It was bad enough that the boy is literally just stabbing the book with a dagger and dissociating.
I picked this comic up by coincidence a few months ago and I am delighted to inform anyone curious that she wrote him in a torrid love affair with his bodyguard and completely undermined his terrifying reputation and made him a folk hero instead. He was Not Thrilled.
May I introduce you to my favourite Calvin and Hobbes strip which only got funnier when I got hearing aids.
wait actually i gotta reblog this again i just remembered an additional fun fact. sunday funnies pages were not created equal; some allotted less space than others. to make space? they would literally chop off parts of the comics. this is why many sunday strips have a Big Title Bar at the top, bc that was usually the part that got cut off. comic artists essentially had to account for that a big chunk of their strip was Optional Bonus Material that couldn’t be relevant to the plot or punchline of the strip.
bill watterson? HATED this. he was in a constant battle with the presses to keep his strips intact. he eventually won this battle, forcing any paper that wanted to run calvin & hobbes to print the full strip. but in the meantime, you would get protest strips, where the top bar is essential for the comic to make any sense at all.
this? is almost definitely one of those. please picture with me living in a town with one of the newspapers that cuts off the top bar. imagine seeing this comic WITHOUT the top panel.
