31 Years Later, One ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ Line Remains The Greatest Quote In Comic Strip History

Bill Watterson ended Calvin and Hobbes 30 years ago, and the strip’s influence still shows up everywhere. The cartoonist kept his work creative, fresh, and creator-owned, refusing to let his syndicate hand it off to an imitator. He walked away at the height of his fame, and has stayed famously reclusive ever since.

The Line That Lasts

The strip’s best single line, according to a new column at Polygon, is a single line from a late 1995 entry. It reads: “We need to start putting prices on the priceless.”

That line, the column argues, is a mission statement for one of the strip’s major themes. Watterson drew his stories with the idea that Calvin’s house sat right against the edge of a nature preserve or national forest. Calvin wandered through infinite, dreamlike visions of nature, full of trees to climb, hills to sled down, and rivers crossed with fallen logs.

Calvin often got mildly injured in the course of his wandering, and Hobbes himself wasn’t prone to mauling him at a second’s notice. The wilderness had teeth, but it wasn’t a saccharine playground either — Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes balanced adventure with danger, and that balance made the strip’s environmental themes land harder than they would have otherwise.

Why Watterson’s Message Endured

The environmentalist reading of Calvin and Hobbes has gotten less attention than the strip deserves. The column notes that American culture struggles to accept and measure intangibles, and Watterson’s quiet message got there first.

It took much of pop culture over 30 years to catch up. Now you can see similar messages sneaking into the mainstream, like the unsubtle vein of villainous capitalism running through much of Al Ewing’s work at Marvel. The logic is simple: if something isn’t making fat stacks of shareholder cash right now, tech dorks line up to denounce it as unnecessary.

Those dorks are always wrong, the column argues, but even the ensuing damage isn’t enough to convince them of that.

The Strip’s Legacy

Calvin and Hobbes shaped the webcomics movement of the 2000s, indie comics in general, and fiction as a whole. Its DNA is visible in much of Western print media today. Watterson insisted on keeping his work at a legible size, and that decision made the strip a model for other creators.

The strip barely aged at all. Its themes remain relevant, and its quiet genius gets across its message in just three panels. That makes this strip one of the most effective messages to ever run in a comics page.

The Numbers Behind It

• 30th anniversary: last New Year’s Eve marked the 30th anniversary of the ending
• Nov. 11, 1995: the date the cited strip ran
• 1995: the year Watterson published the annotations to The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book
• 2014: Watterson emerged from retirement for a stint as an uncredited guest artist on Pearls Before Swine

The Column’s Argument

The column’s argument rests on a simple observation: some of the things that make us human are also the most difficult to monetize. A generation of businessmen has assumed those things are irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Watterson understood that decades ago, and he expressed it in three panels. The line is short, but it packs a heavy weight. It’s a reminder that value doesn’t always show up on a balance sheet, and the column argues that Watterson’s message has already endured longer than most of its readers expected.

The strip’s quiet message has lasted longer than most of its readers expected.

Source material: “31 Years Later, One 'Calvin and Hobbes' Line Remains The Greatest Quote In Comic Strip History,” Polygon.

Bill Watterson · Calvin and Hobbes · comic strips · environmentalism · legacy · quotable