A tribute to Mr Watterson - you have never seen Calvin and Hobbes like this

My friend Tom (yeah one of my four followers on this blog!) once wrote to me about the one true big export America clings on to nowadays - culture.

In my case, I´ve been in constant influense of the USA since, well... I think it may have started with the Ingalls Wilder-books about Little House on the Prairie. I saw it when I was 4/5 years old and then my mom read the books for me.

After that: Knight Rider, Stephen King books (not the movies, too scary!) Tom Cruise, The Goonies, Disney, Springsteen, DeNiro, Steinbeck, Emmy-Lou Harris, Friends, Seinfeld, not to mention all the comic books.

TO mention all the comic books! One comic in particular: Calvin & Hobbes. Please take time to read more about this masterpiece of comics that Bill Watterson produced between 1985 and 1995.

Here´s a good piece that explains a lot of the greatness that builds this comic and why fans still want Bill Watterson to start drawing again.

Now there´s a MOVIE comming up about the Comic! Watch the trailer here!

November 15th is a date to remember. Wonder if they gonna show it here in Sweden?

To show my love of the superbly painted, hillariuosly written and the thoughts behind every inch of the strips - I´ve tried to copy one of the earlier pages. (The latter are simply too hard for me to draw since the details are insane!)

Red or Rödis as we call him in Sweden

Yeah! Finally I got Red!
This is the version from Cars 2.

He is rather big. Like all the "Oversized" and "DeLuxe"-cars. But this one should be big. He is a fire engine!

 Compared to some other nice cars you could see the variation of size.

It sure feels good to have such a big character in my collection. Sure feels good...

Wonder were I go next?

"What´s wrong with that boy? Why is he so strange?!"

Last week was a very big one for A. My oldest son started school.

He is 5 and a half and in Sweden we have a prep-school thing called "six years" that works like a transession between kindergarten and school. But this means that he has moved from his kindergarten to the large building where the school is. So he is a big boy now.

This also means that we have to leave and pick up the kids at two different locations.

And one day something happend.

My wife were saying goodbye to A. V was looking at all the kids. And one of them looked straight back. And he spoke right out.

Now. Things like this will happen. That´s clear. And it will happen a lot of times. But this was the first time for us. At least so clearly and in front of so many.

So how to react?

My wife did the very best you could do. At least that´s my opinion.

 

She turned directly to the kid. Instantly. And told him everything.

The kid had his mother with him. So she heard too. She heard my wife being totally open about V and his disease. In front of lots of kids. Making absolutely no drama about it at all.

And the mother reacted as good as you could ever imagine.

When she heard about V and his disability to talk but his ability to do sign language - she said "Oh really?! Do you sign V?" And then she started to do signs. She "said":
HI V! REALLY FUN THAT YOU COULD DO SIGNS!

Could that episode have gone much better?

And all because of my wife. She decided not to hide, not to pretend that she didn´t hear. She was all open about everything. And got the reward. Another person who could talk to V with signs.

So now we know. It is out there. Everyone can see that V is different. A lot of our friends do tell us otherwise. That he looks so perfectly normal. But they are used to him. And they are being nice.

Kids say the darnest things, don´t they?

The Big DNA Check of V - Swedish scientists to search for the lack of myelin in my son´s brain

We have entered the space between medecine and science. V is now subject to not only doctor´s and specialist´s interest but also to scientists here in Stockholm.

I´ve written about V´s special disease here and the problem to tell exactly what´s causing the lack of myelin in his brain. (Hypomyelination).

My last note there is from March 2012. Since then a lot has happened with V but with the one thing I wanted the most (and still have dreams about at night) - V´s problem to use words - very little has changed.

He is a very active young boy of 4 now. He runs, crawls, jumps (not high but still) and likes to take short strolls by himself down the street to check out the neighbourhood. But he only uses a few words like "mama, papa, Yes, no".

But he understands almost everything we say and we use sign communication. He understands a lot of different signs now and he master over 50 himself. Lately he combines them, like escalator, which in Swedish is "rolling stairs" - so we take the sign for roll and then the sign for stairs. And today V did the same (He loves to see movies on YouTube of Escalators, trains, elevators and buses)

But the cause of the matter is still not determined and now we´re going to let scientist check out all of V´s DNA-genome.
They are then going to compare this to me and my wifes genome (and his big brother´s) to try to see what´s gone wrong and where the mutation occured.

When we decided to go along with this we also had to decide whether we wanted to know about other differnt diseases the scientist could discover that our genes could bear.

Tricky questions, to say the least. Do I want to know if I have a 72% likelihood to grow cancer? Or if my son does?

But at the same time it feels good that we´re on this thing. I want to look under every stone possible to try to find out what has happened to V. And it feels good to have some smart scientists onboard.

Which Red is the right one?

I have to take care of the most obvious black hole in my collection - I have to get RED!

But there´s some unclarity with the Oversized and the Deluxe-variants according to size.


Since I have decided to collect the Mattel cars in 1:55 size (not the Disney varaints that are slightly larger, 1:43) I need to know which of the different variants of Red that would bed right for me?

All help would be great!


Some types I´ve seen so far: