Did You Hear...? #1: BILL WATTERSON TO RELAUNCH CALVIN AND HOBBES!!

Did you hear this?: "BILL WATTERSON TO RELAUNCH CALVIN AND HOBBES"??? Did you hear that? Did you hear anyone say that!?

Wow, what a dream come true it would be for any comics aficionado to hear those words finally after all these decade! As we all know, Calvin was what...five years old when the strip ended in 1996? Well the way I heard it, the new strip picks up in his high school years. He's a hulking, surly teenager who keeps to himself, scowls a lot, and has a gory and lurid fantasy life that he documents in a series of cryptic illustrated journals.

The Hobbes doll - mildewed, stuffing poking out at the seams, fur worn through in patches, discolored and matted with patches of dust and with one arm nearly torn off hanging by a few threads - sits unused jammed into a dark corner of Calvin's bedroom closet, but that does not stop Hobbes from bedeviling Calvin, dogging his every step! Sometimes appearing as a ratty and mutilated version of his old self, sometimes as a nightmarish and ferocious full-grown tiger, occasionally as a faint, ghostly apparition of good old Hobbes as we knew him, only crestfallen and dejected. Hobbes takes ever more futile and drastic steps to right the young lad from the path he's started down, functioning as Calvin's tormented and ignored conscience as well as his spurned best friend.

Calvin no longer speaks aloud to Hobbes, but Hobbes's pleading and cajoling is a constant running commentary on Calvin's scowling descent into a black pit of sullen alienation punctuated by occasional outbursts of rage.

Susie pretty much does her best to keep off-panel.

It's going to be great! It's going to be hilarious! Did anyone else hear about this?

Am I the only one who heard about this?

Huh. Go figure.

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