Lets Go Exploring: Calvin and Hobbes [Paperback]

A fascinating investigation of a beloved comic strip

The internet is home to impassioned debates on just about everything, but there’s one thing that’s universally beloved: Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Until its retirement in 1995 after a ten-year run, the strip won numerous awards and drew tens of millions of readers from all around the world. The story of a boy and his best friend — a stuffed tiger — was a pitch-perfect distillation of the joys and horrors of childhood, and a celebration of imagination in its purest form. In Let’s Go Exploring, Michael Hingston mines the strip and traces the story of Calvin’s reclusive creator to demonstrate how imagination — its possibilities, its opportunities, and ultimately its limitations — helped make Calvin and Hobbes North America’s last great comic strip.

This book captures the joy and excitement at first discoveringCalvin and Hobbes, and the wistful sadness that it is no more.  Patton Oswalt

Spelunking through the daily strips and digging into its impact, Hingstons thorough survey of Wattersons masterpiece of sequential art is already one of the great essays on the medium. This is the bookCalvin & Hobbesloyalists have been waiting for.  Lee Henderson, author ofThe Road Narrows As You Go

I now know there wasnt anything particularly noteworthy about my experience with the strip. For a certain kind of kid in the late 80s and early 90sreasonably intelligent, prone to daydreaming, alternately curious and skeptical about this adult world their parents only gave them occasional glimpses ofCalvin and Hobbeswas a rlãÇ