The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes A Calvin and Hobbes treasury

A good comic strip is more like good candy than like good wine. It's a lot better to gobble a big bunch of it all at one sitting instead of appreciatively ruminating over it once a day. (Don't tell the newspapers about this, though; they might "economize" further by dropping the comics altogether--heck, they already print 'em small enough for the microform editions of their rags!)"The Fusco Brothers" is new kid on the block in Hilarity Heights where all the funniest funnies dwell. This is just the second collection of the strip, and it proves that Duffy, while no more artistically gifted than Garry Trudeau ("Doonesbury") or Nicole Hollander ("Sylvia"), is hands down the comic strip master of the snappy comeback. Roseanne Arnold lifts nary a waxen torch to him, and unlike her sitcom, Duffy's strip doesn't have to muck about in sentiment occasionally to "humanize" its characters. The four least eligible bachelors in New Jersey; their dog-cum-teenager-who-thinks-he's-a-wolverine, Axel; and the uniformly sarcastic women the siblings court (especially Lance Fusco's steady, Gloria) are here solely to put each other down via sarcasm, wordplay, willful misunderstanding--you name it, they say it. They're comic strip characters, after all. Why be sensitive? Just be funny. And they are, they are.Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" is another strip altogether. Funny pretty consistently, sentimental seldom but appealingly, artistically stunning quite often, it's knocked "Peanuts" from the pedestal of comic strip popularity as the one comic everybody can (should!) love. This big collection gathers the contents of The Revenge of the Baby-Sat (Andrews and McMeel, 1991) and Scientific Progress Goes "Boink" (Andrews and McMeel, 1991), prints all the Sunday installments in color, and prefaces the lot with some verses by Calvin, which show him to have a pretty good grasp of meter and rhyme (accompanied by more pictures by Watterson). ~--Ray Olson