Books: The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book

"Calvin & Hobbes" by Bill Watterson is my favorite comic strip - I grew up with it during the '90s, and I remember feeling a profound sense of loss when it ended (well, as profound a sense of loss as a middle-schooler can feel for a comic strip). While I had literally read every "Calvin & Hobbes" strip ever drawn through the acquisition of a number of the collections, I was still hungry for more.

Thankfully, I noticed the Tenth Anniversary Book sitting on a bookshelf one day. While the book doesn't actually contain any new strips, it does come packed full of Watterson's commentary on the process of creating the strip itself, including his ruinous battle with Universal Press Syndicate over the format of the Sunday strips. Judging from the sales of special edition DVDs, I know I'm not the only one into this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff, so it was nice to see it for my favorite comic.

One interesting note: I was inspired to become a lawyer partly through "Calvin and Hobbes." While basing a future career on a comic strip probably isn't what they tell you to do at Career Services, the indelible image of Calvin's dad as a patent attorney is still with me today.

Of course, Calvin had a pretty cynical view of the legal profession.