Calvin and Hobbes

It’s hard to overstate how much the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes meant to me when I was growing up. My memory is hazy, but I know that Calvin and Hobbes was first syndicated in 1985. I would have been 8 years old at the time and in 3rd grade living in Athens, Greece. In any case, it was during this time, thousands of miles away from home and several miles away from my closest school friends, that I became entranced by the comic. I would rabidly devour each strip when my Dad would come home with the newspaper in the evening. I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy me the various Calvin and Hobbes collections (Calvin and Hobbes, Something Under the Bed in Drooling, Yukon Ho!, etc). I suppose I relished in the escapism that the comic delivered. It delivered me from a feeling of isolation that I felt while we lived in that big house in Politia, a suburb of Athens.

Honorable mention goes to Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed. I learned pretty much everything I know about Ronald Reagan, the War on Drugs, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Donald Trump, and other 80’s pop culture references from this strip.

It’s an odd coincidence that Bill Watterson and Berkeley Breathed ramped-up and shutdown their strips at roughly the same time. I feel fortunate to have enjoyed their writing, and am glad that they went out on their own terms and didn’t drag along like the Beatle Baileys and Garfields of the world.

Update: $150 is a bargain for what you get in return.