The Fantastic Truth of Calvin and Hobbes

"Bill Watterson's work," notes The Guardian, "remains hilarious, and wildly inventive – but it also manages to be authentic in a way that very few cartoons ever are." They are, of course, talking about the classic comic strip Calvin & Hobbes.

The appreciation continues...

It's pretty mind-blowing to experience something that you expect to be nothing more than ordinary, only to find that it is changing the way you look at the world. (Kind of like stumbling across the Beatles on the radio in 1964 sandwiched between Harry Mancini's Pink Panther theme song and a Jan and Dean tune). Calvin and Hobbes was intended to transcend the funny pages, but no one could have guessed just how far. Watterson knew that his strip allowed him access to his readers' brains for a few moments every morning and he was determined to make the best of it. He didn't see it as a time to deliver clichés, easy gags or sloppy artwork; he saw it as a moment when he might get people to think outside the box, or to rethink how they think inside it. Even though his efforts were often constricted to three black and white panels, Watterson used that space to discuss everything from mortality to the existence of God and the perils of mankind's self-destructive habits. It was always heartening to see a cartoonist discussing issues of such depth with his readers, some of whom were so young that they were learning how to read using the strip or had never thought about what happens when we die.