The Complete Calvin and Hobbes!

[billyboy]

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Like some jazz box sets, 'Complete' might mean too much of a good thing, but this set looks great! Unlike 'Peanuts', which, granted, ran for 50 years, this strip was consistently inventive and funny, with fantastic artwork. Can't wait! Available at Amazon for pre-order at less than $100.

As a side note, I was intrigued by the 'Complete Peanuts' collections that are coming out, but wasn't sure if I'd want them on my shelf. After getting the first volume out of the library, I'm plunking down my hard-earned cash on these books. The early strips from the 50's are really quite funny and edgier than the later comics I'm more familiar with.

[John B]

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Like some jazz box sets, 'Complete' might mean too much of a good thing, but this set looks great! Unlike 'Peanuts', which, granted, ran for 50 years, this strip was consistently inventive and funny, with fantastic artwork. Can't wait! Available at Amazon for pre-order at less than $100.

I know I don't "need" this, but that looks really tempting.

[J.A.W.]

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Like some jazz box sets, 'Complete' might mean too much of a good thing, but this set looks great! Unlike 'Peanuts', which, granted, ran for 50 years, this strip was consistently inventive and funny, with fantastic artwork.  Can't wait!  Available at Amazon for pre-order at less than $100.

As a side note, I was intrigued by the 'Complete Peanuts' collections that are coming out, but wasn't sure if I'd want them on my shelf.  After getting the first volume out of the library, I'm plunking down my hard-earned cash on these books.  The early strips from the 50's are really quite funny and edgier than the later comics I'm more familiar with.

I just noticed the Calvin & Hobbes set on Amazon and I can't wait! Your appreciation is absolutely spot-on. I also picked up the first three volumes of Peanuts. Wonderful stuff.

[chris]

Excellent news! However, figuring out how much of this I already own in my MANY volumens of C&H is more complicated than trying to figure out similar predicaments with CDs

[Kalo]

But who did the mastering?

[Alexander]

I'm not planning on picking this up as I have all of the softcover books, but it is nice to see a great piece of American art published in a durable form such as this. My question is this: Will the set contain Watterson's watercolor art, often used on back covers, and the poems (with accompanying art) that were only published in the large anthologies?

[BruceH]

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Like some jazz box sets, 'Complete' might mean too much of a good thing, but this set looks great! Unlike 'Peanuts', which, granted, ran for 50 years, this strip was consistently inventive and funny, with fantastic artwork. Can't wait! Available at Amazon for pre-order at less than $100.

As a side note, I was intrigued by the 'Complete Peanuts' collections that are coming out, but wasn't sure if I'd want them on my shelf. After getting the first volume out of the library, I'm plunking down my hard-earned cash on these books. The early strips from the 50's are really quite funny and edgier than the later comics I'm more familiar with.

I've got a lot of the Calvin and Hobbes collections, but this is still mightly tempting! Easily my favorite newpaper strip of the last 25 years.

And I love those Fantagraphics Peanuts reprints. They were long overdue.

Granted that the 50 years of Peanuts wasn't entirely consistant, but if Schulz were like Watterson he would have quit the strip in 1961 and we'd now be marveling at it's consistantly high quality.

Edited September 23, 2010 by BruceH

[Uncle Skid]

But who did the mastering?

This is almost as cool as The Complete Far Side!

[billyboy]

Now all I need is The Complete Bloom County, The Complete Krazy Kat, and The Complete Nancy, and I'll be set!

[BruceH]

No Complete Barnaby?

[couw]

The Complete Krazy Kat

hurry and don't miss out on the currently running series then!

plus, you will need Polly and her Pals as well...

[Jazzmoose]

I'd throw in all the Abbie an' Slats you can find as well...

[BERIGAN]

I'm not planning on picking this up as I have all of the softcover books, but it is nice to see a great piece of American art published in a durable form such as this. My question is this: Will the set contain Watterson's watercolor art, often used on back covers, and the poems (with accompanying art) that were only published in the large anthologies?

You might want to get them someday Alexander. My old Bloom County books are well, getting old, and a bit musty smelling, Calvin and Hobbes can't be far behind!~

[BERIGAN]

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Like some jazz box sets, 'Complete' might mean too much of a good thing, but this set looks great! Unlike 'Peanuts', which, granted, ran for 50 years, this strip was consistently inventive and funny, with fantastic artwork. Can't wait! Available at Amazon for pre-order at less than $100.

As a side note, I was intrigued by the 'Complete Peanuts' collections that are coming out, but wasn't sure if I'd want them on my shelf. After getting the first volume out of the library, I'm plunking down my hard-earned cash on these books. The early strips from the 50's are really quite funny and edgier than the later comics I'm more familiar with.

