A New Kind of Calvinism

Christianity Today ^ | January/February 2007 | Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

[Alex Murphy]

First you have to heft it. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes feels like a critical edition. It's the work of ten years, once at a peak circulation of 2,400 newspapers, 3,160 strips in all, first collected in 17 books with 30 million copies already in print, now assembled in a 22-and-a-half pound, three-volume set running to 1,440 pages. Every strip—from the beginning in November 1985 to the last day of 1995—plus every cover from the individual collections, as well as the bonus material in the treasury collections, finds its place here. The CC&H has a few things the previous publications lack, such as colored Sunday panels from Attack of the Killer Monster Snow Goons, a new essay by Watterson with some kinder words about Universal Syndicate (with whom he battled for years over licensing rights), and early comic incarnations of Calvin with his hair in his eyes like the eventual bully Moe. If it is still a trifle less than Compleat—it lacks the commentary of The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book and the black-and-white originals of Sunday pages in the gallery edition of Calvin and Hobbes Sunday Pages 1985-1995—it is an impressive testimony to the cultural significance of the strip all the same.

Calvin and Hobbes thus bookended stands as an oeuvre, a body of work, and inevitably invites scholarship. Calvin himself set the stage for it with his infamous report on "Bats: The Big Bug Scourge of the Skies," and his academically adept book report, "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes." And so, at this inauguration of a new wave of Calvinism, and in honor of the icon of total depravity himself, a few predictions about the future of the field are in order.

[Alex Murphy]

from MUCH later in the article...

Taking that cue, the theologians will indulge in exegesis of a more elevated nature. Calvin, avowedly named for his predestinarian predecessor, is a bit mystified about the whole Santa Claus thing. "Why all the secrecy? Why all the mystery?" he wonders. "If the guy exists, why doesn't he ever show himself and prove it? And if he doesn't exist, what's the meaning of all this?" Hobbes, scratching his head, remembers that Christmas is a religious holiday, but Calvin counters that he has the same questions about God. Two strips later, though, he's made a Pascalian wager: it's worth it to him to believe if the end result is tons of loot.

[Lee N. Field]

Christianity Today | January/February 2007 | Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Christianity Astray is bimonthly now? How have the mighty fallen!

Back when I subscribed, it was fortnightly, and I remember Cornelius van Til being on the cover.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***The Complete Calvin and Hobbes feels like a critical edition.****

My favorite comic strip. My favorite set of books. he reminds me of me too many years ago.

[siunevada]

Still, every Christmas without fail, Calvin is acquitted of his crimes and showered with gifts, even when he learns the wrong lesson from it. A parable of God's love for the sinner and justification by faith, not works, the theologians infer—good Calvinism, indeed.