There are few wellsprings of humor more consistently

reliable than the mind of a child. Most cartoonists,

being childlike, recognize this, but when they set out to

capture the hurly-burly of the very young, they almost

always cheat, shamelessly creating not recognizable

children, but highly annoying, wisecracking, miniature

adults. Chalk it up to either indolence or defective recall,

but most people who write comic dialogue for minors (up

to and including the perpetrators of the Cosby "kids")

demonstrate surprisingly little feel for--or faith in--the

original source material, that is, childhood, in all its

unfettered and winsome glory.

It is in this respect that Bill Watterson has proved as

unusual as his feckless creations, Calvin and Hobbes.

Watterson is the reporter who s gotten it right; childhood

as it actually is, with its constantly shifting frames of

reference. Anyone who s done time with a small child

knows that reality can be highly situational. The utterance

which an adult knows to be a "lie" may well reflect a child s

deepest conviction, at least at the moment it pops out.

Fantasy is so accessible, and it is joined with such force

and frequency, that resentful parents like Calvin s assume

they are being manipulated, when the truth is far more frightening: they don t even exist. The child is both king

and keeper of this realm, and he can be very choosey

about the company he keeps.

Of course, this exclusivity only provokes many grown-ups

into trying to regain the serendipity of youth for

themselves, to, in effect, retrieve the irretrievable. A

desperate few do things that later land them in the Betty

Ford Center.

The rest of us, more sensibly, read Calvin and Hobbes.