A simple one today.
Does anyone do winter better than Calvin & Hobbes?
All I had to do was read a Christmas comic.
And yes, I got a good laugh out of it.
It’s what makes these comics so great. There was a whole world. What’s the noodle incident? Who knows? Do I need to actually see that the dad is a sarcastic asshole to know what’s going on here? No way. It’s all on the page, all this world-building and history in a small space.
I feel like Christmas was and is about connecting to childhood, and I think those sort of limitations, that was a lot of what my childhood was about. How small everything was Video games had to throw huge worlds and ideas into a tiny cartridge. Everything was so limited. I just heard this crazy thing. You know how at the beginning of a Sega game, you get that little theme? That chorus of voices saying “Say-guh”?
That took 1/8 of the cartridge space on Sonic the Hedgehog. A couple seconds, that was approaching 10% of an entire game. That’s amazing.
Calvin & Hobbes had to build this whole world, this whole identity with a few squares. A teeny, tiny space in the newspaper. Not only that, most comic strips had to work under the theory that anyone could pick up a paper and be seeing Calving & Hobbes for the first time. They needed to be able to walk in without knowing a thing and still get a laugh out of it.
It’s an interesting metaphor for a lot of Christmas. We all want to get a package, something that might fit in your hand, and pack a lot of meaning into it. Fill a stocking, a sock basically, with stuff that changes how a person feels.
Did Calvin & Hobbes change how I feel about Christmas.
Yeah. A little.
It made me consider the idea of doing a lot of work in a small window. Christmas Eve, Christmas day, and then it’s over.
Now, it’s a little ruined by the way Christmas starts way too fucking early. I’m hearing a shitty Frank Sinatra “Jingle Bells” right now. Give me a goddamn break. It’s still almost 20 days away.
And that makes me wonder, maybe the never-ending expansion kills some of the magic. The idea of the world being transformed is appealing, but doing it slowly, that’s really not magical. It’s regular. It’s how stuff happens all the time.
Maybe I’d like this better if it happened more suddenly. If I saw a few lights, then one night just noticed they were goddamn everywhere. If a town instituted a day of light putting-up.
But then, how magic is enforced magic?
So I like Christmas a little better. But that’s a testament to the greatness of Bill Watterson more than anything.