Comic strips still a thing?

My kids found Calvin & Hobbes

Hey, this is a newsletter from Josh Spilker. I usually write about online writing, creativity, culture, and sometimes productivity. Let’s go:

While unpacking boxes after moving to NYC, I came across this collection of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips.

My daughters are now 10 and 7, and the perfect age for reading these.

If you’re of a certain age to read Calvin and Hobbes, you know the mix was irresistible:

• Pranks on his parents, babysitters, and of course his frenemy: Susie

• Philosophical musings on life, like this one below, with a slight humorous twist at the end:

  

This back-and-forth makes it accessible for my children, but also makes it relatable to adults.

I could enjoy it when I was a kid and I can enjoy it now.

My children have been into graphic novels for a while (specifically the re-imagined Babysitter Club, very popular!) but the vocab for Calvin and Hobbes is so much richer than what they typically find in those books, so I’m glad they’re into them along with a healthy dose of chapter books.

They even specifically asked for them at the library and we had to hunt down more copies of Calvin and Hobbes collections.

Speaking of Comics…Where are They Now?

Because I’m an elder millennial, I read comics in the dead-tree newspaper. That thing that thudded on the driveway every morning and my dad would trudge out to the end of the driveway to get it.

Every day had at least one page of comics, and Sundays had at least 6 pages of glorious fold-out color.

I had many chill Sundays of lying on the couch reading different parts of the newspaper while slowly falling asleep to golf or whatever.

I still remember that couch pattern (something like this) that seemed so rampant in Florida in the late 90s.

I decided to do a bit of a search and found that you can read the comics each day online!

Here’s the link to the Denver Post comics and one for USA Today, with Blondie and Dagwood still going strong:

Dagwood still wears a bow tie, still has weird cowlicks, and at least has a computer now, though his coworkers probably need golf polos or at least no tie.

The tweaks to Dagwood were subtle: one comic I found had a security camera outside their house—a common occurrence for now, but not as much so in the 90s.

See that arrow on the side of the screenshot?

You can flip between days and even go to a main menu where you can see daily updates of Curtis (one of my faves), Dumplings, The Family Circus, and Sally Forth looks a little different and more modern to me, 20 years later lol:

It makes sense that they would stay the same age, while still aging gracefully into whatever this new era is.

Do you remember those comic strips? Do you still read them online or do you still get a physical newspaper?

btw…

I usually generate my header images with DALL-E, using a prompt that ends with “in the style of an Edward Hopper oil painting.

But this time, I asked it to generate something with Calvin and Hobbes, and here were a few of the results:

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More Things (Mostly books edition)

Didn’t plan on this only being mostly books, but here we are:

• Finished “The Very Last Interview” by David Shields. I generally like David Shields and how he tries different things even if they’re hard to categorize. For this book, he went through all of his interviews and only pulled out the questions asked to him, sans the answers. The fun is trying to guess what David’s answers were while gaining small hints about his life. Good experiment. I’m interested in reading his book called “Remote” from the 1990s which is about celebrity.

• Started reading and will probably finish by the time you read this “300 Arguments” by Sarah Manguso. This is a short book of aphorisms and is similar in size to the book mentioned above. I love books that fit in your pocket. I think I’ve read this before, but it doesn’t lose any of its punch.

• Still reading “The Dish Washer” by Stephane Larue and picked up “Wanting” by

  Luke Burgis
  , about Rene Girard and mimetic desire. He has a pretty good Substack, too!

Not Books

• Started watching “The Gold” on Paramount Plus. Heard good things, and I needed a new TV show.

• New albums by Sufjan Stevens and Short Fictions, let’s go.

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Last Things

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. — Francis Bacon

I’ve been writing more about note-taking, to-do lists, and other similar stuff. If you want a Notion template pack to help you get started, check this out.

Keep going,

-Josh Spilker