If someone were to ask me what my favorite comic was, they might expect an answer from today’s modern webcomics. I do read a lot of those, but since I was born before 1995, I have to answer from an ancient and almost dead form, the newspaper comic.

My all-time favorite comic, is Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes.

Besides owning all of the individual book collections, many of whom are in rags from involuntary neglect and moving around, I also own the giant definitive complete collection box that I’ve had to move probably six times now since receiving it as a graduation gift in 2002. I dressed up as Spaceman Spiff for Halloween one year as a kid. I made time machine cardboard boxes in the basement. I unsuccessfully tried to start a chapter of G.R.O.S.S in my backyard in a wooden bunk-bed fort I helped my father build one year. I even tried to draw comics about a skeleton man that I would tape up near the sink in my elementary school classroom. Newspaper comics were second only to space and NASA for me as a child. My biggest regrets to this day continue to be the fact I did not follow up on either of those dreams.

For me, Calvin and Hobbes was a reflection of my childhood. I was outside a lot, in the woods, on bikes, in wagons, getting in to trouble. But like Calvin, it was often by myself, on my own terms, in my own imagination. I created intricate worlds for myself, based on whatever game or show I liked at the time, using whatever objects I had at my disposal. Watterson’s comics felt like a natural extension of my own world, a sub-world, where I would often try to live vicariously as the little blonde boy with his stuffed tiger, doing all of those wonderful adventures, and attempting to understand why my own parents couldn’t see my wisdom.

Growing up in the mid-80’s into the mid-90’s as a child isn’t anything like I imagine it would be for children today. Today we have the internet, gadgets, social networking, instant communication, and advancements in almost everything from medical to science. Yet we live in this profound disconnect, because as our world view expanded thanks to the internet, our personal view shrank. We started to feel the plights of people we didn’t know or hear anything about except through national news sources, and now we’re made to feel humility for them, to make their message physically known, despite that distance remaining the same. We no longer need comics, or any media form, to create a world for us to imagine ourselves in, that world is already at our fingertips, it’s already in our Twitter feeds and Tumblr pages. A comic like Calvin and Hobbes today would probably be treated like a fantasy, a relic from when times were much simpler, when there wasn’t the threat of terrorism, or failing markets, or political ideologies. Despite the fact the comic ran during the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, and saw its equal share of world conflict, it remaining a comic about a boy and his stuffed tiger, in presumably a world where despite conflict and chaos happening somewhere else, their world was peaceful and functional.

But even in today’s webcomic ecosystem, Calvin and Hobbes still stands up to anything I could consider good, and wipes the floor with it. As good as Penny-Arcade, PvP, Real Life, Questionable Content, User Friendly, or the thousands of other comics out there, they cannot match many of the newspaper legends we know from long ago. But that’s a concept only those of us from that time might understand. It’s a bit unfair of me to say modern webcomics will never surpass newspaper comics, because that would be like comparing today’s supercars to those from the 1950’s. It’s a reflection of the times. Calvin and Hobbes was, and still is, one of the best newspaper comics around.

But that success isn’t due to its readership, or its sales, or any discernible metric. It’s due to the fact that year-after-year, people discover it, read it, and love it. It’s the long-time fans who continue to promote it to people simply by word-of-mouth. It has an aura of simplicity and enjoyability to it that makes it retain its popularity long after the strip ended in 1995. Next year will be its thirtieth anniversary, and chances are a lot of people will know. It’s important to understand that Calvin and Hobbes has no merchandise. It has no store, no art books, or posters. It has no space at Comic Con, or your local anime con. The only way you will ever know, is by reading the strips, either online or in the books. That is the form its creator has chosen to maintain throughout its lifetime as a comic. It’s a comic in its most pure form. It’s a form none of today’s webcomic artists can match. Many of them might disagree with me, especially Scott Kurtz, since he is rooted deeply in newspaper comics. I respect the man greatly for his work, but you can tell that when he finally shed away that side of himself that wanted to be a newspaper artist and embraced the digital form, his work greatly shifted, and it’s probably some of the best he has ever been.

But all of these online artists know that they’re fighting an uphill battle to pursue their craft online. Online costs money. There are few, if not any “syndicates” of online comic creators to help prop beginners into the spotlight. Certainly PA Megacorp’s secondary function, besides powering a massive merchandising engine, is helping smaller artists get the face time they deserve to reach the next levels. We all enjoyed Stripsearch as a concept and execution, but the real purpose, in my opinion, was to give Megacorp more producers of content that would lead to more products. I have to imagine that if Robert Khoo could build a Scrooge McDuck vault and fill it with cash to swim in, he probably could with the success of every property that publishes under his banner. One of the Stripsearch episodes actually focused on comic rights and how PA nearly signed theirs away a decade ago, and Khoo used selling lunchboxes as an example of how he could very cleanly take the rights from the creator for his own purposes. Even if they still retain their rights and properties, and can walk away at any time, Khoo must be getting a small cut from their use of his merchandising empire either in the form of marketing or storage and distribution. I am not mocking that, it’s fair, but it also illustrates how clever of a man Khoo really is in furthering a business model in today’s comic form, one that Waterson refused to play in when approached similarly back then. After all, Peanuts was a massive empire in toys and novelties. Calvin and Hobbes could have been too. But he chose not to. He chose the path few artists take when they make it big in the comic world, and that was to allow his comic to end, for him to walk away, and never collect money by the truckload from licensing opportunities. Few artists can do that. Few artists can do that because they are either motivated by greed, or merchandising as a form of extending their art or spreading their brand. Others choose so out of the necessity of living on that money. Few can simply walk away and live on whatever Waterson receives in royalties, which is likely a lot.

I guess in the end, I was fascinated by Calvin as a dreamer, and Bill Waterson as a thinker. Here is a man who created a ten-year universe with which we saw the world through the eyes of a child, from the pen of a man who didn’t really want much to do with the world during, and especially after. Nearly twenty years after the end of the comic, I can only imagine what motivates him to leave his pen largely untouched and never to consider doing another strip of any sort again. I am intrigued by someone who isn’t willing to entertain the notions of other artists out there still drawing. Did he just stop because he got bored? Because he wanted to pursue other projects? Was it just a one-and-done? It’s this sort of speculation that makes him legendary in a way few artists of any medium have. Usually people like this die before having a chance to continue with their work, like Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, or John Belushi. But Waterson is very much still alive, and that I think confuses us more than if he were dead, because a living person simply stopping what is widely considered to be one of the best comics ever, makes it feel like we’re missing out on something even greater. But it’s very much more likely that he simply wants his only work to remain his only work, the pinnacle achievement. Really, I suppose there is nothing wrong with that.

After all, like his last comic implies, it’s really up to the reader, to discover what lies ahead.