Comic title: Calvin and Hobbes

Creator: Bill Watterson

Publisher: Universal Press Syndicate

Year: 1986

Genre: Comic Strip

Panels:  Nine panels in color

Reviewers: Gabrielle Lima and Douglas Oliveira

    This is another adventure of Calvin, a six-year-old boy, and Hobbes, his stuffed animal and best friend. In Calvin’s imagination, Hobbes is a real talking tiger who is always with him in Calvin’s adventures. The comic strip is divided in nine panels, starting with a long panel where we can see the local where the story is happening. The comic strip has normal gutters, and the first tier contains two panels, the second tier contains four panels and the third contains three panels.

    The story contains three speech bubbles, written in formal language, but most of the panels have just captions above, describing the mood of the comic strip. Onomatopoeias are present describing the sound of the water and just Calvin’s speech bubble is in white, because this conversation is happening in his mind.

     This time the author, Bill Watterson, has chosen to bring us a negative perspective of going to the beach. First, Hobbes has forgotten to bring his trunks to swim, and that would be a problem if you were a real person. Then, when Calvin and Hobbes decide to enter into the sea, the sand was too hot and the water was too cold. Of course, everybody would be disappointed in such situation and this is the feeling of Calvin’s father. We can see that the idea of going to the beach was Calvin’s mother’s and Calvin goes back inside the car. It seems that Calvin doesn’t have the intention of going back to the beach.

      There aren’t many dialogs in this comic strip. The funny images and the facial expressions of the characters are able to tell us what we want to know. Despite of having nine panels the story can be quickly understood.

By Gabrielle and Douglas