Calvinzilla – A Quick Explanation

Cleveland, OH - June 12, 2013

Of the handful of comic strips that made a big impression on me growing up (Peanuts, The Far Side, Robotman), none was more influential than Calvin and Hobbes. My grandmother introduced me to it. She kept several collections in the drawer of an end table in her living room, next to the light brown sofa. The first I remember reading is Yukon Ho!

     I was eight or nine at the time, and I was astonished at the idea of leaving my family and walking to the Yukon. I pretty much took Calvin’s imagination literally. Hobbes wasn’t a stuffed tiger; the mom and dad just couldn’t see him move. When Calvin transmogrified himself using a cardboard box, I wondered where you got a box like that.

     Reading Calvin and Hobbes left me drunk with ideas. Woven through it was a wit and wisdom I wasn’t always old enough to get, but Calvin’s intelligence, mischievous innocence, and his way of seeing things differently than his parents and schoolmates all struck a chord, and increased my own excitement at being alive in a magical world. If I wasn’t aware at the time that Calvin and Hobbes had higher artistic aspirations than other comic strips, I absorbed it unconsciously as a watermark. I now regard it to be the best there has been.

     When I was eleven I wrote Bill Watterson a fan letter asking for his autograph, and sent it to his publisher. I received in return a printed letter from Bill that read something like, “I really hate having to use a form letter but I get more mail than I can ever respond to!” The envelope included a beautiful printed poster of a Spaceman Spiff cartoon, which I have sadly lost over the years.

     In Chagrin Falls, OH there is a bookstore called Fireside Books. It is the only bookstore to ever sell signed copies of Calvin and Hobbes collections, which it did for less than a year in the late 1990s. Soon after, opportunists began snatching the books up and reselling them on the newly popular Internet at exorbitant prices. When Watterson found out, he stopped supplying them.

     One of the volumes signed for Fireside was The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, the back of which depicts the town square of Chagrin Falls being demolished by a giant Calvin.

 I noticed this picture in the course of my long search for a Watterson autograph, and thought it would be fun to see that square for myself. Maybe while we’re there we can buy something at Fireside, and see the waterfalls for which the town is named.