Bill Watterson
I remember saving up credit card reward points for a long time and finally being able to afford this – more than a decade ago. It had a pride of place in my bookshelf, but I never really read it, mostly because I used to read the strips online and in newspapers. During the Covid lockdown, books weren’t getting delivered. It was the perfect time to pick up an all-time favourite.
The set consists of four books, each around 370 pages. I didn’t read them in one shot, and took a break after each book. The first book begins with an introduction to the life, thoughts, and philosophy of Bill Watterson. It’s an amazing story of belief, values, and perseverance. Some of it did remind me of Calvin’s Dad. 🙂
Reading the strips consecutively is definitely a different experience from the standard, one-at-a-time way that I have consumed it thus far. The contexts are clearer, some narrative arcs are better established, and obviously, there’s the continuity. Turned out that I haven’t read a bunch of the strips! For instance, I had never encountered ‘Safari Al’, a reasonably rare alter-ego of Calvin. I had also never seen the rather different art-style that Watterson employs when Susie and Calvin are playing Doctor.
Since I was reading this leisurely, I also got to see the character nuances of Dad, Mom and Calvin himself. Dad’s implied party animal youth, resistance to technology, love for the outdoor life, and his reasonably complex relationship with Calvin – he tries to get Calvin to do things that “build character”, gives bizarre answers to Calvin’s questions, and loses his cool faster than ‘Mom’. But it is definitely from him that Calvin gets his sense of humour, and sometimes Calvin does succeed in bringing out his playfulness.
Dad once states that before Calvin was born, Mom had a stressful job, so they felt she was best-suited to deal with Calvin! Judging by her reactions to Calvin’s antics, this was definitely the right decision. Her “dear” shouts when Dad gives his bizarre answers shows she is the only real adult in the house. She is also Calvin’s nemesis for his alter-ego Spaceman Spiff, usually involving things he doesn’t like to do – eating anything other than Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and taking a bath being the most frequent ones.
All of Calvin’s antics make us forget that he is really a child, and I felt, perhaps a lonely one. His friendship with Hobbes who is not just a stuffed tiger to him but an active and alive partner in crime, all the alter-egos (Spaceman Spiff, Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man), his fights with Susie, his pranks on Rosalyn, and his incredibly wild imagination that results in multiple “inventions”, are all probably an escape from not just his bêtes noires – Miss Wormwood, Mom, Principal etc, but from his own boredom too. But from interviews, I don’t think Watterson really had this perspective.
I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it, as expected, and the better half said it was fun to see me chuckling aloud while reading a book. Never happened before, might never happen again. Makes sense, because C&H is really one of a kind.
P.S. I did hope that somewhere in the 1400+ pages, I would get to know what the ‘Noodle Incident” was, but nope.
