Let's Go Exploring
A fascinating investigation of a beloved comic strip.
The internet is home to impassioned debates on just about everything, but there’s one thing that’s universally beloved: Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Until its retirement in 1995 after a ten-year run, the strip won numerous awards and drew tens of millions of readers from all around the world. The story of a boy and his best friend—a stuffed tiger—was a pitch-perfect distillation of the joys and horrors of childhood, and a celebration of imagination in its purest form. In Let’s Go Exploring, Michael Hingston mines the strip and traces the story of Calvin’s reclusive creator to demonstrate how imagination—its possibilities, its opportunities, and ultimately its limitations—helped make Calvin and Hobbes North America’s last great comic strip.
(Part of the Pop Classics series.)
DETAILS
Release date: May 1, 2018
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 978-1-77041-413-6
PRESS
#1 Regional Bestseller
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"This book captures the joy and excitement at first discovering Calvin and Hobbes, and the wistful sadness that it is no more."
—Patton Oswalt
"Spelunking through the daily strips and digging into its impact, Hingston's thorough survey of Watterson's masterpiece of sequential art is already one of the great essays on the medium. This is the book Calvin and Hobbes loyalists have been waiting for."
—Lee Henderson, author of The Road Narrows As You Go
"Hingston does a great job of reconnecting, or introducing, readers to the popular comic strip and articulating the magnetism of its characters and key moments in Calvin and Hobbes’s history... [a] smart, lively critique."
—Booklist
"Wise and love-driven... full of observations, analysis and well-researched history."
—Edmonton Journal
"Fascinating insights and findings... this is a treat."
—Avenue magazine
"[Hingston] builds his book out of the source material and existing interviews, and avoids getting too swept up in his own feelings for the strip."
—National Post
"His insights are rich and concise, but he never commandeers the work, as is the habit with writing about pop culture. As a critic, Hingston uses light touches of salt to bring out the flavours already in the work... A fine companion to a comic about a kid without much interest in companionship."
—Bookshelf News