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Anniversaries of the 40th Kind (Calvin and Hobbes)

Published: May 20, 2025 1 minute 12 comments

The big comics celebration this year is the Diamond Anniversary of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip. And it is certainly worthy of all the acclaim and hoopla and licensing.

Happiness is 75 years of Peanuts poster

But it has some tough competition in the Best Humor Comic Strip of All Time ranking. Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Gary Larson’s The Far Side, E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre, Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby, and Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury are among those with their own advocates.

Perhaps topping the competition is a comic strip created 35 years after Peanuts. Like Peanuts it was the product of one man. Unlike Peanuts it had a relatively short lifespan, running ten years instead of fifty.

Calvin and Hobbes 40th anniversary image

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson is considered by some to be the greatest comic strip of all time and it is hard to argue with that attitude. GoComics is doing their bit in celebrating the 40th anniversary of Calvin and Hobbes, but I’m afraid it will be another ten years before the comic strip gets the big, all-year birthday bash it deserves with its Golden Anniversary. This year it will live under the shadow of Peanuts’ 75th.

Calvin and Hobbes – 40 Years of Spaceman Spiff
Calvin and Hobbes – 40 Years of reading

But Calvin and Hobbes is too popular to remain hidden, there are always articles about the comic strip appearing and those will grow exponentially as the four decades since its November 18, 1985 debut nears (and after the October 2 Diamond Anniversary of Peanuts passes).

One recent article was Brian Cronin’s take on How Bill Watterson Retconned Calvin and Hobbes.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson – November 18, 1985

Watterson believed that he had to kick off the strip by introducing Calvin and Hobbes, but in retrospect, he thought that the idea was a bad one.

… he felt that it took away from the fancifulness of the comic strip to have their meeting be so literal.

A few years later, in August 1989, Watterson did a strip where Calvin notes that he doesn’t recall anything in his life before the age of three, which he, of course, assumes is a result of him being brainwashed when he was that age. Hobbes, though, recalls that Calvin didn’t do much in those early years but burp up…

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson – August 1, 1989

Thus, Watterson has now retconned the strips where Calvin “trapped” Hobbes and acquired him for the first time, as now Hobbes has been with Calvin since Calvin was an infant.

Now, you could argue that…

The entirety (almost) of Calvin and Hobbes can be read at GoComics and through the strip’s book collections.

The original Calvin and Hobbes book collections

With the books we get the added bonus of original full-color, multi-page comics by Bill Watterson…

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes
The Authoritive Calvin and Hobbes
The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book

and original Bill Watterson illustrations, including those title page drawings.

Calvin and Hobbes title page
Something Under the Bed is Drooling title page
Yukon Ho! title page

Elsewhere.

A copy of the 1985 Universal Press Syndicate press kit for Calvin and Hobbes was recently auctioned. The bids were surprisingly low (to me) until the final minutes when the offers skyrocketed.

selected pages from the 1985 Calvin and Hobbes press kit

It ended up costing the winning bidder $12,000.00!

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Comments 12

  1. Calvin and Hobbes isn’t officially 40 until November. Is this the 40th for the Noodle Incident?

    1. The article noted the November 18, 1985 debut. Neither is Peanuts 75 until October 2 but that anniversary is being celebrated all year. I doubt the U.S. will wait until July 4, 2026 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the adoption of The Declaration of Independence, rather have events all next year.
      Do you maintain The Noodle Incident was pre-history and happened before Calvin met Hobbes?

      1. I think it is still possible Calvin knew Hobbes before that Nov 18, 1985 cartoon. The Noodle Incident happened before that cartoon, though.

  2. Red and Rover, a current comic strip being produced by its one and only creator, Brian Basset, had its 25th anniversary on May 7th.

  3. Wow. 40 years of excellence.Well done Bill Waterson.

    1. Well, ten years of excellence – from 1985 to 1995.

  4. Please excuse me for noting this, but while most of the Calvin and Hobbes strips may be available on GoComics, one has to be a paid subscriber to see anything farther back than 30 days or so. It’s one of GC’s new redesign features.

    1. In addition, the GoComics re-run cycle does not include the entire Calvin & Hobbes archive. Instead of wasting money on GoComics, spend it on the book collections.

  5. Watterston started out doing political cartooning, and started working with United Features on a family strip that was sort of like ZITS, with the teenaged protagonist having an annoying little brother and his toy tiger as a side character, who the editors thought would be a much better lead.

    From what I remember hearing of the story (this was during that glorious month when I actually had a strip in development), someone wanted to replace Hobbes with Robotman, and Watterson quit, taking his strip with him.

    It would be nice if someone could confirm that.

    1. I can confirm, more or less. It was during an interview with Andrew Christie for Honk magazine in January ’87. United Features wanted him to incorporate Robotman into the strip in some fashion, but he refused.

      1. WATTERSON: | think United really looks for the marketing more than some of the other syndicates, and they saw Hobbes as having marketing potential, so | don’t think that that was it. | was later offered the chance to incorporate Robotman into my strip. There they had envisioned a character as a product— toy lines, television show, everything—and they wanted a strip written around the character. They thought that maybe | could stick it in my strip, working with Calvin’s imagination or something. They didn’t really care too much how | did it, just so long as the character remained intact and would be a very major character… And | turned them down. It really went against my idea of what a comic strip should be.
        Honk interview via the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bill-watterson-honk/mode/2up

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