Right about the ol' peanuts. I remember reading them years ago(A cousin older than me had the pocketbooks) and thinking it could have been someone else writing, instead of Schultz. Like both "Styles" just different.

[marcoliv]

billions of thanks for sharng this billyboy

Marcus

[billyboy]

Up.

Just got this yesterday for a birthday present, and it's really quite fabulous. High-quality paper and binding, full-size strips and four-color cartoons, all the watercolors, etc., from the previous books. It's a behemoth of a box (over 20 pounds) about the size of 4 mosaics -- I'm not sure what bookshelf is going to hold it, since it sticks out so much. I had a blast reading to my 7 year old daughter last night, who had several genuine laughs. I'll be reading this one for a long time!

[neveronfriday]

Amazon.co.uk has this one quite cheap at the moment, for 49 pounds (in my case that came out to be (incl. shipping to Germany) a grand total of EUR 84.52). I would think that at the moment that is the cheapest price anywhere, especially for Europeans.

Great book and mine was packaged very well. They simply put the original box from the publisher into a padded box of their own. Despite its weight, it got here in mint condition (inside of the original box, it was also packaged very well with shrinkwrap, cardboard and protective papers).

It's a bargain!

Get it.

P.S.: Funnily enough, the original box still contained a red "Do not open until October 4, 2005 ..." sticker) and also helps us customers figure out how books like this one or the very similar Complete Far Side Gallery (production value) can be produced so cheaply. The box states, amongst other things in big bold letters, "[...]Printing: 1 [...] Printed in China".

Edit: link and image

Amazon.co.uk

Edited October 21, 2005 by neveronfriday

[7/4]

October 22, 2005

'Calvin and Hobbes' Creator Keeps Privacy

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 7:28 p.m. ET

CHAGRIN FALLS, Ohio (AP) -- Maybe someday, officials will put up a statue marking this quaint village as the birthplace of ''Calvin and Hobbes.''

Just don't expect cartoonist Bill Watterson to attend the unveiling ceremony. It's been nearly 10 years since he abruptly quit drawing one of the most popular comic strips of all time. Since then, he's been as absent as the precocious Calvin and his pet tiger, err, stuffed animal, Hobbes.

Some call Watterson reclusive. Others say he just likes his privacy.

''He's an introspective person,'' says his mother, Kathryn, standing at the front door her home, its yard covered by a tidy tangle of black-eyed Susans and other wildflowers. It's where Watterson grew up. Calvin lived there too, so to speak. Watterson used the well-kept, beige Cape Cod-style house as the model for Calvin's home.

You might even expect Calvin to come bounding out the door with Hobbes in tow, the screen door banging behind them. After all, the guy on the front porch kind of resembles Calvin's dad. Readers will remember him as the exasperated patent attorney who enjoyed gummy oatmeal and jogging in 20-degree weather.

Sure enough, Watterson's father, Jim, has a sheen of sweat on his neck, not from a run but from the 73-year-old's three-mile morning walk.

Watterson has acknowledged satirizing his father, who is now a semiretired patent attorney, in the strip. Jim Watterson says whenever Calvin's dad told him that something he didn't want to do ''builds character,'' they were words he had spoken to his cartoonist son.

After ''Calvin and Hobbes'' ended, Jim Watterson and his son would paint landscapes together, setting up easels along the Chagrin River or other vistas. He laughed that sometimes they'd spend more time choosing a site than painting. But they haven't painted together for years.

So what's Watterson been up to since ending ''Calvin and Hobbes?'' It's tough to say.

His parents will say only that he's happy, but they won't say where he lives, and the cartoonist could not be reached for an interview.

His former editor, Lee Salem, also remains mum, saying only that as a painter Watterson started with watercolors and has evolved to oils.

''He's in a financial position where he doesn't need to meet the deadlines anymore,'' Salem says.

Watterson's parents respect -- but have no explanation for -- their son's extremely private nature. It doesn't run in the family. Kathryn is a former village councilwoman and Jim is seeking his fourth council term this fall. Their other son, Tom, is a high school teacher in Austin, Texas.

Bill Watterson, 47, hasn't made a public appearance since he delivered the commencement speech in 1990 at his alma mater, Kenyon College. But he recently welcomed some written questions from fans to promote the Oct. 4 release of the three-volume ''The Complete Calvin and Hobbes,'' which contains every one of the 3,160 strips printed during its 10-year run.

Among his revelations:

-- He reads newspaper comics, but doesn't consider this their golden age.

-- He's never attended any church.

-- He's currently interested in art from the 1600s.

Salem, who edited thousands of ''Calvin and Hobbes'' strips at Universal Press Syndicate, says that Watterson is private and media shy, not a recluse. Salem didn't want to see the strip end, but understood Watterson's decision.

''He came to a point where he thought he had no more to give to the characters,'' Salem says.

