But curiously, the most melancholic comic strip that I've encountered emerges neither from the alternative weeklies nor from the distant past, but from perhaps the most celebrated and mainstream of the mainstream comics: "Calvin and Hobbes."
It is hard to understand why "Calvin and Hobbes" has developed so firmly a middlebrow reputation, though I suspect it has something to do with the countless decals of Calvin mischievously urinating on the back windows of S.U.V.'s. (All bootlegs, by the way. To his syndicate's chagrin, the creator Bill Watterson refused to sign off on any merchandising apart from books. "If I'd wanted to sell plush garbage, I'd have gone to work as a carny," he said in a rare interview he gave to Comics Journal in 1989.)John Hodgman laments the current state of comic strips in the Sunday
Times, recommending some collected classics in time for the holidays. No, not just the
Complete Calvin & Hobbes--that one's already taken care of, no?
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