Spaceman Spiff and the case of the mutant snowmen...

"Calvin and Hobbes" was such an exuberant, strange and metaphysical realm you wonder how it ever got shoveled into a comic strip.
I remember this when i look at "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes," a 1,456-page art-book epic of every panel ever published, in my neighbourhood landmark bookstore. It was original by sheer force of personality. Calvin sounded like a 6-year-old psychotic on steroids one day and a Yale lit grad the next. He was mad off the leash. He wondered what was worthwhile in life if death was inevitable. ("Seafood," answered Hobbes, his imaginary tiger friend. Wait -- was Hobbes real or not? Debatable.)
Calvin battled blobs of oatmeal and the bathtub suds monster. He and Hobbes hurtled downhill in their wagon and set out for the Yukon. He turned himself into a Tyrannosaurus rex , Calvin the Human Insect, Calvin the Bug, Captain Napalm,Tracer Bullet, Stupendous Man and Spaceman Spiff.
In the middle of class, Calvin's teacher suddenly turns into a pig-snouted monster! The drooling blob demands attention and homework!
"Chew electric death, snarling cur!" Spiff howls, blasting her face off with his Atomic Napalm Neutralizer!
He was known to wear little rocket ship underpants. He feared nothing but the babysitter. Also the dark.And monsters under his bed(did metallica dedicate the ''sandman'' to calvin??maybe.)
The strip ran from 1985 to 1995. Thirty million people have bought earlier collections of the strip, but as of today you can buy it all in one pop. It will set you back by a cool 5 grand, but the three-volume, glossy-papered tome finally gives proper appreciation and display to creator Bill Watterson's efforts, the kind of size and color quality that he waged such epic battles for with newspapers and syndicates before retiring into silence at age 37, tired of the fray, wary of drifting into the bankrolls of mediocrity.
Flip open a page here:
"I want a grenade launcher, Mom. When's Christmas?" Calvin pipes in one panel.
"What do you think is the meaning of true happiness?" he asks Hobbes in another. "Is it money, cars and women? Or is it just money and cars?"
Here comes that cute girl from class! Calvin: "Hey, Susie Derkins, is that your face or is a possum stuck in your collar?"
All 10 years gone now.
People still remember because it was never worse than good, and was often simply brilliant. It parodied the issues of the day, the materialism, the greed-is-good cynicism, the pointlessness of television, the rampaging egos, the growing crassness of public intercourse, the bad behavior, our infinitesimal place in the universe. There was also time for snacks and a bedtime story.

"Calvin and Hobbes," worked on the concept that Hobbes was a stuffed animal to everyone in the world but Calvin, an only child. Only when he and Calvin are alone in the panel does Hobbes spring to life -- a tiger who walks on two feet, makes cheesecake grins at girls and appears to be more mature than Calvin by oh, about an hour and a half.
They wrestle, pull the covers back and forth at bedtime and make goofy faces at one another while sitting in the back seat of the family car -- best friends of the type boys no longer have after age 12. The only other kids in the strip were Susie, who lived around the block, and Moe, the school bully. Calvin's parents did not have names. They lived in a house that had a sort of American foursquare sensibility to it, in a nameless town that seemed lost on the Midwestern prairie. It all bespoke a certain Sunday-afternoon loneliness. (Hobbes was Calvin's imagination, right? His alter ego? Which means the whole thing is just Calvin talking to himself? Nobody knows; Watterson never made it clear.)

