The Tiger Strikes Again

People still remember because it was never worse than good, and was often simply brilliant. It parodied the issues of the day, the materialism, the greed-is-good cynicism, the pointlessness of television, the rampaging egos, the growing crassness of public intercourse, the bad behavior, our infinitesimal place in the universe. There was also time for snacks and a bedtime story.

" 'Calvin and Hobbes' is probably one of the last great American comic strips," says Dirk Deppey, editor of the Comics Journal.

A generation earlier, "Peanuts" reshaped the comics world by imagining children with interior psychological lives in a neighborhood devoid of adults. Charlie Brown was a kid on the verge of midlife crisis. There was a beagle who fancied himself a fighter pilot.

"Calvin and Hobbes," the best kid strip since, worked on the conceit that Hobbes was a stuffed animal to everyone in the world but Calvin, an only child. Only when he and Calvin are alone in the panel does Hobbes spring to life -- a tiger who walks on two feet, makes cheesecake grins at girls and appears to be more mature than Calvin by oh, about an hour and a half.

They wrestle, pull the covers back and forth at bedtime and make goofy faces at one another while sitting in the back seat of the family car -- best friends of the type boys no longer have after age 12. The only other kids in the strip were Susie, who lived around the block, and Moe, the school bully. Calvin's parents did not have names. They lived in a house that had a sort of American foursquare sensibility to it, in a nameless town that seemed lost on the Midwestern prairie. It all bespoke a certain Sunday-afternoon loneliness. (Hobbes was Calvin's imagination, right? His alter ego? Which means the whole thing is just Calvin talking to himself? Nobody knows; Watterson never made it clear.)

The childish exuberance, the adult cynicism, the gorgeous colors in the Sunday panels. Hyper-literate third graders read it, overweight taxi drivers in El Paso read it, terminally hip people wearing black in Manhattan read it.

It was a brilliant blue flame of creativity that startled Watterson's friends.

"He wasn't exactly a ball of laughs," says Richard West, a comics historian and author who has known Watterson since college. "Where did this stuff come from? I don't know. I didn't see the genius in his day-to-day personality."

Watterson, in the book's introduction: "Hobbes got all my better qualities (with a few quirks from our cats), and Calvin my ranting, escapist side. Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary . . . it's pretty startling to reread these strips ands see my personality exposed so plainly right there on paper. I meant to disguise that better."

Well. It's not that the man was ever overexposed -- and that was before he did the Garbo thing.

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It is 1988. The strip has been going for three years. The phone rings at Universal Press Syndicate. It is Steven Spielberg's assistant. Mr. Spielberg would very much like to speak to Mr. Watterson.