This Was the Very First “Calvin and Hobbes” Comic Strip

Forty years ago, on Nov. 18, 1985, the world was officially introduced to Calvin, a precocious, imaginative, and wise-beyond-his-years 6-year-old, and his best friend, a sage yet mischievous tiger named Hobbes.

Universal Press Syndicate published the first “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip in just 35 newspapers. In it, Calvin tells his dad he’s off to check his tiger trap, which he baited with a tuna-fish sandwich (irresistible to the big cats, naturally). Sure enough, in the final panel, we see that Calvin has caught a striped feline who is happily munching away. The adventure has begun.

Getting to the point of publishing the first syndicated strip was a journey for creator Bill Watterson, who started his career as a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post.

According to the book Exploring Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson worked on a number of concepts while keeping his full-time editorial cartooning gig. “My comics submissions were not deeply thought out,” Watterson says in an interview with Jenny Robb of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum that’s published in the book. “As each strip was rejected, instead of going back and revising it, I would try an entirely different tack. You don't like spacemen? Here’s college kids. You don’t like college kids? Here’s animals!”

One of these ultimately rejected ideas, however, included a boy who had a tiger friend named Hobbes. Sarah Gillespie, an editor at United Feature Syndicate at the time, encouraged Watterson to focus his efforts on the boy, Marvin. Watterson says after that suggestion, “...all of a sudden things started to click. I was aware of it immediately, because he was fun to write. He had a voice.”

Watterson developed a handful of newly focused panels, this time calling the boy Calvin. But United Feature ended up passing on syndication rights to his submission. Watterson then sent “Calvin and Hobbes” to both the Washington Post Writers Group (they also passed) and Universal Press Syndicate (which is now Andrews McMeel Universal and home of GoComics). Universal said yes, and Watterson worked closely with editors Jake Morrissey and the legendary Lee Salem to pull together the strongest strips and a sales kit (an original of which, by the way, recently sold at auction for $12,000).

“Calvin and Hobbes” took off slowly, growing from the original 35 newspapers to 50 by the end of the first year. By year two, though, popularity increased exponentially thanks to the first book, Calvin and Hobbes. When the comic ended a decade later on Dec. 31, 1995, six additional volumes had been published and it appeared in 2,500 newspapers worldwide.

Of the first strip, Watterson says in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book that he “thought it was important to establish how Calvin and Hobbes got together, but now I think this was unnecessary.” Many fans may disagree, though, living for the running tigers-love-tuna-fish gag that appears throughout the strip’s run.

Watterson also discusses how his artwork evolved. “The look of the strip has changed over the years as the drawings evolved to meet the changing needs of the strip. At the very beginning the strip had a more cartoony, flat look,” Watterson writes. Later in the book, he admits that “...now the early strips look very strange to me.”

On that fateful day 40 years ago, Calvin was successful in catching Hobbes in his trap—and from that very first bite the adventures never stopped. Now you tell us: What’s your “Calvin and Hobbes” origin story? Share it on social media with the hashtag #CalvinandHobbes40 and help us celebrate four decades of friendship, adventure, and of course, tuna-fish sandwiches.