Why read The Essential Calvin and Hobbes?

Book cover of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes

Book description

The award-winning cartoonist details the further adventures of Calvin, a mischievous young boy with boundless energy and imagination, and his lovable stuffed tiger.

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Why read it?

2 authors picked The Essential Calvin and Hobbes as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Annie Barrows

Author

Everyone should spend 30 minutes each day admiring Calvin and Hobbes, the best comic strip ever made.

Calvin is one of the truly magnificent heroes of children’s literature, an embodiment of all the imaginative and moral power that kids have and grownups don’t.

His best friend, Hobbes, is a profound thinker as well as an intermittently alive stuffed tiger, and together they live, squabbling and happy, in their own crazed world, triumphing over parents, teachers, and other authorities with dazzling illogic and hairbreadth escapes to other realities, much more interesting than this one, where you can evade chores by traveling…

From Annie's list on classic heroes with poor impulse control.

Frans Vischer

Author

Because Bill Watterson is a master. Creative kids, so often misunderstood, as Calvin is by his parents, (often understandably) there are no bad guys in this comic strip, aside from the imagined creations running amuck in Calvin’s wonderfully weird brain. The drawings are superb, a great mix of flat graphics and Disney dimensionality, and the writing a great insight into lone kids’ behavior. Watterson created a timeless masterpiece that influenced many comics that followed.

From Frans' list on children’s books that tickled my toes.