The Tiger Strikes Again

And lo.

Universal Press Syndicate picked up the strip in 1985. There were clues all along that this was about more than slapstick. Calvin was named for the 16th-century Protestant theologian who believed in predestination, Hobbes for the philosopher a century later who once observed that life is "nasty, brutish and short." Miss Wormwood, Calvin's teacher, was named after the apprentice devil in "The Screwtape Letters."

Success was quick -- the cartoon was quickly picked up by dozens of papers, and eventually ran in more than 2,400. But the young cartoonist was developing his characters on the fly, uncertain about working in the huge shadow cast by "Peanuts." He often agreed with syndicate editors who thought a lot of the early submissions didn't work.

"Calvin was little more than a mischievous loudmouth and Hobbes was simply his somewhat more sensible friend," Watterson writes of those early days in his introduction.

But the strip was deepened by the friendship between the main pair, which was always sent into the stratosphere by Calvin's imagination. This led to Watterson's other breakthrough idea, that of drawing Calvin's daydreams as the boy himself saw them -- a cartoon within a cartoon.

It became a running gag, a four-panel rimshot: First panel, a crocodile floating to the top of the murky Amazon. Second and third panels, the croc drifting toward a hippo. Panel 4: Calvin's dad (the hippo) standing in the shallow end of the swimming pool, asking his floating-face-down son what on earth he's doing.

The joke was in the contrast; fantasy compared with banal reality. That one goes B-B-B-A. Others, which started in reality, would go A-B-B-A. On Sundays, when Calvin turned into a roaring T. rex, the pattern was elongated for more space.

This got harder to do as time wore on.

"That was originally a fun idea, but the burden on the strip has been to make each switch more clever," Watterson said in an interview with West, published in the Comics Journal in 1989. "Each time it's got to be done with some unpredictability, some cleverness to it so that it doesn't become moribund. . . . I'm doing fewer because it's getting more and more difficult."

Six years later, he would do no more at all. He drew one final cartoon and let a boy and his tiger take off downhill on their snow sled and slide into comics history.

Ten years gone now.

Maybe that was the smart thing, you know. Maybe it was for the best. But still, the last book comes along and you realize there'll be no more Spaceman Spiff, no more Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. As a cartoon blockhead might have observed in an earlier era:

Sigh.

You wonder what that Susie Derkins is doing these days.