format restrictions provides a good snapshot of the artist's mind at work.

Elsewhere, Watterson's careful selection of features and his commentary show us how the strip "grew" over the years as the characters became more familiar to him.

The artistry unquestionably became better, and the early strips show Calvin behaving in ways that are now inconceivably "wrong" - perhaps again, even more so that Watterson realizes. The 1980's Calvin agonizes over the untimely death of a little raccoon. He could not possibly be the same individual as the 1990's Calvin who tries to win a contest to promote highway safety by creating the slogan "Be careful or be road kill" and drawing a corresponding poster in cadmium red crayon and chunky spaghetti sauce.

He's also not nearly as funny. Sometimes, those moral tutorials just got in the way of the humor, Bill.

Watterson also scores when he remarks that the issue of whether the tiger, Hobbes, was "real" or not didn't matter to him and that he went out of his way to avoid resolving the issue. Too many readers are fooled by the stuffed animal that everyone else in Calvin's world saw, and they assume that the animated Hobbes was "obviously" a product of Calvin's imagination.

But Hobbes seemed to have a moral compass utterly lacking in Calvin, and think of the numerous times in which Hobbes surprised and disappointed Calvin. If Hobbes was truly nothing more than Calvin's alter-ego, Calvin must have been utterly schizophrenic. Was it really a "toy" tiger who was able to bind and gag Calvin? And to enable Calvin to climb on his back to open a mailbox?

The mad confusion between "real" and "imaginary" matched perfectly with the mayhem engendered by the first-named title character (who did a little better job of standing up to the powers-that-be than does his creator) and with every bumpy wagon ride through the ravine and down the cliff that he and the tiger ever took.

As long as people remember this strip, there will always be hope that the rebellious "little boy" in us will ultimately prevail over the Ritalin-like conformity that others would impose.

Get out the time-fracture wickets, Hobbes! It's Calvinball forever!