Posts Tagged ‘individual

17
Dec
09

My Top 5 Calvin & Hobbes Christmas Cartoons

There really isn’t much going on today. The office is totally dead and to be honest it’s pretty damn depressing, so I’ve been doing what I always do when I get depressed, reading Calvin & Hobbes!

In my opinion Calvin & Hobbes is the best comic strip that was ever written. Bill Watterson did mankind a huge favour by drawing and writing these stories about a kid genius and his imaginary tiger friend.

And so I thought I’d share my Top 5 Calvin & Hobbes Christmas Cartoons with you guys cause I’m your imaginary tiger friend and it seemed fitting 😉

Once you’ve read these, you have to visit this site:

http://progressiveboink.com/archive/calvinhobbes.htm 

It’s the 25 best Calvin & Hobbes strips all collected and annotated, but it’s the annotations that really struck a chord in me. Take the following excerpt for example, it perfectly sums up why I love Calvin and have always identified 100% with him:

“If you think about it, Calvin was really quite an anomaly in popular entertainment — not just in comics, but in anything, be it movies, TV, etc. He has no friends, and no extracurricular activities; the only people he ever sees are his parents, who he has a strained relationship with, and Moe, Susie, Rosalyn, and Miss Wormwood, all of whom he detests and all of whom detest him. The only person he ever has any real interaction with exists only in his head. He is, for all intents and purposes, completely alone. And he’s fine with that. The kind of kid most people would entirely ignore all through school is not generally the kind you make the star of your show, and yet the strip became hugely successful.

I know that people of all ages enjoyed Calvin and Hobbes, but I have to think that it meant even more to those of us who grew up with him. Going to school every day and seeing all the ways we didn’t fit in, it was nice to see someone like us, who was intelligent and independent, and didn’t need to be a smile-plastered Mouseketeer to enjoy life. Though numerous motivational posters and guidance councelors and after-school specials had said it again and again, it was Calvin who managed to truly express the idea—without being preachy, without being sappy, perhaps even without trying—that it was okay to be different.”

Enough preamble! Here are my five favourite Calvin & Hobbes Christmas cartoons, enjoy 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And my all-time favourite Calvin & Hobbes Christmas cartoon:

 

 

-ST