Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for January 04, 2015

That tyrannosaur should be wearing a helmet to protect his walnut size brain

Dinosaurs flying dinosaurs. Fitting.

OK, so, I need to look for some comic strips that would have inspired Bill Watterson to draw today’s Calvin and Hobbes strip with tyrannosaurs in fighter jets.Still looking……Still looking……This is a tough one. It’s as ridiculous as if you had a dog flying a World War I airplane…….OK, here’s one that I guess will have to do for today:Click here or stretch image: Peanuts (June 5, 1960)

It’s possible that small mammals (the ancestors of rodents and small primates) eating dinosaur eggs doomed them.

You tell ’em Hobbes.

Warning: Educational alert.Final lecture of the holiday season.Today’s Calvin and Hobbes strip is from January 1, 1995. It is the first strip following Bill Watterson’s second sabbatical, and it is the beginning of the final year of Calvin and Hobbes.Note the flexibility that Bill uses with the shapes and sizes of the Sunday panels. Beginning in 1992, after putting a lot of pressure on his syndicate, he was no longer required to draw his Sunday strips in three horizontal rows like the Peanuts strip that I posted above, so that the first row could be thrown away by most newspapers and never published (in order to save space in the comic pages). This gave him the opportunity to use a lot of creativity with the placement of the panels and to do larger, more elaborate artwork like in today’s strip.Here is the first time that a Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip had this flexibility with the panels. It was the first strip following Bill Watterson’s first sabbatical, in early 1992. Note that he numbered the panels in this strip, to help the reader understand their order:Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (February 2,1992)Bill Watterson’s flexible use of the Sunday panels had a strong influence on cartoonists who came after him. Here is a Sunday Mutts strip by Patrick McDonnell, in which Earl the dog and Mooch the cat are discussing the panels:Click here: Mutts (May 12, 2013)Patrick also used flexible panels in some of his daily strips. Here is an early Mutts daily that has an inset with a colored border, similar to today’s Calvin and Hobbes. It is from 1998, published about four years after today’s Calvin and Hobbes:Click here: Mutts (November 16, 1998)Bill Watterson’s influence can also be seen in Brian Basset’s Red and Rover strips. Here is a recent Red and Rover with the order of the panels going in a clockwise direction (with the bottom row read right-to-left). The little gaps in the panel borders show the reader which panel comes next, like following a maze. No gap is necessary before the final panel, since there is only one panel left. Brian also displays his creativity by having the slide in each panel face toward the next panel.Click here: Red and Rover (August 17, 2014)Finally, here is a Red and Rover Sunday strip where Brian Basset uses the flexibility of the panels plus the resulting large space to display some wonderful artwork, as Bill Watterson often did:Click here: Red and Rover (January 19, 2014)

@leftwingpatriot: The Christmas Eve Sunday strip that I posted yesterday has not been published by GoComics, because Christmas Eve has not fallen on a Sunday since 2006, before GoComics began. In 2011 Christmas Eve was on a Saturday, but then it skipped to Monday in 2012, a leap year. Perhaps that strip will be published in 2017.

Oh, Dem Bones…

@Night-Gaunt49: A dinosaur book by Bill Watterson is a great idea. Or he could just send Calvin and Hobbes back to the Jurassic era in a time machine with a camera and some snacks……..

@Night-Gaunt49: Well, we do have conclusive proof of the Diplodocus being plentiful in the Jurassic:Click here: Calvin and Hobbes (June 29, 1990)

See this is why I like my comics on the internet , you LEARN stuff, and get more comics. Thank you Hobbs :)

@Hobbes: Love the history and analysis. Compare and contrast: You must be an English teacher. If you could get all the artists to allow use of their material, a dubious prospect, you could/should write a book about the various influences and threads running through the history of the comics.

@Hobbes: The Sunday Peanuts strip above reminded me of a scene in an episode of The Simpsons. Dr Nick Riviera, noted quack, is performing surgery. He begins to sing: “The thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone. The hip bone’s connected to the red thing. The red thing’s connected to my wristwatch. Uh oh.”

