Platypus of Truth

An interesting article on "Calvin and Hobbes" and being a lonely child:  http://www.avclub.com/article/calvin-and-hobbes-embodied-voice-lonely-child-220226 .

I finished There's Treasure Everywhere last night and began It's a Magical World .  About half way through the first book I began to feel apprehensive.  As my reading progressed, it became harder and harder to turn the page.  The reason is simply that it's coming to an end.  I already know what the last comic will be and can picture it clearly in my mind.  After that, there's nothing more.  The dynamic duo sled off into the morning sunlight and are gone. The art and imagination evident in the last three Calvin and Hobbes treasuries is astounding.  Here is where Watterson finally has enough creative control to go all-out with his vision of comic book excellence.  In truth, he probably had a few years of creative productivity still to go.  His decision to end Calvin and Hobbes at its peak is bittersweet.  On the one hand, what we have is pristine -the work of art as it was meant to be.  On the other hand, there is the Iliadic sen...

Inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's Leaf by Niggle , Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes , and too many summer afternoons playing The Legend of Zelda .  Picture by the author of this post.

This is the first summer in three years where I'm not live-blogging a read through one or more of the Shannara books.  Nonetheless, I am disposed to be communicative, but without a ready-made excuse for a post what shall I say?  Let's start with where the Summer Reading has gone thus far. I've handily dispatched Paul Cartledge's two popular-level books on Sparta's role in the Persian Wars, Thermopylae and After Thermopylae .  Cartledge comes out swinging for his side here and no mistake.  When push comes to shove, he thinks that the Spartans decisively won the Persian Wars and that the Athenians stole the glory.  That's controversial, to say the least.  The Athenian victory at Salamis cut the Persians' supply lines and also kept them from using the fleet to raid the Spartan coast or lend superior maneuver to the Persian army.  I also have to wonder, given what Herodotus account, if the Spartans could have won at Plataea without the support of the ba...

My reading of Calvin and Hobbes has progressed to Attack of the Deranged, Mutant, Killer, Monster Snow Goons .  Watterson reached a new level of art and story-telling in this volume, and it's been one of my favorites since childhood.  There's a sharp and cynical Yankee wit that pervades the pages culminating in Calvin's calling upon "the mighty and awful Snow Demons" to animate a frosty homunculus.  Of course, he gets his faustian, yet comical, comeuppance for his meteorological-theological blasphemy.  This sort of warped humor makes sense to kids who spent most sixth-grade lunch periods discussing the finer points of world domination and arguing over who would rule which subject populations when we inevitably succeeded. While we're on a trip down memory lane, I'd also like to give a nod to the sledding scenes.  Watterson writes sledding in the way I experienced it as a kid (particularly the big blizzard of '96).  We had those awful little sleds tha...

Doing the math the other night, I realized that I am older than Calvin's parents as they appear in the strip.  That's odd: realizing that I have an edge on the immutable authorities of Calvin and Hobbes' world.  It's not that I haven't realized I'm aging or anything.  In grad school I noticed that I was starting to look quite a bit like Calvin's father.  Now I'm older.  I have a beard and all my hair is gone.  That's the thing about art: we age but it remains the same.  Achilles will always be young and powerful, but we won't, and therein lies an opportunity.  Art freezes time so that we who are moving in time can continue to look at the frozen moment.  The art doesn't change, but each change in us offers the opportunity to reengage with the work and draw fresh insights from it. Bill Watterson said that the world of a comic like Calvin and Hobbes is very fragile.  I think I'm beginning to see what he meant.

So it looks like my recent spate of Calvin and Hobbes nostalgia is fortuitous.  Bill Watterson is back from outer space with a series of guest strips for Pearls Before Swine .  The intervention (if you haven't seen it already) begins here .  The back story can be found here .  What we're all wondering is "does this signal Watterson's return to comics"?  It's a magical world after all.

There's something I noticed while working my way through the first two Calvin and Hobbes collections: the regular appearance of certain trees, streams, and logs in the background.  There's the big tree that Calvin and Hobbes spend time sitting under.  There's the big tree with a smaller fork that they pass on their way into the woods.  Finally, there's the stream with the log bridge that Calvin and Hobbes spend so much time crossing with their arms spread wide for balance.  The repetition of these items began to frustrate me this time through: too many repeated scenes.  At first, I began to think that they might have metaphorical meaning -and that may be true- but then a simpler answer hit me: Watterson is drawing a real place.  I knew that the comic is set in Ohio and often has Easter eggs from the town where Watterson grew up.  The connection I'd failed to make is that Watterson isn't pulling random images to create backdrops for jokes, but (I th...

I think it's been four or five years since I last read any of Bill Watterson's amazing comic, Calvin and Hobbes .  Looking for some lighter fair to wedge into small moments of open time as the semester winds up, I decided it was time to remedy that situation.  I began with the first comic a few weeks ago (the one where Calvin catches Hobbes) and have been pushing forward as time allows. The first spate of comics are more sparse and simple than their sumptuous descendants.  The world is still being sketched out.  Even in this opening phase, Calvin and Hobbes  sparkles with a light that I've never seen anywhere else.  I have pages and pages yet to read, but I know that the strip will come to an end and that peculiar light will be extinguished.  It's the way things are in the world.  ...and I think that's a clue to where the sparkle comes from.  Watterson caught something in that web of pen and watercolors.  It's a little piece of reality...

I re-read Bill Waterson's "Calvin and Hobbes 10th Anniversary Edition" a little while back. In it, Waterson lays out his comic author's manifesto. Looking at the funny papers today, it seems as if his push for greater creative freedom in that sphere has gone totally unheeded, and the doom Waterson prophesied is about to be fulfilled. Fifteen years ago, however, he was shrugged off as an idealistic crank. This sense of being treated like the "Cassandra of comics" seems to have played a part in Waterson's decision to retire early. Then it seemed as if a lone voice of dissent had been snuffed, but the world would go on. As we know today, Waterson's predictions were on target, and far from being a crank, he was prophetic and ahead of his time. Just as the rise of the internet is quickly making newspapers obsolete, the chance for artistic freedom offered by the internet is making the newsprint comic obsolete. In the rise of the web comic, we see a...

Tonight I read Calvin and Hobbes. No Gnostics, no source-criticism, no Crossan or Finkelstein or Pagels, just a funny little kid running through Autumn leaves with his tiger. And life is wonderful. Praise God. "Beyond all shadows rides the sun and stars forever dwell, I will not say 'the day is done' nor bid the stars farewell." The Platypus rests.

Calvin and Hobbes that is... I have finally completed my long and arduous quest to collect all the Calvin and Hobbes treasuries with the exception of the "Lazy Sunday Book". My last acquisition was made last night and I am now the proud owner of "Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat". But what will happen when I finish that long sought after tome? Vanity of vanities saith the teacher! Shall my long quest prove a pyrrhic victory? Well... What did you expect for six bucks and a few trips to Borders? The Platypus stopped in at Daphne's along the way. He says the detour had deep, existential meaning. Well, for his tummy at least.