''Calvin and Hobbes'' appeared in more than 2,400 newspapers during its run, one of the few strips to reach an audience that large.

Its success was rooted in the freshness of Calvin -- an imaginative 6-year-old who has the immaturity of a child and the psychological complexity of a 40-year-old. As for Hobbes, the device of Calvin viewing him as alive and everybody else seeing him as a stuffed animal was simply brilliant, Salem says.

Their all-encompassing bond of friendship -- being able to share joy and have fun together, yet get angry and frustrated with one another -- was another reason for the strip's success.

Universal would welcome Watterson back along with ''Calvin and Hobbes'' or any other characters he dreams up. ''He knows the door's open and he knows where we are,'' Salem says.

There are few signs of Watterson or ''Calvin and Hobbes'' in Chagrin Falls, a town of 4,000 that has evolved from a manufacturing hub centered on its namesake falls to an upscale area of stately homes and giant maple trees.

A Godzilla-sized Calvin is depicted wreaking havoc on Chagrin Falls on the back cover of ''The Essential Calvin and Hobbes,'' released in 1988. He's carrying off the Popcorn Shop, where sweet smells have flowed from its spot on the falls for about 100 years.

Fireside Book Shop, located just out of earshot of the water's roar, carries 15 different ''Calvin and Hobbes'' books -- customers used to be able to find autographed copies. Store employee Lynn Mathews says Watterson's mother used to deliver the signed copies to raise money for charity or just to help the book shop. That ended when the cartoonist discovered that some ended up on eBay, she said.

The demand remains, though.

''I get a couple e-mails a month from people looking for signed books,'' said Jean Butler, Fireside's officer manager.

Watterson and his wife, Melissa, moved earlier this year from their home in the village -- a century house on a hill between downtown and the high school, where the mascot is a tiger.

As a child, Watterson knew he would be an astronaut or a cartoonist. ''I kept my options open until seventh grade, but when I stopped understanding math and science, my choice was made,'' he wrote in the introduction to ''The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.''

He loved ''Peanuts'' as a child and started drawing comics. He majored in political science at Kenyon. Thinking he could blend the two subjects, he became a political cartoonist but was fired from his first job at the Cincinnati Post after a few months. So he took a job designing car and grocery ads, but continued cartooning, even though several strip ideas were rejected.

But Universal liked ''Calvin and Hobbes'' and launched its run Nov. 18, 1985, in 35 newspapers. Calvin caught Hobbes in a tiger trap with a tuna sandwich in the first strip. He spent the next 10 years driving his parents crazy, annoying his crush, Susie Derkins, and playing make-believe as his alter egos Spaceman Spiff and Stupendous Man.

Many of the best moments, though, were time spent alone with his pal, Hobbes.

''The end of summer is always hard on me, trying to cram in all the goofing off I've been meaning to do,'' Calvin tells Hobbes in an Aug. 24, 1987 strip, the two sitting beneath a tree.

Watterson ended the strip on Dec. 31, 1995, with a statement: ''I believe I've done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels. I am eager to work at a more thoughtful pace, with fewer artistic compromises.''

The last strip shows Calvin and Hobbes sledding off after a new fallen snow. ''It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy ... let's go exploring!'' Calvin says in the final two panels.

Fans cried out in letters for Watterson to change his mind. Some, like Watterson's parents, say the funny pages haven't been the same since.

''It was like getting a letter from home,'' Jim Watterson says of reading his son's work each morning.

People continue to ask the Wattersons if their son will ever send Calvin and his buddy Hobbes on new adventures.

''He might draw something else, but he won't do that again,'' Kathryn Watterson says.

[Chuck Nessa]

Are the alts at the end?

[sjarrell]

This should be on everyone's shopping list:

Little Nemo in Slumberland

NYTimes review:

New York Times review

I've ordered mine, but it's not here yet...

[sjarrell]

The Times review, for those unregistered:

October 17, 2005

Restoring Slumberland

By SARAH BOXER

The book is so huge you have to crawl over it to read it. It's 21 inches long and 16 inches wide. And cartoonists from Matt Groening to Chris Ware are going nuts over it.

Winsor McCay published his first Little Nemo cartoon a century ago, on Oct. 15, 1905, in The New York Herald. The first panel shows a little boy in a nightshirt sitting up in bed staring at a clownish figure before him. The narration says: "Little Nemo had just fallen asleep when an Oomp appeared, who said, 'You are requested to appear before his majesty, Morpheus of Slumberland.' " The Oomp then presents Nemo with Somnus, a gentle horse to ride into Slumberland.

So began a fantastical comic about a sleeping boy. It was an instant critical success, but the public, especially children, were lukewarm. Since then, "Little Nemo in Slumberland" has found its public. In 1966, Little Nemo was featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many books of Nemo reproductions followed.

