![]() ![]() No cartoonist – no writer I know of – has ever better captured the thrills, defeats, fantasies, and terrors of childhood better than Bill Watterson. Rainy days, snow days, summer afternoons, Christmas Eve – they were all best accented by Watterson’s brilliantly imaginative strip. ![]() They accompanied me on my family’s many trips (including more than one camping trip resembling the ones Calvin’s family takes), were devoured along with a hoard of candy inside makeshift forts under dining room tables, were pored over by flashlight inside a cozy nest of blankets on late winter nights. They contributed significantly to my sense of humor, my creativity, and my vocabulary. I consumed them, rereading every page in every book more times than I can count. To say these books had an impact on me would be a gross understatement. Over the next few years, I amassed the entire collection. ![]() ![]() In 1990, at eight years old, I bought the second book in the series – Something Under the Bed Is Drooling – with my own money from Waldenbooks in the now shuttered Salem Mall in Trotwood, Ohio. I was too young to read Calvin and Hobbes when it was first syndicated in newspapers in 1985, so I caught up with the series through the annual books that were published during the strip’s ten-year run. It would be hard to overstate the influence Bill Watterson’s work had on me when I was growing up. ![]()
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