“All I can say is, I worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to let other people run away with my creation once it became successful. If I could not control what my own work was about and stood for, then cartooning meant very little to me.”

-Bill Watterson: Author, Calvin and Hobbes

In life, you come to learn that there are such things as “high art” (paintings, great literature, symphony), and “low art” (media intended for mass consumption). Comic strips are usually unceremoniously tossed into the latter pile, with little thought to their artistic value above seeing an overweight cat making a smart remark towards a dog.

Yes, the Sunday funnies never carried as much weight as the news section, or sports, or even the classified ads. Yet, as someone who has been a reader of these lowbrow, cookie cutter strips, there was one that stood out to me. A strip that knew the medium its characters were in and still used the audience it had to deliver sentimental, thought-provoking arcs and dialogue. That strip is Calvin and Hobbes, written and drawn by Bill Watterson.

Those familiar with the strip know exactly what I am talking about, but people who just Googled it for the first time are probably very confused. Yes, I am talking about the strip with the rambunctious, misbehaving six year old and his toy stuffed tiger (who is very real to him).

There are many ways Watterson implemented messages or meanings into the comic strips; to start, the strip is still pretty darn funny. Despite this being a cartoon about a six year old boy—one of the top five worst types of human to deal with—it has jokes that will resonate with every age and gender.

Aside from some times where it is painfully dated (a babysitter gets paid $8 for a full night of work), the stories and core characters are timeless. However, rather than land the safe punchline every day, Watterson went bigger and bolder.

Sometimes the punchline is in the strip towards the middle, and the ending panel—the traditional punchline—is just a reaction. He used his wit and dry sense of humor to have characters make small remarks that speak for themselves and land the strip.

Take, for instance, when Calvin was building a snowman in warmer weather (as to make a statement using the fragile nature of the snow medium, of course), and when he gets heckled, Hobbes remarks that there is a “philistine on the sidewalk”.

That joke is not one for the whole family to get a cheap laugh out of; someone who is Calvin’s age in real life is not going to know the term for someone who is “guided by materialism and disdainful of intellectual or artistic values.” Watterson talked about this in an interview he gave to Honk Magazine in the early days of C & H.

“A lot of comic characters are flat and predictable, and a lot of jokes are no more than stupid puns. For most readers, sure, that passes the mustard, but it certainly doesn’t take full advantage of a remarkably versatile medium. I’d like to see cartoonists measuring their work by higher standards than how many papers their strips are in and how much money they make,” said Watterson.

He also talked about how he uses the medium to develop stories within the four panels every day.

“With four panels, the cartoonist has the opportunity to develop characters and storylines. It can be like writing a novel in daily installments. That’s where the potential of the medium is, and I see very few cartoonists taking advantage of it,” said Watterson.

Watterson took advantage of it every chance he could, developing long stories that take place over the course of weeks. Whether it was Calvin and Hobbes going to Mars, or the Yukon (they sure get around, don’t they?), or making a plan to get even with their evil babysitter, the stories involved nuance and wit. Some individual strips did not even have a punchline, but placed within the context of the whole arc, they fit in perfectly.

Some people may be surprised Watterson was allowed to do this, because having a punchline-less strip run in a newspaper seems counterintuitive to running a good business, and indeed, Watterson had to fight many times for artistic license things like this.

”When I saw that editors would squeeze, stretch, and cut my drawings to fit the space they allotted, and I saw I had no final control over whether my characters appeared on boxer shorts or not, I was stunned that publishers would mess around with someone else’s creation. Suddenly, I was defending my writing and drawing as art,” said Watterson in the preface to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

This alone proves these comics are a work of art, not just churned out without care. No dropshipper is fighting for their products this much because they do not work hard for them in the same way that Watterson does. I talk about his fight against syndication more in depth later, but that is another reason this comic and these characters have so much artistic value.

But that is all within the realm of a good comic; it is all some semblance of funny (or at least they started out so). Watterson also used his characters to address both timely and timeless issues through the lens of a six year old’s eyes.

Perhaps the most famous example of this was a simple strip from Feb. 18, 1991, where Calvin asks his dad, “How do soldiers killing each other solve the world’s problems?” The dad is at a loss for words, and Calvin says, “Sometimes I think grownups just act like they know what they’re doing.”

This strip particularly gets shared around so much the fact checking website Snopes.com had to put out an article that verified the contents of the strip.

Another oft-touched on topic in C & H is the environment. Hobbes, being a tiger, naturally cares about the environment, and Calvin follows suit. Calvin often will speak to the beauty and fragility of nature in the strips, whether waxing poetic or to make a point to Hobbes. In these, you will usually hear a comment or two about how humans are killing the earth, or about pollution or other, not-so-subtle digs at the real people messing up our real environment.

“We seem to understand the value of oil, timber, materials, and housing, but not the value of unspoiled beauty, wildlife, solitude, and spiritual renewal,” Calvin stated in a strip from 1995.

Another good, more direct instance is when our intrepid heroes are walking in the forest and come across a construction site for a set of condos. They both get very upset at the way the forest has to be demolished in order for that to happen, with Calvin saying “Where are all the animals supposed to live now that they cut down these woods to put in houses?? By golly, how would people like it if animals bulldozed a suburb and put in new trees?!?”

Calvin is still of the age where he takes “science” as a class. It is a time where most of us loved the outdoors and we waited for summer every year so we could play outside in the sun. Watterson takes that childlike wonder we can all relate to and turns it into a biting reminder that kids in the future may not have the woods to walk in if humanity keeps going down the same destructive path.

Then, of course, the most compelling reason the strip is “high art”, or at least better than other comic slop, Watterson’s fight against syndication. He talks about it in his preface to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a book of all strips that were run over the years. In that, he says that he worked too hard to get the job he loved, and would not want to see these characters he poured love into used for cheap merchandising. This was the hill Watterson died on, leading to him taking a sabbatical for a while after the syndication fight.

“All I can say is, I worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to let other people run away with my creation once it became successful. If I could not control what my own work was about and stood for, then cartooning meant very little to me,” said Watterson.

That is why he is the GOAT. The man is an artist who took on an entire conglomerate and was willing to throw everything away in order to see his beloved art not be used for capitalist greed. That is the reason Calvin and Hobbes is more than a comic farm. Watterson saw it as more than that.

He mentions that in his interview with Honk, saying he hates the factory-produced comic strips that keep on running long after there is no more story to tell.

“Jim Davis has his factory in Indiana cranking out this strip about a pig on a farm. I find it an insult to the intelligence, though it’s very successful,” said Watterson.

Art is finite, and artists know when the limit is reached on their art. Michelangelo did not make nine more statues of David because the first one was well received; Warhol did not make And Also Cans of Corn after his soup stuff went well, and Bill Watterson ended Calvin and Hobbes after there was no more story to tell.

The strip ended on Dec. 31, 1995, a Sunday strip. The very last panel ever published was Calvin and his lifelong friend on a sled, coasting through the fresh-fallen snow in full, bright color.

We are then left with one of the most iconic ending lines ever: “It’s a magical world Hobbes ol’ buddy… Let’s go exploring!” It reminds us that because of Watterson’s choice not to give them a life of repeated jokes and lowbrow gags; their true adventures are far from over.