"I'd always resisted the idea of doing a 'kid strip,' partly because of the long shadow that Peanuts cast over the whole genre," Watterson writes in the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes. In Watterson's first strips Calvin and Hobbes is practically an homage to Peanuts. Calvin tilts his head back, screaming, and his mouth fills his entire face, so all we see is his tongue. Calvin and Hobbes converse about a girl atop a brick wall, just like Charlie Brown and Linus (although Calvin's desire for Susie Derkins is, shall we say, more sublimated than Charlie Brown's unrequited love for the little red-headed girl). When Calvin falls off his bike, he flips upside down and looks as if Lucy had just pulled the football away from him. Calvin sits behind an overturned cardboard box with a sign that reads, "Insurance, 50¢." You half-expect it to also say, "The insurance salesman is IN."
Schulz's biggest influence on Watterson, however, is evident not in his brush stroke but in his sensibility. Watterson's Calvin talks with the wit and intelligence of an adult about a child's fears and dreams. "I've never understood people who remember childhood as an idyllic time," Watterson wrote in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, published in 1995. Like Charlie Brown, Calvin is a perpetual loser. He's terrible at school. His baseball teammates make so much fun of him that he quits the team. He's repeatedly bullied. He doesn't appear to have any real friends, other than his tiger Hobbes. Yet unlike Charlie Brown, Calvin doesn't seem to mind his fate. His main quality, other than imagination, is enthusiasm. Calvin, as befits his name, is a carefree fatalist.
Calvin's imaginative play is the central element of Watterson's strip, and the reality of his friendship with Hobbes is never resolved. The tiger's true nature is left ambiguous. Perhaps Calvin's parents just can't see Hobbes as he really is, or worse, their presence turns him into a plush toy. In a 1989 interview published in Comics Journal, the questioner mentioned to Watterson that Hobbes was a figment of Calvin's imagination. "But the strip doesn't assert that," Watterson said. "That's the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does. … It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with you. So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up."
Calvin, too, is more real than the typical comic-strip character. He's a recognizably modern boy, a lazy TV-watcher who would rather play inside than outside. In some strips, he's astonishingly mean, while in others he's sickeningly cute—almost Family Circus-ish. Doonesbury's Garry Trudeau called Bill Watterson "the reporter who got it right" about boyhood, a statement Watterson disputed because he has no children. But Calvin is strikingly familiar, and like any friend or family member, his hold on readers grew with time.
Watterson refused to license a single Calvin and Hobbes product: no dolls, no greeting cards, no boxer shorts, no TV shows. Without specifically naming, say, Jim Davis of Garfield, Watterson scorned the cartoonists who enlist teams of assistants to draw their strips while they dream up new products for their corporate empires.

Watterson's first job after graduating from Kenyon College was as a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post, which fired him after only a few months. Unlike political cartoons, most Calvin and Hobbes strips exist in a timeless setting, so much so that Watterson's rare references to dated popular culture (at one point, Hobbes calls himself "New Wave") are jarring. Calvin and Hobbes discuss the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the nature of free will, not the merits of the Reagan administration. This strip, however, was published in February 1991, on the eve of the first Gulf War. "It's an incredibly rare privilege to have your work read by people every day, year after year," Watterson writes in the Complete introduction. "If you're inclined to go beyond jokes and say something heartfelt, honest, or thoughtful, you have a tremendous opportunity. And best of all, because the comics are generally regarded as frivolous, disposable entertainment, readers rarely have their guard up."
Beginning in May 1991, Watterson took a nine-month sabbatical from Calvin and Hobbes, the first of two such leaves of absence during the strip's 10-year run. When he returned, he demanded that newspapers run his Sunday strips full size—one-half of a newspaper broadsheet—which allowed him to experiment with unusual panel sizes and shapes. (Typically, comic-strip artists must use the top panels of their Sunday strips for a throwaway gag, in case newspaper editors choose to save space by running only the lower two-thirds of the strip.) Beginning in 1992, sometimes he would draw a single panel on Sundays. On other occasions, his Sunday strip would be filled with 20 small squares. In this strip, the third Sunday after Watterson's return in 1992, the "assembly line" snowballs are a clear metaphor for the comics, even as Watterson pokes mild fun at his own ambitions.
In the last years of Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson used his characters more and more to complain about the state of the newspaper comic strip. The economic power of the syndicates, he felt, encouraged cautious, committee-approved comics and market-tested strips for niche demographics. Calvin and Hobbes never became cautious, but the late Sunday strips, despite the visual inventiveness, occasionally felt formulaic: Calvin starts out in his imagination as a spaceman, or a dinosaur, or an insect, only to return to the dreary reality of the classroom or his parents' car in the final frame. Watterson says the post-sabbatical strips are his favorites, but you can also see him struggling, wondering what is left for his characters to do.
When Watterson returned from his second sabbatical, the first words of his Jan. 1, 1995, strip were, "The end of the Mesozoic Era …" At the end of that year, the last new Calvin and Hobbes strip would run. At the end of the Mesozoic Era, the dinosaurs went extinct. It's difficult not to think that Watterson knew at this point that soon his strip would be, too. He tried to reinvent the comic strip, to bring back the bold and colorful illustrations that filled newspapers before Schulz and Peanuts. But today, it is graphic novels that are filled with lively experiments, and the comic strip feels more moribund than ever.
On the last day of 1995, Watterson published his final Calvin and Hobbes strip. His two characters toboggan away to forever "go exploring." At the same time, Watterson seems glad to be liberated from the burdens of daily cartooning. In the Complete introduction, Watterson writes of the collected Calvin and Hobbes strips, "Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary … I meant to disguise that better." On his last day, Watterson didn't disguise much of his delight in abandoning the "familiar" for "a fresh, clean start." Or his desire to start painting full-time: "It's like a big white sheet of paper to draw on." With this strip, the last great newspaper comic strip ended after only a decade in print. "There will always be mediocre comic strips," Watterson said in a 1989 speech titled "The Cheapening of the Comics," "but we have lost much of the potential for anything else."