Calvin & Hobbes creator speaks!!! (Sorta)

I always loved this one Spaceman Spiff strip where Calvin's daydreaming about Spiff getting ready for a crash landing. He starts counting down "7 seconds to impact. 6, 5, 4,"

Then Calvin blurts out "Three!" to his classroom. His teacher says, "Very good Calvin. 5 minus 2 is 3. I didn't think you were paying attention. That question was worth three points."

Then in the final panel, Spiff celebrates that he survived with a perfect three-point landing.

 

There was another Spaceman Spiff where he's in war. He starts firing, and the noise he makes is, "Krakow! Krakow!"

Susie, taking a test, desperately asks Calvin what the capital of Poland was until 1600. Yep, Krakow.

 

I still crack up at Spaceman Spiff coming in for a landing and saying, "Please extinguish all smoking materials. Including the spacecraft."

 

How dare you leave Bloom County off that list

 

Wasn't it at its peak in the 80s?

 

Loved Bill the Cat, but Opus couldn't carry the strip by himself.

 

Milo Bloom was a great newsman and Steve Dallas would be the only attorney I would ever retain.

 

Best comic strip of all-time. I can't believe it's been 15 years...

 

I'm almost positive that just about every Calvin and Hobbes merchandise, not counting the books, was unauthorized. I remember reading how pissed Watterson was at the merchandise that people were making using the characters he created. When I was in college in the 90s, you could find those T-shirts on every college campus.

 

Those three I mentioned were just my favorites from back in the day. Bloom County was another one I read regularly, along with Doonesbury, Kudzu, Dilbert, Baby Blues, Garfield (always there, always mildly amusing at worst) and others. It was a really great period for comic strips.
Another one that I always liked was Robotman, which has morphed into Monty. That strip has had an odd history. It's been fun to see it slowly evolve into something completely different than it was 10 years ago, and light years different than it was when it started about 25 years ago.

 

I wonder if there were a number of questions that Watterson refused to answer or gave an answer that made the question unusable. He has no love for being interviewed or even being contacted, so I'd consider those to be good possibilities, and the reporter may have not mentioned these facts because Watterson would probably never talk to him again (which he's kind of doing anyway).

 

I thought that, too. Seems like an awfully short interview ...