Review by Woodrow Phoenix

The Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium is a new reprint series for this classic newspaper strip. It 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 that nobody else can see, who appears only when Calvin is alone. Or maybe both. Or maybe some third possibility. Previous collections of Calvin & Hobbes come in three hardcover volumes or four softcover volumes, and/or the original series of softcovers which were released yearly during the original run.

This new series is packaged and priced to make them very accessible. Each Portable Compendium is 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. 144 pages present 500 black and while daily strips and colour Sunday strips. Featuring sixteen months of strips from March 1987 to July 1988, this is the second set in a planned series of seven.

The Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium is a very convenient way to rediscover Bill Watterson’s classic series. The strips are printed much larger than they appear in newspapers today, allowing a good look at Watterson’s brilliant cartooning, while the two books together in their slipcase are neatly compact enough to easily slip into a backpack or bag, and extremely good value at list price. New readers can start here, and previous fans will find the convenience of this format hard to resist.