Day Eighty: Love Is
You may have noticed that there was no post up yesterday - this was due to the fact that Vox was playing up all evening and I couldn't sign in to post. However, the post was written even if it wasn't put online, and here it is now, so I'm claiming the moral victory and as far as I'm concerned reasons of force majeure mean that I, who am of course final arbiter of these things, haven't actually missed a day. Not my fault, guv.
Anyway. This is a special Valentine's day post, dealing with one of the most tender love stories in comics - Calvin & Hobbes. It's not a romantic love, sure, but there's no doubting that these guys care for each other. Cheekily, this is taken from something I wrote last year for Ninth Art, but there's been no change in sentiment from me in the intervening time, I'll tell you that much.
There aren't many newspaper strips or panel cartoons that will go down in comics history as truly well-respected and important works. Peanuts is one, The Far Side is another. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson's series of insights into the lives of a boy and a big cat, is undoubtedly another, and last year Andrews McMeel gave fans of the strip - and fans of comics in general - a wonderful gift in the form of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a hefty slab of hardback boxed goodness collecting the strip in its entirety.
The reasons Calvin and Hobbes is so well-loved are many, but most boil down to the central relationship in the book; that between a boy and his stuffed tiger. At its core, the strip is about friendship, that much is clear. But it's also about acceptance. Calvin is not what you would call an easy kid to live with. Everyone else in the strip thinks he's a distinctly odd little fella, and with his wildly out of control imagination, it's not hard to see why.
Hobbes, though, simply regards Calvin's flights of fancy as the norm. He's willing to take Calvin, mad peccadilloes and all, as his best friend, and Calvin is willing to do the same for the tuna-obsessed big cat. Calvin's parents and teachers, they only get to see one aspect of his multifaceted personality. Even Susie, who, by dint of being the only kid who will talk to Calvin, is his de facto best 'real' friend, really only interacts with him as the straight man to his bizarre flights of fancy, or as the target of one of his many water balloon/snowball attacks.
Hobbes is the only person who gets to see the whole Calvin. The only one who gets the benefit of his unbridled imagination, his restless sense of fun, his inventiveness, his truculence, his mean streak. Likewise, Calvin gets a friend in Hobbes who is vain, sweet, annoying, protective, lazy, and a willing partner in crime. Calvin and Hobbes are a single unit; Calvin divides the world up into 'us' and 'them'. Hobbes is the only one who gets to join Calvin as one of 'us'.
I'm making it sound a little sappy here, but at its heart Calvin and Hobbes is a comedy. It's equal parts stupid pratfalls, ridiculous alter-egos juxtaposed with prosaic reality, and smarter situational and language-based gags. It's one of the few comic strips that manages to be laugh-out-loud funny - when was the last time Garfield could claim that?
The box set isn't cheap. But it's an investment that will pay you back tenfold with every page you read. There's treasure everywhere, as Calvin so joyfully said. There's certainly treasure here.
