Calvin and Hobbes

Calvin and Hobbes Complete Digital Collection

What is
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This collection compiles all Calvin and Hobbes strips from its 10-year run, as well as as much incidental artwork and commentary as was available. Unlike any other collection floating around on the internet, these comics are scanned from the original books, not taken from a low-res website image and resampled to high resolution resulting in a blurry mess. They are presented in the proper order with no missing strips. The comics are arranged into the originally published books with some carefully considered changes to format and order as presented below. All comics were scanned at 300dpi with descreen enabled and then filtered in photoshop to remove dust and scratches so as to present the most solid color possible. Images were then scaled to fit on a 1920x1200 resolution page. The only way this collection could be improved is if it were scanned from a copy of the Complete Collection after taking apart the binding. This will not be happening unless an extra copy falls from the sky.

This collection represents about 3 months of solid effort in my free time. I do not consider it time wasted in the slightest.

Purpose
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This collection is meant to be a high-quality collection of all of Bill Watterson's work related to Calvin and Hobbes. It is intended for the true Calvin and Hobbes fan who has already purchased the books but would like a convenient digital format to carry them around with, or has had the book fall apart from too much love over the years. If you like Calvin and Hobbes enough to download this, then make sure you've paid for them.

This collection may be redistributed but only in its original format and resolution along with this readme. Artwork of Watterson's calibre demands the highest standards to preserve it in.

Details of the Project
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Sources
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The following books were disassembled and scanned to make this project possible:
The Essential Calvin and Hobbes
The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes
The Indispensible Calvin and Hobbes
The Lazy Sunday Book
Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons
The Days Are Just Packed
Homocidal Psycho Jungle Cat
There's Treasure Everywhere
It's a Magical World
The Sunday Pages

The following books were used to supplement but scanned intact:
Calvin and Hobbes
Something Under the Bed is Drooling
Yukon Ho!
Weirdos From Another Planet
Revenge of the Baby-Sat
Scientific Progress Goes Boink
The 10th Anniversary Collection
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

Changes from the original books
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For the most part, the original 11 collection books are presented in the same "spirit" of the originals. The following changes were made:

-Any art from a book that had a version in the Complete Collection that I could get a decent scan of without destroying the book has been included after the scan of the art from the original book.

-Books 1-4 in the annual collection versions had a number of incidental pieces of artwork that replaced daily strips on the pages. All of these are moved into Book M. These drawings were not in the two treasury volumes that collected these strips, nor did the appear anywhere in the complete collection except a colorized version of one.

-Books 1-7 have had the Sunday comic panels rearranged from their vertical reprint layout to their originally published horizontal layout. This is also how the strips appear in the Complete Collection. This is how they were originally drawn and intended to be viewed.

-Books 1-7 have had the daily pages set to have only 2 strips per page. As this is the format of the later books, it gives all the books a similar layout and also accommodates the widescreen format of the cbr files better.

-Strips have been reordered in some books to better fit the original publication schedule, with the following exceptions:
-No daily stories were interrupted by Sunday strips
-No two Sunday strips occur in a row
-With a few exceptions, strips were not moved between books to balance the schedule. This means that the books all still end with the same strip they do in the published versions.

-In a few cases a daily strip or three were moved from the end of one book to the beginning of the other or vice versa to balance out the strip count so each book had an even number of daily strips and prevent orphan daily strips at the end of a book.

-Book 7 had a Sunday strip challenge. Sunday strips were scanned from 10th Anniversary book, the Sunday Pages book and The Complete Collection and when blurry from the binding were supplemented with panels personally colored from the Snow Goons black and white versions. This means that all the Sunday comics are in color in book 7, but not as perfect as they could be if I had an extra copy of the Complete Collection to destroy and scan.

-Book 8 has the title page strip reappear in it original publication spot within the book as well as on the title page.

-Book 8 contained a Sunday comic with a panel colored with a black background where the original publication and Complete Collection have a faded blue background. (Calvin is climbing a ladder to a slide up in the sky.) Said panel was scanned from the Complete Collection and replaced.

-The 10th Anniversary book was not scanned from the book itself but rather the strips were taken from the original books, arranged in the proper order and commentary added manually. As such, the font does not match exactly and there may yet be typos, despite my best attempts at proofreading.

-All artwork that didn't "fit" into the original 11 books is included in book M. This includes the extra stories/poems that were done for the Treasury collection, the drawings from books 1-4 mentioned above and any misc artwork from the Complete Collection.