When: closing May 28, 2018
I loved "Calvin and Hobbes." I miss it still. Other comics involving a young person and a pet or other companion do not compare. The artist Tony Lewis clearly shares my feelings about the strip, as he has used it in an exhibit now showing at the Hirshhorn.
He's covered all the drawings, and erased most of the dialog, to leave only a few words, which are now poems. Most of them are dark, which seems in contradiction to the light-hearted surface of the original comic. I think they reveal the darkness beneath - the death and sadness and isolation that was always there. Now you don't have to look for it.
I think some of the poems work better than others, and I found them sometimes hard to follow. I wasn't sure in what order the words were supposed to be read, so it's possible I didn't quite get the point of all of them.
My favorite was the one I photographed for this post - about monsters. It leaves in a big chunk of the original dialogue - "Thrashing about in a desperate bid for freedom, he only becomes more entangled!" Love that.
I chatted with two docents about the show afterwards and discovered that the husband of one of them went to college with Bill Watterson. To find out I'm now just three degrees of separation from him made my day. Almost as good as actually meeting Berkeley Breathed.
Verdict: Don't miss this show if you're a C&H fan.
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