@Hobbes: Don’t misunderstand, I too appreciate all the information, but my first thought was ‘Wow Hobbes has WAAAY too much time on his hands’. :-)

I am with Hobbes on this one. I never was into dinosaurs.

How’s he controlling it with those little hands?

I have to agree with Calvin on this one. Tyrannosaurs in F-14s is cool.

I really like the emblems on the middle F-14.

I think SyFy will be making a movie with T-Rex in the F-14

Number Six said, “Anyone who can draw like this purely from imagination is a genius.”Yes — it’s more than simply learning to draw upon one’s imagination.

Time to play something else. Lol

@MickMaus: Well, for awhile I tried selling spices, but inventory was a problem and I ended up with way too much Thyme on my hands.After that I tried selling magazines, but I ended up with way too much Time on my hands.Then, following Calvin’s example, I tried writing a fictional autobiography, but it ended up being only two paragraphs long, at the beginning of this posting.In reality, the holiday season is ending and I have to go back to work tomorrow, so I’ve really been enjoying having too much time on my hands. For some it can be a negative thing, but for others it can be the spice of life. The most important thing is not simply how much time we have, but how we choose to spend it.

he drew the planes good but named them wrong. should be F15

@HobbesThank you for continuing to post your comments and related comics here. They are a joy to read.

@LiverlipsHa—“The Simpsons” is my favorite show, but I hadn’t seen that clip. I can just hear Dr. Nick, too—“Hi, everybody!” followed by singing …

I wonder if the tyrannosauri had frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads?

The F-14 was retired from Active service with the U. S. Navy in 2006. I first worked on it in VX-4 Pt. Mugu Ca. in 1972. I wonder if there are any openings in T-Rex Air Force for a slightly Over the Hill Tech. Rep,! USN 65-95

“Jurassic didn’t have much in the way of dinosaurs, more so in the latter Triassic and Cretaceous. Though I like all eras and flora & fauna.”.Not according to what I read. I think the Jurassic period had the greatest concentration of dinosaurs. I believe it was at the end of the period where the greatest mass extinction occurred…

I note the comments about the “puny little front legs” and I must concur. However, given the amount of cockpit space in these fighter jets, his huge rear legs and tail would be a “bigger” problem!.Oh wait… this is just a comic strip!

Just had to comment – love today’s strip (and message?).

Red and Rover reminded me . . . when my youngest boy was about 2 and his brother was about 5, I woke up in the middle of the night because I heard some noise in the youngest’s room. when I turned on his light, there was the both of them having a Orio picnic on the bed! I said to put the cookies away when they were done and I went back to bed. It was hard to keep from laughing.

I’m always blown away by the magnificent artwork by Bill Watterson.

My limit is stick figures.

xxx

That’s scarier than a monkey with a rocket launcher.

I’ve always wondered why dinosaurs are depicted as roaring. Given that modern-day birds are the closest, or ‘latest’, decendents of dinosaurs, wouldn’t it be more logical that tyrannosaurs would have stunned their prey by a chirp? A very, very, VERY LOUD chirp?

Dinosaurs might’ve evolved from reptiles but they aren’t reptiles either.

I remember in one of the collections, Watterson admitted that the anatomy of a T-rex wouldn’t quite work in an F-14 and required a bit of fudging.

I figured exoticdoc2 would eventually show up here to pollute the comments with his fetid fundamentalism and anti-scientific babble. Fortunately, I think most of the commentators here realize that his miasmal exudations are valueless at best; disgusting to those who prefer to think rather than to cower before a tyrant.

Why is the bible god-breathed? Because it says it is? So what? The koran also claims to be the word of god (and is just as incorrect).

You have flat out stated that you place the shifting, faulty wisdom of humans over that of God. Translation: “Don’t follow the evidence; don’t think for yourself; don’t ask questions. My authoritarian organization will tell you what to think and to do. Even though we don’t do anything found in our magic book unless we want to.”