Customer Reviews
"What Did I Just Tell You?" "Beats Me. Weren't You Listening Either?" - By: Mark Baker, 11 Jul 2008 
And so it began.
This treasury included the strips from the first two collections of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes. And if you don't know what you have been missing, you arein for a treat.
The comic strip follows the misadventures of Calvin, a highly imaginative, hyperactive six year old. How imaginative? His only real friend is Hobbes, his stuff tiger. But that isn't a problem because Hobbes is really a real tiger, at leastin Calvin's mind.
Since this is the first book, things are still being established. But many of the strips staples are here already. We meet Calvin's parents, teacher Miss Wormwood, neighbor Susie Derkins, & bully Moe. We even get the first couple of run ins with babysitter Rosalyn. While we don't get the hilarious social satire that would show up later, we do get some comments on the environment & Calvin's obsession with polls. (He is constantly trying to get his dad to bend to political pressure by showing his standings with household six year olds & tigers.) And we get plenty of adventures from Spaceman Spiff, Calvin's imagination again as he tries to deal with the various aliensin his life like his parents or teacher.
I tend to read the later books more often, so I had forgotten just how go the early strips are until I picked this up. There are so true classics here, most of the time at Calvin's six year old nature. Not that I'd want my kids getting any ideas from Calvin. He doesn't see anything wrong with pounding nails into coffee tables or popping popcorn without the lid on the pot.
And that does bring up the only possible flaw with the book. These strips originally appearedin 1985-1987, so at times they are a little dated. Calvin makes reference to renting a VCR or wanting to get cable. But that doesn't bother mein the slightest.
This "treasury" collects the strips from the first two books. As a bonus, there is a story toldin poem form at the beginning & the Sunday strips arein color. If you have the two books, you probably don't need this one. But if you don't have them, this is the way to go.
The day this strip ended was a sad day indeed. But thanks to books like this one, we can relive it over & over again.
Funny and touching and so incredibly real - By: Lis, 08 Aug 2005 Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes series is all about six year old Calvin & his tiger Hobbes. Hobbes may seem to be just some soft toy, but with Calvin he truly comes alive, & the two buddies hurtle through life together.
Anyone who has been six (so, all of us) will find this series well-observed, touching, & funny. In one strip, our heroes are just getting up to exactly the kind of highjinks we all got up to when we were young (adventuresin the woods, building time machines using discarded packing cases, ...). But then on the next page, Calvin's six year old wisdom hits on an aspect of contemporary life, exposing it for the silliness that it is.
If you want to remember what it was like to be six, if you ever had an invisible friend or you talked to your teddy bear, if you were ever convinced there were monsters under your bed, or if you just want to laugh out loud, then BUY THIS!
The childhood of Holden Caulfield - By: , 29 Mar 2005 Absolute brilliance. Stories of a 6 year old & his 'tiger' friend & how they see the world. Bill makes it absolutely hilarious though. Philosophy, humour, - it's all here.
A fantastic collection of early Calvin and Hobbes comics - By: Daniel Jolley, 27 Jun 2004 The Essential Calvin & Hobbes, first publishedin 1988, is chock full of early Calvin & Hobbes comic strips. No cartoonist, not even Charles Schultz, has captured the magical essence of childhood the way Bill Watterson didin this strip, & it should come as no surprise (although it did to Watterson) that Calvin & Hobbes quickly developed an incredibly loyal following. This strip went way beyond mere popularity. While I wasin college, the campus newspaper decided to stop running Calvin & Hobbes (I think this was during one of Watterson's sabbaticals) - this resultedin nothing less than a furor on campus, as countless students immediately demanded the return of C&H. In a matter of days, Calvin & Hobbes were right back where they belonged.
How does a comic strip featuring a mischievous six-year-old boy & his stuffed tiger attract a fiercely loyal following of adults? Most adults would love to be children again, to know the freedom & sense of wonder that somehow withers inside the human soul after the onset of puberty. Calvin & Hobbes vividly recreates the feelings & emotions of the very essence of childhood. It brings back memories of things we forgot far too long ago, & it thus reawakens the deepest parts of our ever-hardening souls. Reading this comic strip is the next best thing to being a child yourself. Calvin does everything you used to do: he takes time to stompin mud puddles, he lets his imagination run wild to make thrilling adventures out of even the most mundane tasks, he ponders the same deep questions you are now, as an adult, afraid to ask, he goes for the gusto no matter what sort of risk is involved, he isin every way a perfect specimen of childhood. Who, as a child, didn't pretend to be a dinosaur, walk around with a hideous expressionin hopes of your facing freezing that way, tease the girls (or boys) you claimed to hate, journey to distant worlds unseen by human eyes, etc.?
Of course, Hobbes is just as important to the comic strip as Calvin. Hobbes is a tiger, Calvin's best & constant friend, a fellow partakerin the joys of childish innocence. To Calvin, Hobbes really is all that, & that is how we see him as well - until, that is, someone else comes into the frame, when he suddenly becomes nothing more than a stuffed animal. Watterson is a fantastic comic artist, & there is just something captivating about the way he draws Hobbesin his stuffed animal form. Everything about Watterson's art is fantastic, though, particularly the way it captures the emotions of its two principal characters.
Sadly, we have only ten years of comic memoriesin the form of Calvin & Hobbes, as the inscrutable Bill Watterson retired (around the age of 37)in 1995 & quite obviously has no plans of returning to the public arena. Watterson is actually frighteningly private & seems to be living a life of unmatched solitude. I find this extraordinarily sad: here is a man who captured the essence of childhood so vividlyin the form of Calvin & Hobbes, a world bursting with life & possibilities, yet now he seems to have withdrawn from life itself. We must be thankful we do have as much Calvin & Hobbes material as we do, & The Essential Calvin & Hobbes, with 255 pages of black & white daily strips & color Sunday strips, features much more than just a chunk of itin & of itself.
perfect Calvin and Hobbes book - By: Ben, 06 Nov 2003 This Calvin & Hobbes book is so funny as many of them are. Every time I read this it is so funny I laugh out loud. Many Calvin & Hobbes books are very funny but this one is so long it took me a long time to read. Most of the others I can read very quickly. I found this book so, so funny I bought loads more. I am trying to collect all of the Calvin & Hobbes books I can get because it is so good. This is a must buy!!! I suggest you get a smaller Calvin & Hobbes book & see if you like it first. If you do buy this!!!
