Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Bill Watterson’s newspaper strip Calvin & Hobbes features a hyper-imaginative six-year old boy called Calvin and his best friend Hobbes, who is either a stuffed toy tiger that he imagines is real, or a magical being nobody else can see, who appears only when Calvin is alone. Or maybe both. Or maybe some third possibility. Leaving this question up to the reader to solve via lots of sometimes ambiguous clues gives this series a uniquely powerful hook, and the blend of hilarious slapstick, philosophy, funny drawings and conceptual weirdness was a smash hit. Calvin & Hobbes was appearing in over 2,400 newspapers every week when Bill Watterson decided to end the series. The final Sunday page was printed on January 1, 1996 but the ten year run of strips continues to be reprinted daily worldwide.

The Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium is a new reprint series designed to be slipped into backpacks and carried around. It’s a cardboard slipcase containing two softcover books which slide out of the top of the package. Their landscape orientation is the standard layout for newspaper strip cartoon collections, allowing for four dailies to a spread. Each book is 144 pages, and together they present 500 black and while daily strips and colour Sunday strips. This first set runs from November 1985 through to March 1987.

Previous collections of Calvin and Hobbes come in two forms: the hefty Complete Calvin and Hobbes in three hardcover volumes or four softcover volumes, and the original series of softcovers which were released yearly during the original run. All of these are much more expensive than this new series of books which are nicely packaged and priced to make them very accessible to new readers and existing fans alike. The Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium is a very convenient way to rediscover this classic strip, and if you haven’t read it before you have some great reading ahead, at a very reasonable price.