31 Years Later, One ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ Line Remains The Greatest Quote In Comic Strip History

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 in 2014 as an uncredited guest artist on Pearls Before Swine.

As with any daily strip, the “best” Calvin and Hobbes is largely an exercise left up to the reader. Ask any 10 fans and you’re likely to get 11 answers, none of which are untrue or invalid. When we kicked the idea of this column around here at Polygon, we were no different; everyone who was willing to cite a specific favorite strip or quotation from Calvin and Hobbes brought up a different one.

However, since I’m the one who ended up writing this, I get to say in print which one is the best, and here it is:

Source: Bill Watterson

“We need to start putting prices on the priceless.”

According to the official GoComics archive, this ran on Nov. 11, 1995, near the end of Calvin and Hobbes‘s run. It’s always struck me as an effective mission statement for one of the strip’s major themes. For all the ink that’s been spilled on Calvin and Hobbes since its conclusion, its environmentalist reading feels underdiscussed.

According to Watterson himself in the annotations to The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book (1995), he always drew the strip with the notion that Calvin’s house was built right up against the edge of a nature preserve or national forest.

As such, Calvin was often shown exploring some infinite, dreamlike vision of nature, full of trees to climb, hills to skid or sled down, and rivers to cross with the help of some convenient fallen log. You can’t accuse Watterson’s wilderness of being defanged, either; even if Hobbes himself wasn’t prone to mauling Calvin at a second’s notice, Calvin often got mildly injured somehow in the course of his wandering. It’s not exactly nature red in tooth and claw, but it isn’t some saccharine playground either.

Image: Bill Watterson/Andrews McMeel Publishing

For all that, though, Watterson’s quiet environmentalist message is one of the parts of Calvin and Hobbes that’s endured the best in a strip that as a whole has barely aged at all. It often gets mixed up with the generally anti-consumerist aspect of C&H, as typically embodied by Calvin’s dad getting annoyed at some facet of life in the ’90s (why are there so many kinds of peanut butter, anyway?), but Calvin’s love of the woods is about as simple and pure as anything about the character gets.

Further, American culture as a whole really does have a problem with accepting and measuring intangibles. It took much of the rest of pop culture over 30 years to catch up to Watterson here, but you can see similar messages sneaking into the mainstream now, such as the unsubtle vein of villainous capitalism that runs through much of Al Ewing’s work at Marvel. If something isn’t making fat stacks of shareholder cash right now, then there are tech dorks lining up to denounce them as unnecessary. Those dorks are always wrong, but even the ensuing damage isn’t enough to convince them of that.

Some of the things that make us human are also the most difficult to monetize, which has led a generation of businessmen to assume they’re irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. Calvin and Hobbes, in its quiet genius, gets that across in just three panels, which makes this strip one of the most effective messages to ever run in a comics page.