Pros: lots of full color Calvin and Hobbes with a great afterward by Watterson
Cons: Only includes material through 1989
The Bottom Line: Sunday is the most colorful day to a child. Freedom turns the world into an imaginative playground. It is not surprising that Calvin is at his best on Sundays!
argonut's Full Review: Bill Watterson - The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday...
Frame 1 (Calvin & Hobbes in wagon at top of Concussion Hill.)
C: "Hobbes, do you think the world was a better place when everything was in black and white?"
Frame 2 (Wagon picks up speed. In foreground a rabbit tries to keep up with the wagon.)
C: "It must have been so much easier to get your clothing to match and to pick teams for Calvinball since everyone and everything could easily be classified into one type or another."
Frame 3 (Wagon picks up more speed. In background a swallow is losing ground to the wagon below.)
C: "I bet it was much easier to think back then, too since in a black and white world everything is by nature either right or wrong, yes or no, up or down."
Frame 4 (Wagon increases speed yet again. It is basically a blur now. Overhead, a supersonic jet roars and yet still cannot keep up with the wagon.)
C: "Yet somewhere in the 1920s there was an explosion of color and suddenly so much more was possible. Color pictures, color television, even color newspaper comics. Color also made the world more confusing because ideas were not cut and dried anymore. People were able to have opinions of such a complex nature that they could both agree and disagree, be right and wrong, up and..."
Frame 5 (Wagon passes edge of cliff and hovers momentarily in the air.)
C: "…down!"
Frame 6 (Calvin & Hobbes climbing out of person-shaped holes in the ground ala Looney Toons. The wagon lies battered, bruised and utterly crushed in the background.)
C: "What do you say Hobbes? Don't you wish we could go back to the simple world of black and white?"
H: (menacingly) "How does black and blue sound to you?"
I do not remember exactly when I discovered Calvin and Hobbes, but I imagine sitting at home on some rainy Sunday afternoon with little to do but flip through the paper. I am lucky to have been the perfect age when Calvin was born in 1985. Old enough to be interested in the newspaper, but still young enough to need to take a break from the news articles to flip through the comics, my first impression was pure fascination.
Even those people who were introduced to the mischievous child, stuffed-tiger duo through a daily comic strip did not really meet him until they stumbled across his colorful Sunday adventures. While the daily strip was appealing, humorous and enlightening it was the colorful world of the Sunday comics page where Bill Watterson worked his magic and gave birth to a precocious creature who would be forever six-going-on-eighteen.
Anyone who knows Calvin well enough to have crash-landed on Planet Zorg will agree that colorful is an understatement for the life that Calvin led. Whether transmogrifying himself into a bat, racing down a hill at breakneck speeds, or running away from any and every adult figure in his life, Calvin lived a life fraught with excitement and color.
Watterson brought a new level of imagination and ingenuity to comics through the Calvin & Hobbes strip. He brought the child out in every adult by introducing the adult hidden behind Calvin. While we find Calvin’s body most often in the midst of very child-like adventures, his mind is full of ideas and concepts that are entirely adult.
Since book form is the only way in which we are able to appreciate Calvin and Hobbes now, it is not surprising that I find the Lazy Sunday Book my favorite. It is, as the name suggests, a compilation of the best Sunday strips from the first five years of Calvin and Hobbes. (Everything through Yukon Ho!) The strips are fabulous and it is hard to put the book down. The more I absorb anthologies of Calvin and Hobbes material the more fascinated I find myself with the earlier days of the comic strip. While Watterson was able to take Calvin in later life to levels of vibrancy and size that were boundary shaking, I feel as if the energy of his earlier works were even more concentrated even if they were more contained.
One of the interesting notes about the book is that it was soon after its release that Watterson pushed the boundaries of the comic publishing industry by moving to a half page Sunday comic strip instead of the traditional two-row spread. In light of that, the afterword by Watterson is amazingly prescient:
"Cartoons can be much more than we've been seeing lately. How much more will depend on what newspaper readers will demand. One thing, though, is certain: little boys, like tigers, will roam all the territory they can get."
For those who are as fascinated by Calvin’s colorful world, I highly recommend curling up with the Lazy Sunday Book and let a little boy and his tiger roam all the territory you will give them.
Afterword: In doing my research for this review I discovered that the newest book in the Calvin and Hobbes series is entitled Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995. It contains 36 Sunday prints from the entire range of the C&H strip that are currently running as part of the 2001 Festival Of Cartoon Art at the Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library. I have not seen the book or the exhibit yet, but I imagine it will be another wonderful way to enjoy Calvin’s Sunday world.
The magical friendship shared by Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes has endeared them to millions of fans. Now, their friendship endures in a full-co...More at Buy.com
The magical friendship shared by Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes has endeared them to millions of fans. Now, their friendship endures in a full-co...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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