(This is the first in what I hope will become a bi weekly (depending on how fast I read) series of reviews of the things I am reading. I do not claim to be a professional critic, so make of these reviews what you will, and with the exception of a few longer Graphic Novels I have on the docket, everything else will be prose. All of the What I am Reading” reviews will begin with one of the three grades I give out, “Recommend”, “Don’t Recommend” or “Recommend BUT”)

Recommend But

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes was a very conflicting book. As a die hard Calvin and Hobbes fan, I WANT this book to be wonderful, and it has moments where it is a great book, but these moment are very few and far between. The biggest drawback that the book has is that there just is not enough information on Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin And Hobbes, to fill even a hundred and 150 pages, much less the 240 this book is. All of these extra pages are filled with descriptions of various strips and with interview after interview with other cartoonists, most of whom never met Watterson, or if they had only briefly, and there is just so many times you can read, “Calvin and Hobbes was so inspiring, I wish it was still being made.” (there is actually a whole chapter of these interviews.)

The other thing Martell does to pad his book, is he uses adjectives and lofty language, that is often used incorrectly or awkwardly. For example, while explaining one strip he refers to Calvin’s wagon as archetypal. this begs the question, what about the wagon is an archetype? Where else is this archetype used in the history of human story telling? This gets even more frustrating where later in the book Martell explains that nothing like Calvin’s wagon and sled rides had ever taken place. This is a minor criticism, and I came across two or three other little examples of a word used incorrectly, which made me wonder more about the editor of the book then Martell.  While these errors alone didn’t ruin this book, it took me out of the reading every time I hit one, and I hate that.

This is not to say that the book is without merits, infact at points it was extremely interesting. These moments happen when Martell is actually telling the story of Watterson. He goes into great detail about Watterson’s high school and college years, and then into his failed attempts to get a comic syndicated. It is these sections where Martell as the writer shines.  He is smart enough to get out of the way and let the story be told. (The struggle that Watterson has to keep his comic from being merchandised is particularly well written.)

In the end I don’t know where to rate this book, and since I have decided that my grading scale is going to be “Recommend,” “Don’t recommend,” or “Recommend BUT,” I am going to have to go with Recommend BUT, only the most hard core of Calvin and Hobbes fans should read this book, and of the book they should not be afraid to skip the chapters where Bill Watterson’s story is not being told, these sections are a total waste of time.

Good reading,
John K.