AND AND AND

Complete Calvin And Hobbes, dudes! Eep!

I've got all the paperbacks, but they've been damaged over a lifetime. Some are probably in great shape, the others I kind of want to pick up over the future from remainder tables where they are frequently found.

It's a slipcase with three hardcovers. It doesn't say anything about the bonus material, the full-color stuff from the treasury editions. All of those really should be in there.

But the main thing is that the image on Amazon showing this thing for sale is Calvin and Hobbes, and they're just hugging, and there's no background to speak of, just white negative space.

Seriously: If you don't like Calvin And Hobbes, I don't even want to know you. I say that for a lot of things, but the other things in question aren't nearly as popular. (I've said it about The Triplets Of Belleville, to name but one example.) If you never had one of the collections in your youth which you've spent bored evenings and the holidays you received them poring over, I recommend going and buying one post-haste. It's amazing how much I've read these and how often I can find a joke that still makes me laugh when I look back over them. Really, you should all have all the material to your name already.

The stuff in the Snow Goons book (abbreviated solely because I can't remember the full title) never got the good treatment. The first six books that were in the squat square format had treasury editions, but the Snow Goons book existed after those were stopped being made, but before the conversion to the ideal format, of two strips per elongated page. Those later books also printed them at the biggest size. I really hope that's the format for these hardcovers.

How much great art is friendly to both children and the elderly? There's a handful of comic strips which are great art: Notably Krazy Kat and The Far Side, but both of those are frequently kind of inpenetrable. Honestly, Calvin And Hobbes is one of the best things ever, and it really bums me out that my books are in New Jersey, and not here, in my dorm, where I live. And I mean, sure, my one roommate has all the books. But hoo, but for my own. Honestly, it some ways, that comic strip is like a stuffed animal that comes to life in your mind and talks to you. That's not even a stretch to say. The books themselves, as a physical prescence, are the stuffed animal, and I'm pretty sure I have the days spent in bed to prove it, whereas the comics and the content and all the jokes and ideas and all of that forms a dialogue with the reader. The same could be said of any book or any piece of art with intense connections to one's personal history, but very few things from my childhood hold up as well, and so it wins. Over and over again, it wins.