November 18, 1985:
A new comic strip appeared in, at the time, only about 35 newspapers. This strip depicted a young six-year-old boy with an explorer's hat on his head and what became his signature grin on his face, saying "So long, Pop! I'm off to check my tiger trap! I rigged a tuna fish sandwich yesterday, so I'm SURE to have a tiger by now!"
His dad, appearing uninterested, simply continued washing his car and played along with "They like tuna fish, huh?""Tigers will do ANYTHING for a tuna fish sandwich!" replied the boy, already heading in the direction of his trap.
The final frame of this strip showed that the boy had, indeed, caught a tiger. This tiger was hanging by his foot from a tree branch, yet he appeared quite content as he munched the tuna fish sandwich. Apparently hearing the boy's last statement, he commented, "We're kind of stupid that way."
The rest, as they say, is history…
31 years! It's been 31 YEARS since Calvin and Hobbes made their first appearance in the world. Within a year of that first strip's publication, the strip was in around 250 newspapers, and was in worldwide circulation before long. A new adventure (or part of an adventure) of this wildly imaginative six-year-old and his tiger was published every day until May 1991, when cartoonist Bill Watterson took his first sabbatical. He returned in February 1992, now with a custom designed layout for the colored Sunday strips, took one more sabbatical starting in April 1994, and finally stopped the comic strip after publishing 365 final adventures, covering every day of the year 1995.
Ten years after the strip ended, one critic remarked that Calvin and Hobbes left a hole in the comics page "that no strip has been able to fill." Indeed, Calvin and Hobbes is considered almost universally to be the greatest newspaper comic strip ever. The reaction from readers during the strip's run was hugely positive, and many were saddened when it ended only a little more than ten years after it began.
Why did a comic strip that only ran for ten years have such a huge impact on people, while far older comics like Peanuts and Garfield continue to appear in the papers and garner nowhere near as much praise? I can't really answer that question for those who read the strip as it was published, seeing as I wasn't even a year old when it ended. I can, however, attempt to explain why I also consider Calvin and Hobbes to be the greatest newspaper comic strip ever, as thanks to the book collections, I was also able to become a passionate reader of the strip.
I discovered Calvin and Hobbes in the early months of 2003, when my elementary school's "math joke of the week" was one of the many strips in which Hobbes helps Calvin arrive at a completely wrong answer to a math problem. A few weeks later the joke of the week was another Calvin and Hobbes comic with the same premise, and this caused me to notice that the first book collection, containing the aforementioned debut strip and those that followed within the first year of the strip's run, was one of the available options for silent reading in my classroom. After informing my parents of this discovery, they graciously showed me their collection of other Calvin and Hobbes books, and, well, I dove right into it.
Looking back, it's hard to describe exactly what it was about this comic strip that got me so hooked on it, since not all of the jokes made sense to me at the time, nor did I understand a lot of the fancy words that Calvin uses. What I loved about the strip from the beginning, though, was the sense of adventure and excitement that Calvin wears on his sleeves. Honestly, despite his rather selfish and rebellious attitude, Calvin was someone I looked up to for a few of my childhood years. He once says that he thinks it's best to take risks and live life to the fullest, and we see him at his happiest when he's free from the constraints of school and his parents, just romping around the woods, going for a ride, or playing his own version of organized sports … alongside his best friend, of course.
I also loved Hobbes from the get-go. It's never made clear whether Hobbes is a product of Calvin's imagination or if he really does turn into a real tiger when only Calvin is present. Watterson has said that Hobbes is more about the subjective nature of reality than about toys coming to life, and he invites the reader to decide which version of the tiger is truer. As a kid, I firmly fell into the "Hobbes is real" camp, although now I don't know what to believe. In some strips, it seems like Hobbes plays the part of Calvin's conscience, but his own fun and adventurous spirit is present in several other strips, notably in his frequent surprise attacks on Calvin, his pride in being a tiger, and his convoluted sense of math. Whether he's real or not, Hobbes is the ideal friend for just about anyone; he enjoys a good-hearted laugh at various predicaments, he's just as clever at unorganized sports as Calvin, he'll offer a friendly ear to just listen whenever Calvin just needs to vent about his problems, and he can always find the right way to sum a situation up.
Like I said, Calvin and Hobbes's sense of adventure was what I liked most about the comic at the beginning, but as I got older I noticed just how good it is at genuine, heartfelt, and occasional sarcastic commentary on the real world. Calvin and Hobbes are very environmentally friendly, and are able to state the common dilemmas of life very well when they get philosophical, usually while driving their wagon or sled off a cliff. There are also some moments of pure heart in interactions between the two title characters and the frequent aforementioned commentary on life.
The humor the strip provides is also top-notch, from Calvin's dad's sarcastic answers to his son's simple questions to Calvin's blissful ignorance of his own faults to Hobbes's jokes about the love-hate relationship between Calvin and Susie Derkins to Calvin's creative yet grotesque snowmen being used as a way to make fun of the art world. Now that I understand the jokes, I can simply laugh at this comic even more, which is the whole point of the funnies.
But despite being twelve years older than I was when I first read the strip, I can still lose myself in what I loved most about it at first: the adventure. Whether it's an argument about whether or not Calvin touched all of the bases in 25-base baseball, Calvin turning an everyday life situation into another adventure of the intrepid Spaceman Spiff, Calvin and Hobbes going out of their way to harass their babysitter, or trying to rid themselves of five replicas of Calvin, this remains my favorite aspect of the strip.
Calvin and Hobbes has had an immense impact on my life since I started reading it. For a number of years, I led my friends in helping me reenact (or create) some of their adventures. The strip also inspired two of my Halloween costumes: I went as Calvin himself in 2003 by spiking my hair and getting my own stuffed tiger (I'll give you three guesses what his name is, and the first two don't count), and I brought Calvin's mentioned but never shown Halloween costume to life in 2005. The biggest influence Calvin and Hobbes has had on me, though, is the fact that I have started to draw my own comics. First I drew my own versions of Calvin and Hobbes comics, then I tried a few original Calvin and Hobbes adventures, then I started drawing illustrations for my many whimsical childish writings, and eventually I took a huge leap and spent nearly seven years drawing and coloring Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace in comic form. This is the biggest project I have undertaken that wasn't school required. Calvin and Hobbes was even the inspiration for my first musical composition.
Watterson has said that now that he's left them alone, he likes to think that Calvin and Hobbes are in their own world, having an even better time. All I can say to that is, "Admirable sentiments!" And like many others, I'd like to thank Watterson for his undeniably great contribution to the world of comics. With this small and yet great cast of characters, great drawings, and so many great quotes about the reality of life, from the brutal ("Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere is that none of it has tried to contact us") to the silly ("Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless") to the heartfelt and honest ("There are many things we don't understand, and we just have to do the best we can with the knowledge we have"). In my eyes, Calvin and Hobbes is truly the greatest newspaper comic strip ever, from the moment Calvin successfully rigged a tuna sandwich exactly 31 years ago to the moment on December 31, 1995, when Calvin and Hobbes, carrying their sled through waist-deep snow, rode off into the trees, with some very fitting final words:
"It's a magical world, Hobbes, ol' buddy... let's go exploring!"