But Peter Maresca, a comics collector, wasn't happy, he said in a recent telephone interview. Even the best preserved pages of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" were fast deteriorating. Soon no one would be able to see them the way they originally looked. Mr. Maresca wanted, he said, to publish a selection of Little Nemo comics just the way they appeared in the Sunday funnies: in the same colors, on rough matte paper that looked like newsprint, and at the same size.

He approached numerous presses, but none would take it on, he explained. Finally he went to Art Spiegelman, the founder of Raw and the author of the very large comic book "In the Shadow of No Towers," who suggested that Mr. Maresca publish it himself. So he did. It cost him, he said, something close to "the price of a three-bedroom house in Kansas."

On the way to self-publishing "Little Nemo in S

lumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays!" (Sunday Press, $120), Mr. Maresca learned how much size really does matter to Little Nemo.

In the comic of Feb. 2, 1908, Little Nemo travels through Befuddle Hall, a place where everything is elongated. The panels are stretched and squeezed. The effect at full scale is disorienting, like a funhouse mirror. "You really have the stuff spinning around you when it's that big," Mr. Maresca said.

In the comic of Oct. 29, 1905, Little Nemo walks on stilts among flamingos. The panels become longer and longer as Little Nemo's situation becomes more perilous. Finally, as he falls in slow motion, the panels become progressively shorter. You can see this in smaller reproductions, Mr. Maresca explained, but the effect at full scale is different, enveloping you much the way a movie screen does.

"The idea of cinema was in McCay's mind," Mr. Maresca said. In the comic of May 22, 1910, Little Nemo walks in Martian air and it looks as if a movie camera were following him through space. As he moves forward, the background fades. (So do the speech balloons, as if the sound were growing dim.)

It's not only the grand cinematic things that come through at full scale. It's the little things too, like the words.

Not only can you actually read them, but you can also see how they were made. Consider the strip of July 17, 1910, in which two teams of hypnotists try to put a yellow blob, the Whang-Doodle, to sleep. If you look carefully, you will see that some of the letters in those speech bubbles are blue rather than black.

"At first I thought it was a mistake," Mr. Maresca said. When he took a closer look, though, he noticed that when the characters were close up, they spoke in loud black words. When they were far away they spoke in blue.

"A lot of people know more about Winsor McCay, the man, than I," Mr. Maresca said. "But few know Nemo better than I, panel for panel. I think McCay drew some of these pages in less time than it took me to restore them."

Even after assembling the best set of original funny pages that he could find, Mr. Maresca had to spend between 5 and 20 hours restoring each one. Some pages were so damaged that panels had to be redrawn.

Color accuracy was crucial. Usually, Mr. Maresca said, a printer will try to get maximum contrast by making the background sheets pure white. But since the background sheets of old newspapers are actually different yellows, thanks to variable fading, the colors in the artwork become distorted in the correction process.

Mr. Maresca ignored the imperfections in the newsprint and corrected only the color within the drawings. Then he put each on a new newsprint background. It was, he said, "a little crazy." He was after "an imperfect ideal." He said he wanted the finished product to look just as inconsistent as the original newspaper pages did.

Finally, he flew to Malaysia in order to watch the pages coming off the presses. It took 60 hours to print 5,000 books. And he stayed up through almost all of it. "There was one press check I slept through," he said, and when he awoke, "I freaked out." The page still rankles him. He wouldn't say which one it was. "You have to figure it out yourself."

On the Web site for the new book, sundaypressbooks.com, Mr. Spiegelman tried to explain just how different the big Little Nemo is from all the little Little Nemos. "I mean, it's as if somebody showed you a tabletop model of the Chrysler Building and said, 'It's just like that, only bigger.' "

Chris Ware, the author of "Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth" and the designer of some books of comic reprints, said in an e-mail message that he was rethinking the whole enterprise: "After this book, it just seems unacceptable and a disservice to the artist's memory to do it any other way."

You can't get much more perfectly imperfect than that.

[marcoliv]

Amazon will want my liver in exchange of shipping this to Brazil but i gotta order this for me really soon

the truth is that i have all the Calvin & Hobbes books in english and portuguese too

Marcus

[neveronfriday]

Amazon will want my liver in exchange of shipping this to Brazil but i gotta order this for me really soon 

the truth is that i have all the Calvin & Hobbes books in english and portuguese too 

Marcus

←

Believe me, you don't need your liver as much as you need this baby.

Just drink less and read more.

Cheers!

[Quincy]

For just today (December 4, 2007) Amazon has this set as the Deal of the Day.

$67.50.

Act fast if you want it at that price.

[Noj]

I couldn't resist, I love this strip. Thanks for the tip, Quincy!