Review by Woodrow Phoenix

The ten years of strips created by Bill Watterson featuring a boy and his tiger have been a constant presence in the newspapers of the world since they first appeared in syndication in 1985. There are two large archival sets containing the whole classic series for readers to treasure in hard and softcovers, but those are big, and ideally need a table to read them on. Nobody would argue that Watterson’s brilliance doesn’t deserve that level of respect and more, but there was definitely room for something more casual and impulse-friendly.

Readability and portability are the two weapons making The Calvin and Hobbes Portable Compendium Set an easy sell in a nearly irresistible package. Each volume of this reprint series features two softcover books in landscape format, housed in a cardboard slipcase. The slipcase is nominally portrait orientation, with the two books sliding in and out of the top, but the spines are have the title information on them from every side, so readers can put them on their bookshelves in either way that suits them.

Set 4 of this compact collection features 500 daily and Sunday comic strips presented chronologically from December 1989 to April 1991, in black and white for the dailies and full colour for the Sundays. The four strips to a page layout means they are reproduced at a nice size, considerably larger than they appear in newspapers, and the surprisingly reasonable price for these sets mean the whole package couldn’t be more attractive to old and new readers. If you haven’t read this series before, you have missed out, but now is the time to remedy that. Start here.