Before he played Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in the Broadway smash musical Hamilton, Daveed Diggs played a classic, fictional character: a stuffed tiger named Hobbes.
Hobbes & Me, a shot-for-shot (or panel-for-panel) adaptation of Bill Watterson’s classic comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes, was created by writer/producer/actor Rafael Casal, who plays the role of Calvin, back in 2014. Now that Diggs’ star has begun to rise, the series is making the rounds again on the Internet, and it’s too adorable not to share with you. It’s as true an adaptation of the 1985-95 comic strip as we’re likely to get. Each episode is only :30 to a minute, because they are direct representations of the strips on-screen, using the panels as storyboards and the gutters as cuts.
According to AV Club, the choice to have the episodes be in black and white is integral to the series’ charm: “This is no mere stylistic affectation. Calvin & Hobbes ran during an era when only Sunday comics were in color. Dailies were monochromatic, so Diggs and Casal are maintaining the integrity of Watterson’s original strips.”
Check out the pilot episode:
There are only eight episodes at the moment. Obviously Diggs is busy being a big Broadway star these days and Casal, who is also a spoken word artist/rapper and contributed to (and edited!) Daveed Diggs’s album Small Things to a Giant, continues to perform and write all over the place. Still, there’s a part of me that hopes that there’s more Hobbes & Me to come!
(image via screencap)
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