It's All Lord Of The Flies

I like the TV show LOST. I have seen every episode and I plan to keep watching despite the heckling of my co-workers. I dig that there is mysterious and weird shit going on but then of course I am a nerd. So as my special friend was reading to me from an article in The Village Voice on the subway last night I started flashing back to the funny papers. It suddenly hit me that two of my favorites seemed to be mixed up like say the chocolate and the peanut butter or perhaps the methamphetamine and, well, nevermind. It had seriously crossed my mind that LOST is the new Calvin and Hobbes! Sounds nutty but look at what people with jobs are saying.

Joy Press notes the obvious and writes in the Voice about LOST "...the series doesn't stint on ideas. Take the timely theme of the struggle between faith and reason: LOST pits the hunky, ultra-rational surgeon Jack Shephard against true believer John Locke. (How impish is that, naming him after the father of empiricist rationality!)"

While Neely Tucker of the Washington Post writing about Calvin and Hobbes said: “There were clues all along that this was about more than slapstick. Calvin was named for the 16th-century Protestant theologian who believed in predestination, Hobbes for the philosopher a century later who once observed that life is "nasty, brutish and short." Miss Wormwood, Calvin's teacher, was named after the apprentice devil in "The Screwtape Letters."

See what I mean. Same story? Maybe just perhaps. Different imaginations? For sure. The long and the short of it is that Calvin and Hobbes, a comic strip, is much deeper than television will ever be and while LOST is good TV today, Calvin and Hobbes is genius forever. And if the playful old scenario came true and I had to chose one book and one long playing record album to be stranded on my desert island with for all eternity, the book would be easy. The record will have to wait for another day but I assure you a record it will be.