The Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book: Solemn Wonder.

There's no sedative like seeing a tiger lying in the sun.
- Calvin

Why is it that I can recall a cigarette ad jingle from 25 years ago, but I can't remember what I just got up to do?
- Calvin's Dad

I don't care about being accepted. I'd settle for being ignored.
- Calvin

In The Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, there's a Sunday strip that opens with a sketch of a felled bird, drawn like piano wire stretched and contorted over opaque nothingness. The gentle, ebony-night eyes and ink-dark, shadowy plumes are exact. There is a grass-blade-shadow-thin, one-dimensional quality to Bill Watterson's drawing. Next panel: enter Calvin and his tiger chum.

Calvin: Look, a dead bird!
Hobbes: It must've hit the window.
Calvin: Isn't it beautiful? It's so delicate.
Calvin:(next panel.) Sighhh. Once it's too late, you appreciate what a miracle Life is.(Next panel.)You realize that Nature is ruthless and our existence is very fragile, temporary, and precious.(Next panel.)But to go on with your daily affairs, you can't really think about that.(Next panel.)Which is probably why everyone takes the world for granted and why we act so thoughtlessly.
Calvin: It's very confusing.(Next panel.)I suppose it will all make sense when we grow up.
Hobbes: No doubt.

The last panel shows Hobbes and Calvin lolling beneath a tree dripping leaves, watching birds skitter up the sky. The hollow, glassy bottle tones of the water color work well in this strip, never quite scurrying up the palette to cheerful brightness. How beautiful, yet how filled with icy-veined horror. There is no time spent pining over lost innocence. The humorlessness of the last scene is particularly effective. There is a tendency for writers to brood over Death. Brooding is a pensive, mental run around. It accomplishes nothing. Watterson presents the truth in a quiet, crystalline moment. I like Calvin's musings on dreary-eyed death. The best way to tell a story is not through clumsy words, but through visuals, as is illustrated in this strip. The absence of wordy dialogue hammers home the numbing power of Watterson's art. Calvin & Hobbes thrums and whirs with sheer pictorial beauty. The best strips are the ones where Watterson wipes away all word balloons and lets us drink in the experience through our retinas. We pace out the length of our lives, all the time shying from what lurks at the end. I'm not going to run up and embrace it, but I'm also not going to ignore it.

Artistic skill and fluidity of thought are accumulative, not instantaneous: tracing over and scrubbing out line after line until one can bang out drawings and deal out words with relative ease. Calvin looks a bit like a troll doll in the early strips, his exaggerated feet and swelled head bordering on caricature. His haircut resembles the pencil-point do of one Bart Simpson. Hobbes seems in active revolt against his fellow quadrapeds, preferring to lope about on hindlegs and munch toast while reading comic books. Watterson effaced out the black blots on Hobbes' front paws that were supposed to be paw pads after a while.

Calvin's world is gorgeously animated: watery blankness of sky, starfishlike leaves, scratchy branches clutching handfuls of azure. Watterson douses us with landscapes gaunt and grey with melancholy. Tucked behind those expressionless Os that are Calvin's eyes, is a world as bizarre and novel as the lunar surface, a world of pretend. Calvin dwells in a soap bubble of imagination, never quite snapping out of it and into reality. He pretends he is a blobby octopus, a self-narrating spacefarer. He concocts a cardboard transmogrifier that goes awry and spits out dozens of copies of himself like some crazed human assembly line. Calvin's world is stained with surrealness.

Calvin is our perspective, our peephole into the hostile and forbidden world of grownups(Calvin's parent drone on tediously like a sewer grate slurping rain water), and the mystical world that is Bill Watterson's brain. An observant writer always has his ear tuned in to the inner-hum of the world's machinery. Watterson populates his world with enigmatic characters: the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, Moe. Susie, with her boyish haircut and six year-old sensibility, the dour Rosalyn. Some strips ladle out the sentimentality in hefty dollops. Others are barely a blip on the intellectual radar. Watterson is neither. His is a bleak honesty, rarely achieved. There are moments of eye-twinkling merriment in Calvin & Hobbes, dialogue edged with whipcrack wit. "I am significant," shouts Calvin to the star-sequined sky. Then he mutters," Said the dust speck." His human ego is squelched by the awesomeness of the universe. A good writer is always probing and searching about like a fly's proboscis for universal truth. Watterson has found the mother lode. Writing is a welling-up in the mind, that jolts the creative process into motion, causing experience to jump from pen and paint brush, to paper. Watterson always said he never had to trek much beyond his own backyard before the electric bolt of creativity would strike. We are the richer for his efforts.