Hobbes: You’re working on your report already?Ĭalvin: Mom says the pills must be working. (Hobbes sits next to Calvin, who is writing at a table) I’ll transcript it here for those who can’t see the image. In fact Comic Book Resources reported on January 16 of 2016 that a version of this strip was recently pulled from Ebay after 28 bidders jacked the price up to over $14,000 when the seller (who had no selling history with Ebay) could not provide more details about its origins. Often billed as the “secret last Calvin and Hobbes”, versions of “the pills strip” to the right have been popping up from time to time for years. Which is just one of the many reasons why today’s entry into the arena of meme destruction makes my blood boil. I plan to buy that gigantic collected volume some day. The deepest question, the actual nature of Hobbes animation was always avoided by their creator. I have at one time or another owned every collection. It is fair to say that Calvin and Hobbes may be the last great, beloved American comic strip. Named for philosopher Thomas Hobbes and theologian John Calvin, the boy and his tiger were always exploring much deeper and more interesting material than your average Dennis the Menace knockoff, taking on the battle of the sexes, environmentalism, education and other deep philosophical questions. The pair would go on adventures across an idealized late 20th century suburban landscape, equipped with hills for sledding, trees for climbing and all the universe for a young imagination to soar through. I think it’s safe to say that the last comic strip to truly capture the mass imagination in that way was Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. Running for a decade from 1985 to 1995, the strip followed the adventures of the rambunctious tyke Calvin and his best friend Hobbes, who was either a ferocious, tuna craving jungle beast as he appeared to Calvin, or a well loved stuffed tiger as he appeared to everyone else. But the kind of shared experience that had an entire nation chuckling together over the same four panel jokes with their Bran Flakes or Cap’n Crunch is a thing that passed away around the same time that Charles Schulz hung up his pen and inks for good. In fact the rise of social media has helped relaunch the career of Berkley Breathed and his iconic Bloom County much to the delight of us Gen X kids who cut our cynical teeth on the adventures of Milo, Opus, and Bill the Cat. Not to say that the art form is passing away, on the contrary the rise of the Webcomic has given artists a new platform to present works that would never have made it into the local Sunday paper. The funny pages, like the newspapers that carry them have been waning in their cultural impact for decades now.
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