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Another year that ends and another that will begin with many resolutions and hopes, but also with more uncertainty than ever.
Every year is hard because you always have to mourn the loss of loved ones, but they are also 365 more days of learning and experiences that will always be with you and that will shape your personality, your character and your way of facing life.
Like every December 31, The Grandma will congratulate Mallorcan family and friends who are celebrating the Festa de l'Estendard, Mallorca's National Day, today and will climb her most beloved peak to celebrate this passage of the year as close to the stars as possible. And once they arrive at the refuge, there will be no shortage of a good meal for dinner, a guitar, a harmonica and a violin to play and a good book to read.
Before preparing this mountain kit, The Grandma has decided to read one of the most extraordinary comics ever created, Calvin and Hobbes, a true philosophical masterpiece created by Bill Watterson that stopped being published on a day like today in 1995.
More information: Go Comics
Calvin and Hobbes is a daily American comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995.
Commonly described as the last great newspaper comic, Calvin and Hobbes has enjoyed enduring popularity and influence while also attracting significant academic and philosophical interest.
Calvin and Hobbes follows the humorous antics of the title characters: Calvin, a mischievous and adventurous six-year-old boy; and his friend Hobbes, a stuffed tiger. Set in the suburban United States of the 1980s and 1990s, the strip depicts Calvin's frequent flights of fancy and friendship with Hobbes. It also examines Calvin's relationships with his long-suffering parents and with his classmates, especially his neighbor Susie Derkins. Hobbes's dual nature is a defining motif for the strip: to Calvin, Hobbes is a living anthropomorphic tiger, while all the other characters seem to see Hobbes as an inanimate stuffed toy, though Watterson has not clarified exactly how Hobbes is perceived by others, or whether he is real or an imaginary friend. Though the series does not frequently mention specific political figures or ongoing events, it does explore broad issues like environmentalism, public education, and philosophical quandaries.
At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. As of 2010, reruns of the strip appeared in more than 50 countries, and nearly 45 million copies of the Calvin and Hobbes books had been sold worldwide.
the first Calvin and Hobbes strip was published on November 18, 1985 in 35 newspapers. The strip quickly became popular. Within a year of syndication, the strip was published in roughly 250 newspapers and proved to have international appeal with translation and wide circulation outside the United States.
Calvin and Hobbes had almost no official product merchandising. Watterson held that comic strips should stand on their own as an art form and although he did not start out completely opposed to merchandising in all forms (or even for all comic strips), he did reject an early syndication deal that involved incorporating a more marketable, licensed character into his strip. In spite of being an unproven cartoonist, and having been flown all the way to New York to discuss the proposal, Watterson reflexively resented the idea of cartooning by committee and turned it down.
Watterson has expressed admiration for animation as an artform. In a 1989 interview in The Comics Journal he described the appeal of being able to do things with a moving image that cannot be done by a simple drawing: the distortion, the exaggeration and the control over the length of time an event is viewed. However, although the visual possibilities of animation appealed to Watterson, the idea of finding a voice for Calvin made him uncomfortable, as did the idea of working with a team of animators. Ultimately, Calvin and Hobbes was never made into an animated series.
The strip borrows several elements and themes from three major influences: Walt Kelly's Pogo, George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. Schulz and Kelly particularly influenced Watterson's outlook on comics during his formative years.
Watterson's technique started with minimalist pencil sketches drawn with a light pencil (though the larger Sunday strips often required more elaborate work) on a piece of Bristol board, with his brand of choice being Strathmore because he felt it held the drawings better on the page as opposed to the cheaper brands (Watterson said he initially used any cheap pad of Bristol board his local supply store had but switched to Strathmore after he found himself growing more and more displeased with the results).
He would then use a small sable brush and India ink to fill in the rest of the drawing, saying that he did not want to simply trace over his penciling and thus make the inking more spontaneous. He lettered dialogue with a Rapidograph fountain pen, and he used a crowquill pen for odds and ends. Mistakes were covered with various forms of correction fluid, including the type used on typewriters.
Watterson was careful in his use of colour, often spending a great deal of time in choosing the right colors to employ for the weekly Sunday strip; his technique was to cut the colour tabs the syndicate sent him into individual squares, lay out the colors, and then paint a watercolor approximation of the strip on tracing paper over the Bristol board and then mark the strip accordingly before sending it on. When Calvin and Hobbes began there were 64 colours available for the Sunday strips. For the later Sunday strips Watterson had 125 colours as well as the ability to fade the colours into each other.
Reviewing Calvin and Hobbes in 1990, Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker gave the strip an A+ rating, writing Watterson summons up the pain and confusion of childhood as much as he does its innocence and fun.
More information: The Mitchigan Daily
I'll bet they'd live a lot differently.
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