This week’s reading is a favorite book that barely missed the cut on my list of five books to read before seminary. It’s The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, by Bill Watterson.
If you’re not familiar with their antics from Calvin and Hobbes’ many years as a newspaper comic strip, young Calvin and his tiger Hobbes are a delightful duo, mischievous and imaginative and hilariously candid. They conspire against the babysitter, “transmogrify” themselves into random creatures, endure the childhood injustices of school and bath time and family camping trips, and imagine the world from the perspective of a T-Rex. Calvin is simultaneously boisterous and uncertain, while Hobbes succeeds in sarcasm and wisdom.
The Tenth Anniversary Book provides the bonus of Watterson’s insights to his own cartoons: personal stories that inspired particular C&H strips, reasons for his artistic choices, letters received from readers, syndicate and copyright issues, as well as environmental concerns, questions about God and death and evolution, analyses of our relationships with media … in other words, comic strips about life and faith and big questions, the sort of things we talk about in church but in our very best “adult” voices. Watterson reminds us that we don’t have to be grown-up or serious to explore the important stuff of life.