On November 18, 1985, the very first comic strip of Calvin and Hobbes appeared in newspapers. I’m off to check my tiger trap!” Calvin, wearing a safari helmet, said to his dad in the first panel. Calvin went on to explain that he rigged the trap with a tuna fish sandwich, something a tiger cannot resist.
In the last panel, Hobbes is seen for the first time, hanging upside down in a tree, eating the sandwich. The comic was written and drawn by Bill Watterson, who’d spent years as a struggling cartoonist trying to get into the business before Universal Press Syndicate saw potential in Calvin and Hobbes. The comic debuted in 35 newspapers, and within a year had expanded to over 250 papers.
For 10 years, Watterson shared the daily adventures of the imaginative and unruly six-year-old boy and his stuffed tiger. The strip would eventually be published in more than 2,000 newspapers, but at the height of its popularity, on December 31, 1995, Watterson concluded the comic strip and he did it in the most perfect way possible. Such a move was an unusual one, as many popular comic strips ran for many decades.
Peanuts had been running for 45 years at that point and it would be five more years before Charles Schulz was forced to end the comic due to declining health. Some comics had even continued past their original creators, like Nancy, Blondie, and many others. Calvin and Hobbes certainly had the staying power to last for years, if not decades, longer, so to conclude it after a 10-year run was surprising to fans.
If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10, or 20 years, the people now ‘grieving’ for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.
I've never regretted stopping when I did.” Watterson appears to have been right. 31 years after the strip ended, it still endures. Fans who read it during its original run still re-read the comic regularly and newer generations have also become fans. And while Watterson was always against licensing his characters as merchandise, the collected books of Calvin and Hobbes are still being published today.
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