Were you a newspaper editor, imagine your reaction if a cartoonist came to you and proposed a comic strip that would offer the reader moral instruction conveyed by the antics of a self-centered six-year-old boy whom only saintly parents could love and no other child could tolerate. The strip would have no running story line, would contain few if any jokes, and would from time to time be devoted to ruminations on the meaning of life. And, oh yes, the boy would talk to a stuffed tiger.
Whatever editor signed up Bill Watterson despite this rather unpromising scenario deserves the heartfelt thanks of all of us who have for years regarded reading “Calvin and Hobbes” as the necessary beginning of every day. Watterson has decided to bring his comic strip to a close at the end of December. So now we are to lose the boy, the tiger, and our only popular explication of the moral philosophy of Aristotle.
