Ran across this tonight and thought the Calvin and Hobbes fans here might want to read it

[highplainsdem]

https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/calvin-and-hobbes-and-the-price-of

Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity
How Bill Watterson Stuck to His Guns — and Vanished

The Republic of Letters and Matthew Morgan
Jun 11, 2026


Dear Republic,

Maybe you liked Calvin and Hobbes as a kid but you probably have no idea of the scrupulous moral integrity that went into it, as Matthew Morgan demonstrates in this deeply-researched piece.

-ROL

CALVIN AND HOBBES AND THE PRICE OF INTEGRITY

I.

1978, Kenyon College, sophomore year. Bill Watterson is lying on his dorm room bed, staring up at the ceiling. He hasn’t yet invented six-year-old Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes — though his studies have made him familiar with their philosophical namesakes — because the strip that will make Watterson’s name is almost a decade away. Right now, he’s thinking that his dorm room needs an amateur rendition of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”.

There’s a number of problems up front. The first is that (as Watterson will tell you himself) he’s not a talented painter. Still, what the work will lack in “colour sense and technical flourish” it’ll make up for with comedy — specifically “the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakeable odour of old beer cans and older laundry”. Besides, Michelangelo wasn’t Michelangelo until he’d painted and kept painting and became Michelangelo the painter. Watterson decides to go ahead and start painting.

-snip-

Much, much more at the link.