Category: Friendships

As I continue my series, New Year; New Types of Friends, and specifically this subset of friendships from literature, I present Calvin and Hobbes to show how friends help stretch our imagination and expand our creativity. The strip also shows that we need a dose of reality sometimes. While some people do not consider comic strips part of serious literature, animated stories do have a message to convey to people. The definition of “comic strip” is a series of adjacent drawn images, usually arranged horizontally, that are designed to be read as a narrative or a chronological sequence. The comic strip is essentially a mass medium, printed in a magazine, a newspaper, or a book. Comic strips usually contain text inscribed within “balloons” inside the picture frame that tells an amusing story. But some comic strips aren’t always funny. Most are simply observations about life. While Calvin and Hobbes does not specifically represent one of the archetypes of

My next post with examples of friendships from literature has a local flare. I live in the western suburbs of Chicago, so the death of Aurora-born author Clive Cussler gave me the opportunity to include his characters Dirk Pitt and his childhood best friend, Al Giordino, as part of this subset of adventure literature. In my earlier posts, Discovering My Wild Heart and Men Need Get-Aways and Retreats, I wrote that every man needs adventure in their life. The friendship between Pitt and Giorino exemplifies this sense of adventure, even if it is based on fictional characters.  About Clive Cussler Clive Eric Cussler (July 15, 1931 – February 24, 2020) was an American adventure novelist and underwater explorer. He was the founder and chairman of the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), which has discovered more than 60 shipwreck sites and numerous other notable underwater wrecks. Cussler was the sole

This next post about friendships from fantasy and adventure literature may surprise you. Did you know the Star Wars franchise started as a book before the first movie was even released? It may also surprise you that even these examples of friends from a galaxy far, far away had a “force” that makes their relationship special. The Book Not Written By George Lucas Did you also know a paperback novel titled Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker appeared in bookstores a full 6 months prior to the first movie’s release? Did you also know the original book was not penned by George Lucas? According to several sources, George Lucas hired 29-year-old writer Alan Dean Foster to ghostwrite a book on the original screenplay for Star Wars, along with a sequel that could easily be spun into a second, lower-budget film if the first underwhelmed at the box office.