A wild Zontar from the planet X-13 landed on Mt. Auburn St. Thursday and asked me what a "television sitcom" was. I told it about "The Cosby Show." It asked me what an "action-adventure movie" was, and I pointed it to "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It wanted to know about newspaper comic strips, and I showed it the latest collection of "Calvin and Hobbes," Yukon Ho!

Bill Waterson's strip about a hyperactive kid and his overactive imagination is a neo-comic strip. It has all the conventional characters--suburban parents, a smart-aleck kid, a female foil and a school bully. It's wrapped in a clean, cute art style. And it's funny.

It is "neo" because it presents a family turned inside out by Calvin's imagination. The symbol of that inversion is Hobbes, a stuffed tiger who comes to life for Calvin. It is a device as old as "The Nutcracker," and it is a powerful way to blur the lines between reality and cartoon reality and cartoon imagination.

Yukon Ho!

By Bill Watterson

Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel

$6.95

A comic strip must have a twist if it's going to pierce the today's national consciousness. "Tiger" is simply a comic strip, with funny kids delivering one-liners, and it will never have best-selling collections like "Calvin and Hobbes," "Doonesbury" (where the gimmick is politics) or "The Far Side" (where the gimmick is weirdness).

Of course, this is a double-edged sword--the "Bloom County" crew of politically-aware funny animals is currently running on air. After four years, has Watterson's device--a boy's ability to alter his cartoon reality quickly--also gone cold?

Yukon Ho!, a collection of 274 strips from late 1987 and early 1988, shows an artist still testing his limits. The strip's previous collections have been fixtures on The New York Times bestseller list, and Watterson's duo is at or near star status. Most readers are now familiar enough with the stuffed-tiger device that Watterson can approach it from some wonderful new angles.

In one strip in this collection, Susie Derkins asks if she and her stuffed bunny can play with Calvin and Hobbes, who is drawn as a stuffed tiger until the last panel, when he muses, "Mr. Bun seems comatose. Did you notice?" It is tantalizing to wonder if Watterson will ever give us a look at Susie and a "live" rabbit looking back at Calvin.

As a cartoonist who craves Calvin and Hobbes but knows that all strips must one day fall flat, I worry that Watterson will start creating a series of new personas for Calvin without improving either the presentation of those characters or the psychological depth of Calvin. Yukon Ho! focuses on the presentation more than showing a more human side to Calvin, but the approach is still fresh.

Stupendous Man Persona

In the last year, Calvin has invented his Stupendous Man persona, and Watterson has manipulated it to begin showing us Life With Calvin from non-Calvin eyes.

In one strip we see Calvin's father reading quietly, when Calvin runs into the room, deflects an imaginary bullet off his chest near his dad and then runs off again. The strip is done with only four words and with the father's viewpoint in mind, and it succeeds.

In a Sunday strip, Calvin is a God who condemns humans to the under-world in a stark series of panels, and in the last we are jolted back to comic strip form to hear his father say, "Have you seen how absorbed Calvin is with those tinkertoys? He's creating whole worlds over there!"

The book is full of such leaps from the cosmos to suburbia and back again. Watterson's watercolor treatment of Calvin's alternate realities is striking in the Sunday comics sections of America, but, unfortunately, Yukon Ho! has no color. Instead of a blue insect head, we get a shade of grey. Instead of a rainbow of colored clothes pouncing on Calvin one morning, we see a few black and white objects flying at him. The strips are still funny, but they lose much of their artistry. No comic strip in the last 20 years has used color so well on Sundays.

The imagination on display here is Watterson's, not Calvin's. Watterson became an editorial cartoonist in Cincinnati after graduating from Kenyon College, and even then his cartoons had an element of the fantastic in them. He has shown a dozen worlds that Calvin inhabits, and often the joy in the strip comes from simply being on an alien planet with Calvin, instead of laughing at his wisecracks.

Like Walt Kelly's "Pogo," Watter-son's strip deals in aggregate humor, drawn from the characters more than the individual jokes. Reading "Calvin and Hobbes" in book form is much more fun and revealing than reading it day by day. And Yukon Ho! is a goldmine of a collection.