Most of us like to read books of one sort or another; but very few are really able to resist the lure of a good comic! Comics require no understanding of the story. They can be taken up and left off whenever one pleases. After a long day, not many of us can digest ‘Types of Ethical Theory’ or ‘Zen and the art of the motorcycle maintenance’. Hence for cool dudes who want to have a good time and just keep on laughing helplessly, I recommend my all-time favourite: CALVIN and HOBBES!
Written by a genius named BILL WATTERSON, it is about a six year old boy CALVIN and his stuffed tiger (you guessed it right!) HOBBES, who comes to life only where there is no one else around. Calvin’s parents are average middle class Americans though his dad has a special streak of weird humour in him which gives the reader an idea of how Calvin will be if he ever grows up. Calvin himself an over smart precocious brat has an amazing vocabulary and an outsized imagination in which he takes on roles like fearless inter-planetary explorer or a masked super-hero. Hobbes, for his part, is a tiger who constantly ogles at the tigresses in the National Geographic, spouts stupid one- liners and claims that tigers are the epitome of creation.
Bill Watterson, through his amazing comic strip, manages to portray childhood as it really is. Unusual titles to the Calvin comics like “ Scientific Progress goes Boink”, “Attack of Deranged mutant killer”, etc. only add to the aim of sheer idiocy that surrounds the Calvin persona. One can go on and on about the myriad of unusual phenomenon which lie inside the Calvin comic books. Perhaps the one that illustrates it the best is the one where Hobbes doing Calvin’s Maths homework,puts down Alabama as the answer to the subtraction question or the one where Hobbes is all worried about tigers being endangered species and this being the reason for he is not meeting the babes.
The true way to enjoy Calvin and Hobbes is to experience the sheer magic of good humour your self. So go out, read it and have a good time!
(Pic taken from Google Images)
