Why Calvin and Hobbes Is Great Literature

Calvin’s first appearance was actually in a rejected strip from before Calvin and Hobbes called Critturs, in which he is the younger brother of the main character; the syndicate suggested he focus on this sibling instead, and that led to the creation of his flagship comic. Calvin and Hobbes feels so inventive because it is: the strips take us to new planets, to parodies of film noir, to the Cretaceous period, to encounters with aliens in American suburbs and bicycles coming to life and reality itself being revised into Cubist art. Newspaper comics become much more popular in the early 20th century, and this was when, Watterson argues in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, they were at their peak, as the space allotted to certain comics was far greater than that allotted to any modern newspaper comic.

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