Looking back on my childhood, I can think of many things that shaped/affected my life. Video games, cartoons, Nickelodeon (the good ‘ol days), Mr. Bean. Those are a few of many that popped into my mind just now. But possibly the one thing that sticks out more than anything else is Calvin and Hobbes.
Now I didn’t read too much as a kid. You coulda given me a Nintendo and Super Mario Bros. any day over the crap I had to read in school. A few things did fall through the cracks, like The Phantom Tollbooth or The Giver, but for the most part, I was having none of it. Enter my cousins, four or five years older than me, at a Crown Books store in Pasadena. Being an only child, they were the closest things I had to siblings, so I kinda looked up to them. Anyway, we were browsing this magical bookstore (I may have hated reading books but, let me tell you, I sure as hell loved buying them), just wasting time, when I saw one of them pick up a copy of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes (I was about six, so the treasury was probably about two or three years old at the time). I picked up a copy of the same book and, for some reason, instantly fell in love. I forced my mom to buy it for me and immediately started reading it in the car. I’m not really sure what drew me to the comic at such a young age. It could’ve been the fact that Calvin was a six year old only child (just like me!), the fact that there was a talking tiger, or even simply the fact that my cousins read the comic and I wanted to be like them. Whatever the case, I loved it and would read it every night before bed over a cool glass of chocolate milk. At the time, there was nothing I wanted more in the world than for Hobbes to be real.
Almost seventeen years later, here I am. I have every single Calvin and Hobbes book and treasury (I didn’t really care if treasuries were the same books printed over again, I still had to read them), and a few years ago I got The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, which is a three volume, nicely bound set of every strip in the series. It has been about tweleve and a half years since I cried reading the last strip ever in the Los Angeles Times (it was one of the hardest things I had to deal with at age ten…on New Years Eve nonetheless) and I miss Calvin and his pal more than ever. Here’s a scan of the final strip for your viewing pleasure:
Okay..so I realize I’ve gone waayy too far into my childhood love of the show for the this post’s own good, but whatever. The reason I bring Calvin and Hobbes up is for this image I found on Neatorama. It’s a deviantART drawing in the style of Calvin and Hobbes, but instead of a little boy and a tiger, it’s actually the philosophers John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes (Bill Waterson actually named his two characters after these philosophers).
So yea..that’s really about it. Just wanted to share this picture. Now you know more about my love of this comic than you probably want to. Enjoy!
