Just let it ring

• Neely Tucker digs up some gems on Bill Watterson at the Washington Post.

Half a warm appreciation of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, the other half shedding a little more light on its reclusive creator. Best bit: Watterson refusing to take a call from Steven Spielberg.

• Karl Ritter recaps the recent brouhaha over the Nobel Prize on the Associated Press newswire.
  

So Knut Ahnlund doesn't particularly care for Elfriede Jelinek's work. Fine. But ask yourself, now: what's the point of the Nobel Prize in the first place? Like any award, it's just an invitation to a club. Clubs belong in junior high school and awards don't change a damn thing.

• Old news: "Sleeping on it" works. (from 2004)

I suppose it never hurts to be reminded of this. Once you hit the wall, you can either sit there and cry about it or just come back to it later. I suggest the latter.

"...Let's go exploring!"

• Editor & Publisher summarizes Bill Watterson's 13-page introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

Reading the last installment of "Calvin and Hobbes," nearly nine years ago now, gave me a pang of loss that has never quite gone away. Thankfully, nowadays we can just plunk down $100 or so for the complete three-volume edition, published this week by Andrews McMeel, and bask in all the nostalgia you could ask for.

And what a strip it was... charming, literate, funny, beautifully drawn and above all, tremendously imaginative. Hyperactive Calvin and sage Hobbes were two characters with incredible warmth and dimension, and it was a bittersweet thing to see them disappear from the funny pages. But Watterson had the balls to know when enough was enough, and more power to him for that:

"In 'Calvin and Hobbes,' I used my childhood -- sometimes straight out of the can, sometimes wildly fictionalized, and sometimes as a metaphor for my twenties and thirties -- to talk about my life and the issues that interested me. Without exactly intending to, I Iearned a lot about what I love -- imagination, deep friendship, animals, family, the natural world, ideas, ideals ... and silliness. These things make my life meaningful, and having the opportunity to consider it all at length through the medium of drawing was the most personally rewarding part of 'Calvin and Hobbes.'"