Calvin & Hobbes

I just saw this article in the Washington Post, looking back on Calvin & Hobbes, ten years after the last strip came from Bill Watterson's pen. I must have read every strip Watterson ever wrote a half-dozen times, and just reading about it now makes me want to go back and read them again. I'm not sure that even now I can express exactly why they appeal so strongly to me. Parts of it, no doubt were the linguistic cleverness, the appeal of a Calvin's relationship with Hobbes, the limitless expanse of discovery the Calvin discovered beyond the worlds of house & school. Perhaps a deeper attraction, however, was the fact that Watterson pointed towards what I felt just had to be true, in his critique of materialism, of television, and the wonder he pointed to both in nature and in the imagination. C.S. Lewis wrote of how, in reading George MacDonald's fairy tales, his imagination was baptized. I suspect Calvin & Hobbes had a similar effect on me.