Last New Year's Eve marked the 30th anniversary of the ending of Bill Watterson's seminal newspaper strip Calvin and Hobbes, the impact of which is still being felt throughout Western print media to this day.

If you were in a position to be reading comics at the time, then Calvin and Hobbes likely found some way to crawl into your brain. At a moment when newspaper comics were beginning their headlong dive into functional irrelevance, Watterson was insistent upon keeping his work creative, fresh, creator-owned, and maybe most importantly, at a legible size.

As a result, there's a non-trivial amount of Calvin and Hobbes's weird DNA in the webcomics movement of the 2000s, in Western indie comics in general, and in fiction as a whole. Even better, Watterson chose to walk away at the height of his fame and abilities, rather than hand Calvin and Hobbes off to an anonymous imitator at his syndicate or eventually age into self-parody. Since then, Watterson has been famously reclusive, only emerging from retirement for occasional gimmicks like a stint........

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