“Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. That’s the one thing we know for sure in this world,” Calvin says to Hobbes in the first panel of a two-panel strip that ran in more than two thousand newspapers on Monday, July 17, 1995. The two friends are in a wagon, plummeting perilously forward into the unseen—a common pastime for them. Outside the world of the cartoon, it’s less than half a year before Bill Watterson, thirty-seven at the time, will retire from producing his wildly beloved work. “Calvin and Hobbes,” which débuted in 1985, centered on six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, Hobbes, a tiger who to everyone other than Calvin appears to be a stuffed animal. Six days a week, the strip appeared in short form, in black-and-white, and each Sunday it was longer and in color. The second panel of the July 17th strip is wide, with detailed trees in the foreground, the wagon airborne, and Calvin concluding his thought: “But I’m still going to gripe about it.”
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