Calvin & Hobbes
"Hyper-literate third graders read it, overweight taxi drivers in El Paso read it, terminally hip people wearing black in Manhattan read it ... "
Displaced Ugandans in South Dakota read it. And now for those of us who can speak of being emotionally attached to Calvin & Hobbes, The Complete Calvin & Hobbes has been released: every single panel of the boy and his tiger ever released.
If there were a short list of items to really signify my "generation" - if that's what you call those of us who began with this comic strip at age 10 and grew up with it for the next 10 years - it would be Calvin: overactive, exuberant, philosophical, wistful, and full of daydreams.
Peanuts didn't quite have the same effect on me. Rather than an extroverted set of interactions between the diverse characters: Charlie, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy, and so on, Calvin & Hobbes represented something more introverted and thoughtful. It was internal: dialogues, and imagination.
Even more zeitgist, however, was the author, Bill Watterson, who had little use for the spotlight and who decided, when people like me were getting their first jobs and capabilities to spend more on Calvin paraphernalia, to stop producing the strip. He was less concerned with making money than he was with his craft.
Which makes perfect sense to me.
I was talking to someone recently who confessed to me that he couldn't see the point in anything: the internet, RSS, or any other item unless it had some fiscal rewards. But the dreamers who made our world as it is today were driven by higher ideals than dollars and cents. Here is a snippet of one of the two speeches that Watterson has made publicly:
In the middle of my sophomore year at Kenyon, I decided to paint a copy of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" from the Sistine Chapel on the ceiling of my dorm room. By standing on a chair, I could reach the ceiling, and I taped off a section, made a grid, and started to copy the picture from my art history book.
Working with your arm over your head is hard work, so a few of my more ingenious friends rigged up a scaffold for me by stacking two chairs on my bed, and laying the table from the hall lounge across the chairs and over to the top of my closet. By climbing up onto my bed and up the chairs, I could hoist myself onto the table, and lie in relative comfort two feet under my painting. My roommate would then hand up my paints, and I could work for several hours at a stretch.
The picture took me months to do, and in fact, I didn't finish the work until very near the end of the school year. I wasn't much of a painter then, but what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.
The painting lent an air of cosmic grandeur to my room, and it seemed to put life into a larger perspective. Those boring, flowery English poets didn't seem quite so important, when right above my head God was transmitting the spark of life to man.
My friends and I liked the finished painting so much in fact, that we decided I should ask permission to do it. As you might expect, the housing director was curious to know why I wanted to paint this elaborate picture on my ceiling a few weeks before school let out. Well, you don't get to be a sophomore at Kenyon without learning how to fabricate ideas you never had, but I guess it was obvious that my idea was being proposed retroactively. It ended up that I was allowed to paint the picture, so long as I painted over it and returned the ceiling to normal at the end of the year. And that's what I did.
Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism. - Bill Watterson [the rest is here]
I'd like to think that the things I do are, at their roots, born from an inner imperative - that my dreams and secret hopes were born, at least in part, from moments of laughter between panels of Calvin becoming a T-rex and destroying things, or Calvin and Hobbes in dialogue, or Calvin just being Calvin.
7:29:13 PM 
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