Thursday, February 14, 2008

Thanks, Mr Watterson

A recent post of mine, and the conversation that has resulted from it set me to thinking how many times Calvin & Hobbes cartoons have come up in posts on this blog. Turns out it's ten - or eleven, if you include this one. One thing I know - it could have been a lot more, only I guess I was afraid of becoming a one-trick pony.

Although Bill Watterson has retired from cartooning (and apparently now enjoys fishing with his Dad and waterolour painting) his cartoons are probably as popular as ever. I have a link in my aggregator that delivers me a daily dose of the precocious 6-year-old and his stuffed tiger/imaginary friend. It's a long time since the link delivered a strip I haven't already read, but I am no less amused by the reruns than I was by the originals, and, in fact, I see more depth in them now that I'm not just looking for a laugh.

There is so much about learning and teaching in the strip, that I once joked that I could write my dissertation on the subject, whereupon, somone immediately pointed me to the blog Learning and Teaching with Calvin and Hobbes. But here's an interesting exercise: go to Google and do a search on learning teaching "Calvin and Hobbes", but just make sure your jaw has something soft to land on when it drops. I kid you not, there is a book on the subject!

So just for auld lang syne, here is a list of my posts which reference Calvin & Hobbes, starting with the oldest. Sadly, some of the links don't work anymore, so the cartoon being referred to is unavailable. This is a sad reflection on the whole copyright issue. Not wanting to infringe copyright, I used links in the early posts, rather than lifting the strip itself. However, this meant that the link was at the mercy of the site hosting the strip. When they removed the target (which is surely bad netiquette?), there were repercussions all the way over here on my blog. C'est la vie.

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