Most of the time, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes was a straightforward comedy, set in equal parts a nondescript American suburb and its protagonist’s imagination. While it’s got more than its share of memorable lines and genuine wisdom, C&H was rarely out to tug on anyone’s heartstrings. There are two exceptions to that rule. One is a full story arc from March 1987, in which Calvin tries to rescue a baby raccoon. The other is a one-shot from late in the comic’s run, as one of Watterson’s more experimental Sunday strips. Both are quiet meditations on death, as Calvin confronts mortality through encounters with animals.
This isn’t going to be a particularly funny article, but here are the best Calvin and Hobbes comics about grief.
He’s not gone
Watterson mentioned in passing in The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995) that, in his imagination, Calvin’s home is built right up against the edge of a nature preserve or national forest. As such, Calvin has a nearly infinite amount of woodland to explore in his free time, with or without Hobbes. That’s part of what inspires any number of C&H‘s occasional deviations into environmentalism.
It’s also what led to the storyline that began on March 9, 1987. Calvin and Hobbes find a baby raccoon out in the woods, injured and with no sign of his parents. Without any better ideas, Calvin runs to get his mother, and they spend the next couple of days trying to nurse the baby raccoon back to health. Unfortunately, the baby raccoon doesn’t make it.
“At least he died warm and safe, Calvin,” his dad tells him. “We did all we could but now he’s gone.”
“I know,” Calvin says. “I’m crying because out there he’s gone, but he’s not gone inside me.”
It’s an unusually sentimental piece from Calvin and Hobbes, particularly for a story that involves Calvin’s mom and dad. It’s rare to see them as unequivocally supportive as they are in the baby raccoon arc, as both of them are often deliberately depicted as ambivalent about parenthood, but this is a rare glimpse of some genuine sentimentality in C&H.
In retrospect, it’s also the kind of comic you only really see in the first half of Calvin and Hobbes, before Watterson’s first sabbatical. Once he got back to work in 1992, Watterson’s ongoing feud with his syndicate had sharpened much of C&H to a razor’s edge. While it wasn’t without moments of kindness or emotion in the back half of its run, C&H is subtly a different comic from 1992 onward.
Fragile, temporary, and precious
Speaking of which, Calvin and Hobbes‘ next meditation on death came in 1993, as part of Watterson’s new approach to the strip. After his first sabbatical in 1991, Watterson changed his Sunday comics from their previous panel grid to the “unbreakable” half-page format, which allowed Watterson a level of creativity with his layouts that’s still unique 34 years later.
The comic for Sept. 19, 1993, opens on a sketch of a dead bird lying on the ground, possibly after having struck a window. Calvin and Hobbes encounter the bird on a walk through the woods and stop to study it.
“Once it’s too late, you appreciate what a miracle life is,” Calvin says. “You realize that nature is ruthless and our existence is very fragile, temporary, and precious. But to go on with your daily affairs, you can’t really think about that.”
It’s confusing, Calvin decides, but it should make more sense when he grows up. He and Hobbes go off to sit beneath a tree, silently lost in their thoughts.
Sometimes the only joke you got from Calvin and Hobbes, particularly later in its run, is that American newspapers ran it right next to stuff like Dilbert. There’s no punchline to speak of in this particular strip, and there isn’t even really a joke, aside from Calvin deciding he’ll understand more about death once he’s older. (And of course, he won’t, because none of us really do.) It’s simply a meditation on life, and how its end gives life more meaning.
This is the kind of comic that makes Watterson’s retirement, a little over two years after this strip ran, make more sense. Every new Sunday strip from 1992 to 1995 was a swing for the fences, with Watterson doing his best to challenge the limitations of what was already becoming a rapidly obsolete form of media. When he was firing on all cylinders, Bill Watterson was one of the best to ever do this weird niche of a job. It’s not sad that he stopped so soon; it’s lucky we got this kind of work out of him at all.