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First you have to heft it. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes feels like a critical edition. It's the work of ten years, once at a peak circulation of 2,400 newspapers, 3,160 strips in all, first collected in 17 books with 30 million copies already in print, now assembled in a 22-and-a-half pound, three-volume set running to 1,440 pages. Every strip—from the beginning in November 1985 to the last day of 1995—plus every cover from the individual collections, as well as the bonus material in the treasury collections, finds its place here. The CC&H has a few things the previous publications lack, such as colored Sunday panels from Attack of the Killer Monster Snow Goons, a new essay by Watterson with some kinder words about Universal Syndicate (with whom he battled for years over licensing rights), and early comic incarnations of Calvin with his hair in his eyes like the eventual bully Moe. If it is still a trifle less than Compleat—it lacks the commentary of The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book and the black-and-white originals of Sunday pages in the gallery edition of Calvin and Hobbes Sunday Pages 1985-1995—it is an impressive testimony to the cultural significance of the strip all the same.
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Calvin and Hobbes thus bookended stands as an oeuvre, a body of work, and inevitably invites scholarship. Calvin himself set the stage for it with his infamous report on "Bats: The Big Bug Scourge of the Skies," and his academically adept book report, "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes." And so, at this inauguration of a new wave of Calvinism, and in honor of the icon of total depravity himself, a few predictions about the future of the field are in order.
There will be, of course, compilations of mere trivia. For instance, one might list the six R-rated movies Calvin tries to see despite Mom and Rosalyn's proscriptions: Venusian Vampire Vixens, Attack of the Coed Cannibals, Vampire Sorority Babes, Killer Prom Queen, Cannibal Stewardess Vixens Unchained, and Sorority Row Horror. There are two exceptions to Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs for breakfast—once, early on, there's plain old Crunchy Sugar Bombs, and then, much later, there's a go at the parents' Pulp-N-Stuff. (On another occasion, Calvin drops an Alka-Seltzer into Raisin Bran.) Mabel Syrup is Calvin's favorite writer, author not only of Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie—requiring squeaky voices, gooshy sound effects, and the happy hamster hop from a much-afflicted Dad—but also of Commander Coriander Salamander and 'er Singlehander Bellylander. Three heroes grace the pages of Calvin's comic books—captains Maim, Napalm, and Steroid—and only two monsters under the bed get a name: Maurice and Winslow.
Historians of a higher order will want to trace the genetic influences and the transmutations thereof in Calvin and Hobbes. Minimalistic precursor Peanuts makes its presence felt, for instance, in subtle ways. Anxiety in Calvin or his parents is indicated by parentheses around the eyes, characteristic of Charlie Brown and friends. Then there is the Schulzian emotional reality of Calvin's life, which evinces the torture of childhood much more than the illicit decals and T-shirts care to notice. ("People who get nostalgic about childhood," comments a scuffed-up Calvin just shoved by lower-case-lettered Moe, "were obviously never children.") Calvin doesn't play psychiatrist, but he does hawk his wares at a great variety of Lucy-like booths during his ten-year career, selling Great Ideas, a Swift Kick in the Butt, Scientific Names, a Suicide Drink, Candid Opinions, and a Frank Appraisal of Your Looks. By way of contrast, while the Peanuts kids are lonely in a crowd and devoid of any adult presence, Calvin lives with his best and faithful friend, but at the mercy of grown-ups. Charles Schulz said there were no adults in Peanuts because they simply wouldn't fit in the strip, but in Watterson's world, Calvin shrinks to make room for the grown-ups, to whom he is only knee-high. Even Hobbes towers above him, friend though he is.
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