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