Scientific Progress Goes 'Boink'

It's been 12 years since Bill Watterson retired his whimsical strip Calvin & Hobbes and there is still a hole in the comics page to this day. There are some fun comics (Get Fuzzy, Sherman's Lagoon and Canadian talents Fisher and Pooch Café) but nothing has been able to replace the precocious, imaginative Calvin and his stuffed, but very much alive tiger, Hobbes.

For 10 years Watterson's strip was the highlight of the comics page and he helped shake up what had become a stale art form. The pages were filled with stale offerings that had run their course but still plodded along - I'm looking at you Beetle Bailey, Blondie, Hägar the Horrible and Shoe, to name just a few.

Calvin came on the scene along with contemporaries Bloom County, Bizarro and The Far Side that were nothing like what else was in the newspaper. Calvin was often lost in his own universe that allowed Watterson to draw worlds filled with dinosaurs, aliens and anthropomorphic snowmen. He could be a hellion but also a sweet kid who just needed a hug from his mom. In short, he was a little boy.

Watterson also wrapped up the strip when he felt he couldn't keep up the quality any longer. The same was done by Gary Larson and Berkeley Breathed (though he kind of slid on that). I respect that artistic decision and it is a lesson many a strip could emulate (see the list of strips above), although I missed their absences.

I still miss Calvin's cardboard box transmogrifier, Spaceman Spiff and, of course, Calvinball, my most favourite of sports. But that's what the book collections are for. Or read 25 Great Calvin and Hobbes Strips for a quick refresher.

This comic nostalgia all came about when I happened across space coyote's (Nina Matsumoto) version of a classic Calvin & Hobbes scene, with philosophical namesakes instead of the characters. (Check out her manga version of The Simpsons)

From space coyote: "Few historians know of the heartwarming friendship between French Reformation theologian John Calvin and English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the latter of whom may or may not have been real, considering he was not even born yet."