A review by jsisco
Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip by Nevin Martell

1.0

This is one of the great disappointments I've read in recent years, as Martell focuses almost exclusively on his own personal feelings about the comic and republishes countless quotations and excerpts from other books. His research comes across as superficial and lazy in some places, and irrelevant and uninteresting in others. I don't doubt that he worked very hard on this book, but hard work doesn't necessarily result in a captivating, entertaining, and thought-provoking text.

I think that Martell figured his "sense of humor" would save him in the weaker areas of the book, but it didn't. This is basically one of those books that I dreaded coming back to, and I ended up reading huge chunks at a time just so I could finish it and move on with my life.

One last nit-picky comment? His editors were lazy, he incorrectly identified source materials, and I found a handful of typos in the text. This behavior is inexcusable in a book that was mediocre to begin with.