Review of The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson and The Complete Peanuts Volume 1: 1950 to 1952 by Charles M. Schulz
By
Brendan West-Moreland
There’s an old saying that we’ve all heard, so often that it has perhaps become cliché—“all comedy comes from pain.”
Sometimes those clichés are true. And nowhere is the above statement better proven than in two of American pop art’s most indispensable texts: Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strip and Charles M. Schulz’s influential, in many ways seminal strip called Peanuts.
It’s easy for infidels to dismiss Calvin and Hobbes as an overly pretentious take on elementary school kids; after all, no kid in history (and, indeed, comparatively few adults) has displayed Calvin’s eloquence, or his ego. Consider this:
Calvin: I believe history is a force. Its unalterable tide sweeps all people and institutions along its unrelenting path. Everything and everyone serves history’s single purpose.
Hobbes: And what is that purpose?
Calvin: Why, to produce me, of course! I’m the end result of history!
What a complex idea: history as aggressive, manipulative force, described in Old Testament—hell, Calvinistic—Godlike terms. And the end result of this glorious plan is one little boy who likes to hang around with a tiger and throw snowballs at the little girl next door.
When you think about it, it almost makes sense.
Calvin’s philosophy and grasp of history range from the precocious to the tunnel-visioned, but his love for Hobbes, the tiger who functions as his best friend and partner in crime, never wavers. Neither does Calvin’s thirst for mischief. His innate ability to annoy his mother was one of the best parts of the strip.
But Calvin’s world is tinged with sadness—more on the part of the reader than the characters. Whenever another character occupies the same panel as Calvin and Hobbes, we are reminded that Hobbes is really a stuffed tiger and that the various adventures they share occur only in Calvin’s imagination. While we can celebrate the kid’s imagination, we can barely comprehend what must be his colossal, thundering loneliness.
Taken from the collections The Revenge of the Baby-Sat and Scientific Progress Goes “Boink”, The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes is an excellent investment. I stumbled across it in a Barnes and Noble, its asking price a mere ten bucks for the hardcover edition. If you find such a treasure, pick it up and keep it safe.
A more expensive hardcover containing equally priceless treasures is The Complete Peanuts Volume 1: 1950 to 1952. For those of you who don’t know or can’t remember, Peanuts was the strip with Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and all those other existential kids. Long revered for its very insightful depiction of the alienation of growing up and the way that life brings tiny joys amidst its rainy days and blowout baseball games, Charles M. Schulz’s strip has brought smiles and knowing nods to whole generations of Americans.
You can probably name some of the most famous recurring images: Linus, sucking his thumb and holding his “stupid blanket”; Lucy, sitting behind her makeshift psychiatrist stand (no selling lemonade for this girl); Charlie Brown, watching yet another homer sail over the center field wall or flying in the air after his latest failed attempt to kick the football; Schroeder, hunched over his piano, musical notes hanging in the air like clouds; Snoopy, sprawled atop his doghouse or typing the latest of his many novels, all of which begin with the line, “It was a dark and stormy night . . .”
You won’t find much of that stuff in Volume 1.
Snoopy shows up a lot, but he’s not the dog we come to know and love; he has very little to say and actually sleeps inside his house. Lucy comes along a year or so into the strip’s run; she’s initially a bratty little thing that tortures her unseen Daddy, though she soon moves on to Charlie Brown. Schroeder and Linus make their first appearances in these years, both as babies; by the end of 1952, though, Schroeder’s career as a pianist is in full swing. We see precious few baseball games and only one or two attempts at football kicking.
What we do get to see is an artist working out his characters, his tones, and his great themes. From the opening joke—“Good old Charlie Brown…how I hate him!”—to the very last panel of 1952, in which Charlie Brown philosophically grumbles “That’s the way it goes” after yet another disappointment, Schulz plays with our alone-ness, with our cruelty to one another, with our desperate need to be loved and accepted, and with how all this plays out from the moment we begin to explore the world.
Some fun facts you might not know about Peanuts:
Snoopy was not originally Charlie Brown’s dog.
Before making friends with an older Linus, Charlie Brown’s main running buddy was a kid named Shermy, who would later disappear from the strip.
Charlie Brown was originally a wiseass almost as often as he was the butt of others’ jokes.
The original Peanuts girls were Patty (not the Peppermint flavor, either, unless she undergoes a later change I’m not aware of) and Violet.
Both girls liked Charlie Brown, at least part of the time; Violet baked him mud pies, while Patty literally stores him in her hope chest at one point.
Charlie Brown introduces Schroeder to the piano and to Beethoven.
The book also features an introduction by Garrison Keillor and a long interview with Schulz, obviously from several years ago. Fun facts from the interview: Schulz didn’t like Trudeau or Doonesbury; and not only was he not the person who chose the name “Peanuts” for the strip, but he also hated the name and refused to use it in conversation.
The Complete Peanuts will eventually swell to twenty-five volumes. Buy them and show them to your kids.
Charlie Brown and Calvin are our latter-day answers to “Hell is other people.” Yet somehow they both make us smile, laugh out loud, perhaps even weep. Not bad for a couple of pre-teens with emotional problems . . .
Both books: A