Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 by Bill WattersonAndrews McMeel Publishing, 2001

My boyfriend checked this book, which is a catalog that accompanied a 2001/2002 Bill Watterson show at The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, out of the library and thought it’d be fun to read together. I think he was a little surprised that I didn’t have a strong connection to Calvin and Hobbes from my childhood. I don’t know: I read the Sunday comics at my grandparents’ house, including Calvin and Hobbes, but Calvin was such a boy, and so active, and I was a girl, and bookish, and I wasn’t really into any comics, except for The Far Side. But reading comics together sounded like fun, so I agreed to make an exception to the TBR Double Dog Dare rules for this, and I’m glad I did. The book contains 36 Sunday Calvin and Hobbes strips from between 1985 and 1995, chosen by Bill Watterson, preceded by a short preface by the show’s curator and an introduction by Watterson himself. Each strip is presented twice on facing pages, once in the original black and white and once in the final colored version. Some strips include more commentary from Watterson, and it’s fun to see his thoughts on either individual comics or other things, like the challenge of making a Sunday comic that will be run in different sizes/formats by different papers. My favorite thing in the book is the “homicidal psycho jungle cat” strip from 1993, but I liked the whole thing. And oh, the neo-Cubist strip is also pretty great!