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.
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.
Image: Bill Watterson
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.
“By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say,” 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.”
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.
The final Calvin and Hobbes
Image: Bill Watterson
It also helps that Watterson really stuck the landing in terms of his final comic strip. After ten years of adventures with the duo, there must have been enormous pressure on Watterson to get it right. Many long-running series, no matter the medium, struggle with creating satisfying endings, thanks, in part, to fan expectations.
Often, the biggest decision in the writing of an ending is whether or not it will be open-ended. Some stories come to a proper end where a character dies or moves away or some other final event that puts a period on the end of the creation’s sentence. Other endings are left open, with more of an ellipsis, where we can imagine the characters and their adventures are still going on somewhere, even if we can’t see them anymore.
Watterson, wisely, left Calvin and Hobbes open-ended.
Image: Bill Watterson/Andrews McMeel Publishing
The final comic strip was an extended Sunday strip and, like many Sunday strips he’d done in the past, Watterson didn’t 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. It was a stark contrast that made Calvin and Hobbes really pop off the page. Snow was also a familiar setting to long-running readers, as Calvin and Hobbes had had 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 is off on the sled into the open white world.
Image: Bill Watterson/Andrews McMeel Publishing
As far as endings go, it couldn’t be more perfect. Instead of ending on a punchline, Watterson offered up a heartwarming, inspirational, open-ended conclusion which makes clear that Calvin and Hobbes are still out there, even if we don’t see them. And while Watterson credits Calvin and Hobbes’ longevity to his choice to end the comic before it got stale, it also helps that it’s the rare story, in any medium, with a perfectly satisfying conclusion.