Calvin and Hobbes - Yukon Ho - Side 5

This part contains Calvin's some dreams and imagination. Calvin has Hobbes tie him to a chair so he can practice being an escape artist, but he can’t get out so he’s stuck there till his parents find him. Calvin pretends he’s a T-rex in the library and gets kicked out. There’s some trouble with sneezing. He has to wear a tie and imagines he’s being executed in days of yore. Then there’s his adventure getting a Christmas tree with his mom and Dad tells him they aren’t decorating it this year. They’ll keep it out in the garage. The joke doesn’t play so well. Then there’s the excitement of Christmas and Santa and presents and sure enough, Christmas comes and Santa too. The snow comes as well. There’s the book Calvin writes for his dad to read to him before bed about a fictional boy named Barney who’s dad was bad and so he had to lock him away in a dungeon. There’s the time he knocked Susie's eye out with a snowball. She told him that anyway to get him to go look for it so she could give him a swift kick in the behind. There’s some Monopoly mayhem. Susie and Calvin get assigned to a group project that has Susie pulling her hair out over it because Calvin won’t take it seriously. It doesn’t go well. Then there’s the invention of the new Transmogrification Ray handheld converter remote. Calvin asks Hobbes to point it at him and turn him into a pterodactyl. But instead Hobbes makes him a chicken. Then he fixes it and makes him a pterodactyl, but a little one the size of a chicken. Well a war begins and both of them end up as other creatures. They finally call a truce and Calvin turns Hobbes back into a tiger again, but the Transmogrifier won’t work anymore after that. Calvin is stuck as an owl. Afraid that he’ll have to eat mice from now on he feels terrible, till he realizes being an owl means he doesn’t have to go to school anymore. But the next morning, he’s not an owl anymore! He’s himself! Just in time for school… Well, you can’t have everything. The story ends with Calvin trying to go out and play in the snow, but after all that layering and putting on his boots and gloves, he has to go to the bathroom, so he goes back inside and repeats the whole process in reverse to go use the bathroom.

Like and Subscribe to be notified when part 5 is posted! Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite comic I grew up reading it every day in the newspaper funnies. I loved the style of the illustrations and the characters. I didn't spend much time trying to figure out if Hobbes turned back and forth into a toy tiger or if he was in Calvin's imagination. That didn't really matter. I just loved the humor and the irony of pointing out Calvin's blind spots. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you'll tune in for my reading of the rest of the collection. If you have reluctant readers, comics can be a way to break through that. The combination of pictures and short form narratives can help incentive kids who don't love reading yet to find some motivation to keep trying. It's a lower barrier to entry, but I believe that Bill Watterson's writing doesn't lower the bar on intellectual and cultural value. This book includes several stories that span more than a single daily strip and can help children continue on farther than they might if you've given them a certain amount of time or page goal. I hope this book makes Calvin and Hobbes fans of your kids. The strip was in syndication for many years, so there are lots of books that can be found at the library or picked up and used online, for not too much money. It's a comic that affected me deeply as I grew up. I hope you'll be motivated to share more of it with your kids.