5 out of 5

Scholastic edition

Ah, here are the goods, the later years of C&H.

So, again, there’s no need to really review the strip so much as the presentation and contents.

To the presentation: the Scholastic editions of the book are the long-form, allowing the panels to appear full-size.  The cover is glossy but flexible, and similarly, the pages are of thinner stock than the square books, but the quality of the paper is great, bright contrasts and allowing for good blending and richness of the color panels.  The over-size is a plus/minus: I love how big the book is, but it’s never been a great size for reading in your lap (the spine will weigh it down and it’ll flip-closed or fall to the side), and holding it and reading it is something of a balancing act if you don’t want to fold it over.  So it’s made to sit on a kitchen table, appreciated while consuming a bowl of cheerios.  But – given that you have a good setup, the extra gutter buffer (is that the proper term for outside of the panels?) allows each strip to really pop and be drooled over, your eye sitting on it without feeling rushed to the next page.  And, as mentioned, Sunday strips presented in glorious color, richer than their newsprint counterparts.

Contents: the book is lacking in extras, but who cares when the strips are this good?  By this point in the strip, Watterson has established the character and so has no need to clearly delineate reality from fantasy for Calvin, nor does he always have to end it on a smile, allowing his cynicism to ring through loud and proud.  Calvin’s voice has evolved from snarky kid with inadvertently spouted wistful gems into a direct way for Watterson to view the world through the less distilled eyes and ears of childhood.  It’s a subtle shift – the strip is still totally family friendly, but reading it side by side with older strips makes the evolution fairly apparent.  It’s a glorious thing to be established.

Art-wise Bill also grew that much more comfortable by this point, thinning up his inks to give us a clearer view of his precise and yet sketchy style.

I suppose there’s not many Calvin tropes in this collection – just a couple G.R.O.S.S. appearances – but who cares?  Totally one of the most re-and-re-and-re-readable collection of the strip.