I don't normally include any cartoons here, but I just read through every Calvin & Hobbes strip ever published and that beats your average book by whatever measure, be it total pages, time required, enjoyment, whatever. So I decided to include it.

First things first: C&H is obviously one of my all time favorite cartoons, don't let the following criticisms fool you in any way in that regard. That out of the way, reading Watterson's whole production in one piece gives you a pretty good idea about his values. And I think his values need some finetuning. Quite often, he seems to imply that "we", or I guess he means "American society", has drifted away from some "golden age" when things were perfect, and that we should return to that age. Of course there never was a golden age, so longing for that is stupid.

Then there's the matter of Calvin's mom. She doesn't seem to do anything besides staying home and looking after Calvin. Not exactly the sort of thing we should encourage as we approach the 21th century...Linked to that, there's the constant refusal to acknowledge the progress of technology. Isn't in quite unbelievable that by the strip's end, start of 1996, Calvin's parents still hadn't gotten even a VCR? And the constant remarks about how machines supposedly haven't improved our lives the way they were supposed to. Umm, yeah, right. Try living in a cave or a wooden hut and see how you last without the modern conveniences.

And last, but not least. One of the most important themes in C&H have been the attacks against the superficiality of modern world and how people don't care about complex issues etc. Then in the next strip Watterson attacks nuclear power, usually in the form of "yeah but about the nuclear waste?". One's forced to answer, "Yeah, what about it?" Watterson hasn't followed through in his own logic and done the research to see which is more dangerous, fossil fuels or nuclear energy.

Looking back at all these comments, it's surprising to see how much I disagree with Watterson's ideology. But most of the time the strip doesn't deal with these issues. Snowfights with Susie, dinosaur strips, spaceman spiff strips, snow-art strips, etc etc, are the most common type. And those are the best ones. Who could forget the classic "Tyrannosaurs in F14's" strip? It's strips like that that make C&H the classic that it is.