Since it’s about the work of one of my favorite authors, I thought I’d put this column up for discussion. There are a couple of surprises herein, and much with which I identified.
Here’s one of my favorite parts:
The title of the column isn’t earth-shattering to me, since, again, Bill Watterson is one of my favorite writers. I say that without regard to genre. As with the work of any great writer, as the author of this column intimates, as you change the work changes (in that it means different things to you). I recall a professor telling us the same thing upon assigning Oedipus Rex in one of my earlier lit classes.
Lucky for me, my kid is into the Calvin and Hobbes books. We have read them many times, and as he circles back to them again and again I can see him getting a little something different from the books every time we read them. Yes, he isn’t even a teenager yet, but he gets something new each time. And it is a joy explaining some of the concepts Watterson is trying to convey as he gets older.
I’m in total agreement. It’s great literature and great philosophy. As a teen, it had me looking up the origin of the names of the lead characters, and exploring my world view for th first time. Later, it had me wondering about the very nature of reality.
I’m in a similar situation with my own 10 year old son. We spent so many nights reading the collected strips together when he was 6 or 7. The time spent with my son, and Calvin, and Hobbes has truly been one of my greatest joys as a parent. He also returns to the strips now and again, and it’s just as great a thrill to see his new appreciation for more and more of the work as he grows. It’s a happiness that should never end.
It doesn’t take any persuasive argument for me to consider Calvin & Hobbes literature. I’ll leave semantics to others, but Watterson’s work is as profound and moving as it is whimsical and silly. The linked essay was thoughtfully written. As Borges is also counted amongst my favorite writers, I don’t begrudge anyone bringing up his amazing work. The Borges parallel to Calvin was only a little bit forced, as the author is clearly also a fan, but hey, it’s fine. :). It’s great to see how universal Watterson’s concepts of love, life, friendship & annoyance remain.
Calvin & Hobbes is likewise one of my all-time favorite works of anything. I never knew how close I lived to Watterson when I first encountered this strip (it was a matter of a few blocks). I just knew instantly that he got the teenage me, with all the baggage of childhood and pretensions of adulthood, better than anything else. As I grew I started to appreciate even more how complex each strip could be, at times both poignant and cathartic within the same space.
I started reading these books to my son before he could read, because, if you’ll excuse the imagery, his grandparents had them along with their Dilbert books (etc) in those little magazine racks in their bathrooms. So in the early days of toilet training, my son would ask us to read those books to him.
I would edit as I read, because as he was still developing language and what not, we’d be squeamish about reading certain things to him, like “that sucks” or certain other things Calvin might say to his parents or friends that our son should not be repeating in his infant/toddler class. So I’d just edit on the fly.
One of my favorite moments was when my son, at a ridiculously young age said to me, “That’s not what it says.”
That’s one of the first times I realized he was actually learning to read.
Now he often reads it to me when we are driving in the car.
Our four-year-old started doing this - she’s completely memorized some of the books we read at night so she’ll call me out if I skip a page of The Little Mermaid. I love reading to them but if reading #278 turns out to be a page or two short, no harm done!
I’ll probably break out the C&H this week and see how it goes. Hopefully her little sister will be into the drawings enough that she’ll allow it to happen.
No argument here. Calvin and Hobbes is up there with Looney Tunes as one of the great cultural artifacts of the 20th Century that won’t get enough credit because the medium is young.
Whenever my kids get finished devouring a new book I bought them, they always return to Calvin and Hobbes. I don’t know how many times they’ve read through them.
Man, I get that feeling. My wife has an old collection of Disney stories, the book itself older than her. There are a few stories in there I wasn’t comfortable reading to my son as they were written. Particularly Songs of the South, Peter Pan, and Dumbo (I can’t recall off hand exactly all stories, it was only a handful). Some of the classic Disney stuff had some nasty racial undertones.
Learning to edit on the fly is a useful skill for a parent, I think. And I love how your son picked up on it too, very cute story :)
This topic inspires me to introduce C&H to my 7 year old and 5 year old. I’ll do it for bed tonight. My worries have always been on whether C&H is suitable materials for one so young especially Calvin can be pretty sarcastic and cynical.
I’ve been a huge fan of Calvin and Hobbes since I was just a little kid ordering the collections from the school book club, and then buying the ones I missed in college. As soon as they came out, I got the complete collection in three volumes - which I still have and still love owning. When my son was old enough I started reading them to him before bed time, and we went through the entire run twice and started a third time before it sort of just fell off. He keeps them in his room though, and still reads them from time to time.
my gosh! Horrible day indeed. I wanted to order one but the shipping cost was just too horrendous! I can imagine the anguish of losing it in mail. It sucks!
I though I had read (a long time ago) that the quality of the binding was actually not very good. I think the spine was glued rather than sewn? Perhaps later editions have improved in quality, I don’t know.
Here’s the thing: you have to be willing to be aware of how anything is adversely affecting their behavior patterns, and you have to be willing to take that thing away when you need to course correct.
This happened to me with Calvin and Hobbes. There was a time I had to take it away, especially when my son was younger and his behavior at the table became too sarcastic and defiant. This was tough. He saw his dad crack up at the panel, “This smells like bat barf!” This is one of Calvin’s many contentions over his mother’s cooking. My son saw me crack up about that particular panel over and over again (and I’m the cook!). I just love the way that scans. “This smells like bat barf!”
In developing a nascent sense of humor, he responded to that and that started to affect his behavior. I did not want to discourage his developing vocabulary or sense of humor, but I couldn’t have him disrespecting me, or his mother, or his grandparents at the table. So Calvin and Hobbes had to go away for a time.
This is all good, however, because one of the things we have to do as parents is teach our kids discretion. And believe you me, Calvin and Hobbes helps with this.
man! and his loud BURPING at the table!!! It’s these type of stuff which put me off from introducing C&H to the girls. On the other hand, I also remember the stories about the bully at school and I think it creates opportunity for me to talk to the girls about bullies and how to recognize one and reacting to them, before they actually faced one.
Holy crap never put that together. Both names fit for their characters too. Calvin is always talking about predestination and the futility of his decisions: school, homework, etc. Hobbes is always challenging Calvin and deconstructing their relationship and his views of the world, pointing in many cases to the social constructs between him and his parents, teachers, Suzie, etc. That’s really deep.
I’m also pretty interested in how you deal with the relationship between Susie and Calvin in particular as you read this to young girls. Not just the obvious G.R.O.S.S. (Get Rid Of Slimy girl-S) stuff, but also their general weird tension in the classroom. To say nothing of the mom/dad stuff. I wonder how all of that plays with younger girls and how a parent talks about that. Or even if you bother to point it out at all.
…
Since reading this essay I’ve started reading back through my books. I own The Complete Collection, although it doesn’t live with me. My sister gave it to me for my birthday a few years ago, but I let it stay at my son’s mom’s house. I like the collection because of the way it feels like an encyclopedia. I mean the sheer physical weight of it. I’ve always loved the word ‘tome’ and that huge block of book feels like a tome. However, when reading Calvin and Hobbes, I really prefer to read the books and collections of strips (I think they have the word “Treasury” on them) in their rectangular floppy form. The individual treasuries have a way of falling apart over time–I’m telling you, they get a lot of page-turning mileage around here–which means I have to replace them book-by-book over the years. That’s fine since they’re usually not that expensive and they are much more practical for taking in the car, or bedtime reading.
