Reflecting on the Final Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strip

On November 18, 1985, the very first comic strip of Calvin and Hobbes appeared in newspapers. “So long, pop! 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.

Bill Watterson wrote and drew the comic. He had 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, Bill 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, Bill Watterson concluded the comic strip.

Ending the series was an unusual move because 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 even continued past their original creators, including Nancy and Blondie. Calvin and Hobbes had the staying power to last for years, so concluding it after a 10-year run surprised fans.

“By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say,” Bill Watterson told the Cleveland newspaper, The Plain Dealer, in 2010. “It’s always better to leave the party early. 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.”

Bill Watterson appears to have been right. Decades 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. While Bill Watterson was always against licensing his characters as merchandise, the collected books of Calvin and Hobbes are still being published today.

The final Calvin and Hobbes

Bill Watterson stuck the landing in terms of his final comic strip. After ten years of adventures with the duo, enormous pressure rested on Bill Watterson to get the ending right. Many long-running series struggle with creating satisfying endings due to fan expectations.

The biggest decision in writing an ending involves choosing whether it will be open-ended. Some stories come to a proper end where a character dies or moves away, putting a period on the creation. Other endings remain open with an ellipsis, allowing readers to imagine the characters continuing their adventures somewhere else.

Bill Watterson wisely left Calvin and Hobbes open-ended.

The final comic strip was an extended Sunday strip. Like many Sunday strips he created in the past, Bill Watterson did not adhere to the once-strict rule of nine perfectly square panels. It featured Calvin and Hobbes going sledding after a fresh snowfall, leaving most of the color comic entirely white. Snow was a familiar setting to long-running readers, as Calvin and Hobbes experienced many snowy adventures before.

“Wow, it really snowed last night! Isn’t it wonderful?” Calvin asks Hobbes as they trek through the snow. “Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand-new!” replies Hobbes. Because this ran on New Year’s Eve, Calvin says, “A new year… a fresh, clean start!” Before Hobbes gently breaks the fourth wall, saying, “It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!”

Finally, over the last three panels, Calvin says, “A day full of possibilities. It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy… Let’s go exploring!” With that, the duo goes off on the sled into the open white world.

As far as endings go, it could not be more perfect. Instead of ending on a punchline, Bill Watterson offered a heartwarming, inspirational, open-ended conclusion making clear that Calvin and Hobbes remain out there. While Bill Watterson credits Calvin and Hobbes’ longevity to his choice to end the comic before it grew stale, the series endures as a rare story with a perfectly satisfying conclusion.

Source: Polygon