Advent

We all need a suit like that. The suit that says, "bring it." Sometimes, when I'm traveling light and far, a comfy pair of jeans and a small backpack are that suit. Sometimes its a tweed jacket and club tie for coffee--or better, sherry. Whatever it is, it's a little bit of costume, a little bit ridiculous for one's station, whether a click too high or a notch too low. It's a suit that sets our minds for magic. The wonderful thing is, that it so often comes when we're ready to see.

As a critical aside, this strip is among the 8% or so (I'm estimating) that gives us Calvin from his parents' eyes. These only work because we know Calvin so well from his own point of view, so that the change of perspective is still tethered to the familiar. It's like seeing "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," or the Lion King 1 and 1/2, which is the same thing.

Calvin and Hobbes and Aristotle

There's a wonderful scene in the C.S. Lewis biopic The Shadowlands, where Anthony Hopkins, as Lewis, explains Aristotle's ethics to a group of fresher tutorialists. Pipe pressed between his lips, Hopkins ponders the relationship between character and action: which is more important for judging the measure of a man? "Aristotle's solution," he pontificates, "was simple, and revolutionary." There was no difference. Character was action--it was habit, whose existence was only meaningful to the extent it was enacted.

Thus saith Lewis (and Hopkins). And herewith saith Waterson (and Hobbes):


One of the delights of C&H is the breezy encounters one has with some of the truly Great Questions. The off-handed manner and unexpected locale makes them all the more delicious.

Rules of the Game

Board games make infrequent appearances in C&H: Scrabble a couple of times, checkers, Monopoly, and, once, a Ouiji board. This is one of the more successful board game strips, mostly, I think, because of the timing of Hobbes's expression in the last panel. 'Tis the sport to have the tiger hoist with his own petar.

I used to think that games like Scrabble were won by the player with superior raw intelligence, or at least the superior vocabulary. I remember my sophomore year of high school, on the last day of the semester in A.P. Literature, Mr. Holocek challenged me to a game. Mr. Holocek was one of the legendary characters of East High, a kind of cowboy poet who'd been around since the 60's, and whose silver mustache had a yellow dimple where he held his cigarettes. "Now the student has become the master," my friend Andrew mocked as I approached the desk at the front of the room.

But in fact, the student had not become the master. A few moves in, I took an early lead. Somewhere in the middle of the game, though, Mr. Holocek took control with a string of 20+ point words. By the end he'd beaten me solidly, presumably, I thought, because he just knew more words.

It wasn't until several years later that I learned it wasn't true. Mr. Holocek did have a better vocabulary than mine, and he was probably smarter than me, but that wasn't why he won. He won because he'd learned tricks, methods for exploiting the rules of that particular game. For example: don't waste your time learning long words--memorize every two-letter word you can; try to stack words parallel to one another, like "zoo" on top of "own"; always try first to use double and triple point spaces, and try not to set up your opponent to use them.

Once I started abiding by these simple little rules of thumb, I found myself beating other players--even smarter players--who didn't use them, every time. A little bit of very specific knowledge trumped a lot of general intelligence. It's a lesson I've found to apply in many tasks: law school issue-spotting exams, investing (so I'm told), and--needless to say--every board game out there (I've won a dozen consecutive games of Monopoly, but that recipe will remain a secret).

So specific knowledge beats general, tricks beat brainpower, and playing smarter beats playing harder...sometimes. Because tricks still need to be used at the right time, and in the right circumstances. Reliance on a misplaced trick is the way to ruin:


A bag of tricks is only consistently useful to a wise hand selecting among them.

A special link

Sometimes, you get the opportunity to write something fun...

What We Wish For

People say they only want to be happy. I don't think that's always true. We talk about happiness as the aim, the high and lofty target out of reach, someday to be reached. Sometimes we link it to something so lofty, a fair-minded observer might begin to wonder if we ever really want to reach it.

I think happiness is not something lofty and faraway. Happiness is low-hanging fruit. It's all around, ripe for the plundering--and yet, we don't seize it. We don't even want to see that it's there. But in any and every circumstance, the possibility of happiness is indeed there. There are just too many examples of happy people in any and every circumstance for that not to be true.

We resent the availability of happiness. There it is, between two slices of bread in a peanut butter sandwich. But that's preposterous that I--I--should be able to find contentment in a sandwich--I, who am meant for such high things.

Goals

Calvin's bike is actually one of the weaker conceits of the strip: The punchline of a bike trying to kill its rider tends to wear thin quickly. Watterson noted in the Tenth Anniversary Collection that, given his own love of cycling, he had to resist the urge to draw biker strips too frequently. I suspect that bias explains the blindspot with the killer bike strips.

All that said, this particular panel worked quite nicely.

Welcome to the C&H

Welcome to my new blog. For some time now, I've wanted to open up a site dedicated to commentary on the most wonderful (in my opinion) comic strip ever published, Calvin and Hobbes. Only recently, though, did I stumble upon the missing ingredient to make the project possible: a complete online archive of the strip. With that in hand, I'm ready to begin. So again, welcome!

Why dedicate a blog to commentary on Calvin and Hobbes? For one thing, Bill Waterson's strip is one of only two works for the printed page that consistently makes me laugh out loud. (The other is P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories.) It's simply fun to spend time with something funny.

As fans of the strip already know, though, Calvin and Hobbes isn't just funny; it's poignant, whistful, at times clumsy and preachy, and at moments it touches something of the essence of boyhood. Maybe girlhood, too, but I wouldn't really know. In any case, there's nuance in Calvin and Hobbes that still captures my interest.

Mostly, though, I want to write about Calvin and Hobbes because the strip is alive. Fifteen years after the last strip appeared--buried beneath news of an incoming Republican Congress, an odd little investigation called Whitewater, and a new computer program called "Netscape Navigator"--there is still life and vitality in the world it creates, long after the seemingly substantial "real world" of those current events dissolved, never to be recovered. I still enjoy spending time in that world, and I suspect others might, too.

A word about format: I envision posting once a week or so, choosing a strip from the 10-year canon that strikes my fancy, for one reason or another. The major service of this site, I imagine, will be to offer a regular dose of a great piece of art (I hope that doesn't sound pretentious, but I really do believe the strip rose to that level). For each posting, I'll offer a bit of commentary on the featured strip--or perhaps not. We'll see.

However this blog develops, we'll at least have delightful fellow travelers.

--Christian