Week 3: Calvin and Hobbes Comic Collection

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson is one of the classic comics that remember reading as a kid.  It was always fun and easy to read Calvin and Hobbes as a kid.  There was always something about these comics that felt easy to relate to when I was young.  The dynamic duo Calvin and his stuffed animal tiger, Hobbes.  Hobbes is clearly an extension of Calvin's imagination of his stuffed animal tiger, but Hobbes is also an extention of Calvin himself.  Whenever Hobbes is seen in the comic, it is usually a representation of what Calvin is actually feeling or thinking. 
I believe Garry Trueau explained it better than I could.  "There are few wellsprings of humor more consistently reliable than the mind of a child.  Most cartoonists, being childlike, recognized this, but when they set out to capture the hurly-burly of the very young, they almost always cheat, shamelessly creating not recognizable children, but highly annoying, wisecracking, miniature adults.  Chalk it up to either indolence or defective recall, but most people who write comic dialogue for minors demonstrate surprisingly little feel for - or faith in - the original source material, that is, childhood, in all its unfettered and winsome glory."
In short, no comic artist understood the way children thought in better than Bill Watterson.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Will Eisner: Contract with God

Will Eisner's "Contract with God" seems to be a tragic story about a man, Fermme Hersh, making a contract with god and living his life based around it.  He lived his life as a "good" man, helping his fellow people and tries to be righteous.  He takes religious instruction and devotes himself to good works.  The man does good and raises a child, only to die from sickness.  The man goes mad, and believes that god broke a contract saying "If god requires it that men honor their agreement...then is it not god, also, obligated?"  After feeling betrayed he turns away from his beliefs and becomes a hard man.  Later on he ends up owning a real estate empire and pays a few wise elders to create a contract with god for him.  Femme Hersh never let go of what happened and what he felt with his contract with god.  Maybe the contract was not properly written, so now he asks wise men of god to create one for him.
Read more

The Smartest Kid on Earth

The Smartest Kid on Earth Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware was an interesting read.  It touched on subjects that I did not expect to come up.  It was mentioned in class that these graphic novels seem to push the boundaries regarding the subjects being told in the stories, and Chris Ware's "The Smartest Kid on Earth Jimmy Corrigan" is no exception.  With in the first few panels, Jimmy is shown to strike a chicken with a rock and kill it.  The artist shows no restraint on showing violence and death within its themes, this carries throughout the book.  Beyond the violence and death, the graphic novel also touches on adult subjects like suicide and depression.  The story of Jimmy Corrigan is not shown in sequential order apparently, I am not sure whether or not that is simply how it comes in this particular piece I am reading.  Regardless, Jimmy Corrigan is shown to age in these stories, up to the point of being an old man.  Reading this story felt a bit ...
Read more

The Arrival

The Arrival is a graphic novel with no words used to tell the story.  The best thing to compare reading The Arrival is a storyboard of a movie or TV show. Being able to communicate an entire story without words can be a fairly powerful thing.  Without using words, the artist has to figure out how to tell a narrative through context clues and visual cues.  It can be difficult to achieve this goal, but the mind is pretty good at piecing things together, and filling the gaps of details.  Even in movies where the picture is moving, there are gaps and spaces of information not shown to the audience, but they accept it and still see the picture as one cohesive story. If the author/artist shows the story well, the overall message of the graphic novel can be more powerful than ones with words.  The story would transcend language barriers, and allow anyone to relate to. The Arrival was able to tell a story cohesive story without any words.  From my point of vi...
Read more