8 Greatest ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ Comic Strips of the 1990s, Ranked

Image via Bill Watterson Published Sep 27, 2026, 6:03 PM EDT Shawn Van Horn is a Senior Author for Collider. He's watched way too many slasher movies over the decades, which makes him an aficionado on all things Halloween and Friday the 13th. Don't ask him to choose between Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees because he can't do it. He grew up in the 90s, when Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, and TGIF were his life, and still watches them religiously to this day. Larry David is his spirit animal. His love for entertainment spreads to the written word as well. He has written two novels and is neck deep in the querying trenches. He is also a short story maker upper and poet with a dozen publishing credits to his name. He lives in small town Ohio, where he likes to watch professional wrestling and movies. Sign in to your Collider account Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes began its syndicated run in the fall of 1985, ending 10 years later on December 31, 1995, with thousands of strips seen in thousands of newspapers nationwide. Calvin and Hobbes took time to evolve, not only with the number of people who read it, but also with an evolution in Watterson's style. By the time the '90s rolled around, the comic was just as popular as the likes of Peanuts, Garfield, and The Far Side. Calvin and Hobbes only ended because Watterson was ready to walk away before his creation lost its spark. The quality never diminished. As this list will show, Calvin and Hobbes got better every year, including at the very end. 8 The Torment of Existence Weighed Against the Horror of Nonbeing (December 5, 1993) Image via Bill Watterson Some of Calvin and Hobbes' best comic strips were published in the winter, with Calvin outside in the snow building snowmen. His resulting art is an outlet for his imagination, which is often very dark. So many comics involve him making poor snowmen who suffer greatly, whether he has them being hit by a car or gutted with a cannonball. In this one, Calvin isn't happy with a traditional, boring snowman that someone else built. He's a nihilist who wants to comment on how dull modern art is while also portraying how snowmen suffer as they melt. Hobbes admires that Calvin puts art above commercialism, but upon realizing that he'd rather be popular and make money, Calvin decides to make a regular snowman instead. 7 Human Hunting Deer (February 26, 1995) Image via Bill Watterson In today's society, with so many horrific mass shootings in America, this comic wouldn't be published. To see it now is to give the reader a jolt. However, if you can put this aside and see Watterson's vision as it was intended during its time, what you get is one of his most clever entries. Several panels don't include Calvin or Hobbes at all, instead settling on a story in a dull office interrupted by gunfire. Then comes the first twist: the deer are the shooters, who treat people just like we treat them. The second twist shows that the story is all from the twisted mind of Calvin, who is enthusiastically reading his story in front of his class, resulting in his parents being called to school again. Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance. 💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power) 👒Grand Line(One Piece) 🐺The Continent(The Witcher) 🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson) FIND YOUR WORLD → 01 What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic. ASomething ancient and half forgotten that came down through my family. BSomething completely ridiculous that works in a fight and gets a laugh. CNo magic at all, just training, potions and a very sharp sword. DSomething I inherited from a parent I have barely met. NEXT QUESTION → 02 Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own. AA fellowship drawn from every corner of the world who barely trust each other. BA crew I picked up one at a time, all of whom would die for me. CTwo or three people I would never describe out loud as friends. DTwo mates from school who are exactly as out of their depth as I am. NEXT QUESTION → 03 Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live. AA high city of white stone with the sea somewhere far below. BA ship under sail, with an island ahead that nobody has mapped. CA rented room over a tavern, in a town I am leaving in the morning. DA cabin at a summer camp with everybody else already awake outside. NEXT QUESTION → 04 How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse. AI am not, because somebody far older than me decided this was my duty. BTreasure, and I am not always careful about whose it used to be. CI take contracts, since people will pay well for what they will not touch. DI am fifteen and this is all technically a school trip. NEXT QUESTION → 05 There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark. ASend word to somebody who has seen this before, then hold the line. BWalk straight in, because it is interesting and possibly edible. CAsk what it has been eating and what the village is willing to pay. DWork out which myth it escaped from, then improvise very badly. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does. AAn ancient evil that has been patient for several thousand years. BA government that has spent a long time calling itself the good guys. CA man who turns out to be far worse than anything I hunt for money. DA god, or possibly my own family, and quite likely both at once. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it. ASome things are worth defending even when the odds are hopeless. BNobody gets to tell me where I can go or what I am allowed to want. CPick the lesser evil, and never pretend afterwards that it was not evil. DMy friends come before anything a prophecy has to say about it. NEXT QUESTION → 08 A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world. AIn a song, in a language hardly anybody still speaks. BAs the one who got there first and proved the whole thing was possible. CBarely, and mostly wrongly, in ballads I would absolutely hate. DOn a plaque at a camp, read by kids about to do the same thing. REVEAL MY WORLD → The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return. Middle-earthYou belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime. This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends. You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line. The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight. You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot. The Grand LineYou want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there. One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together. You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea. The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it. You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it. The ContinentYou would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated. Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept. You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer. The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people. You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong. Camp Half-BloodYou want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you. Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse. You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for. The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way. Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 6 Calvin's Mom Brings Hobbes in Out of the Rain (October 3, 1993) Image via Bill Watterson Hobbes is not a real tiger who walks and talks — he's a stuffed animal turned real in the imagination of Calvin's mind. Every now and then, outside of Calvin's thoughts, we see Hobbes as the toy he really is. In this one, Calvin and Hobbes, forever best friends, begin their morning together before school. Calvin takes Hobbes as far as he can go, saying goodbye to him from the bus as Hobbes sits in the rain. His mother sees all, and as soon as the bus pulls away, she brings Hobbes in from the rain because she knows how much he means to her son. It's a sweet strip that goes for the heartstrings even harder in the last two panels, as both boy and tiger think only about seeing each other again. 5 Calvin Plays With His Dad (January 14, 1990) Image via Bill Watterson Calvin has a complicated relationship with his parents. He's often an annoyance to them, and even though they love their son, it's easy to get frustrated with his antics. Calvin's father is particularly insensitive to his son many times. He seems to be a good man, but he works too much and ignores his child. When he is there, it's as a disciplinarian who wants to build character. Here, Calvin comes in from the snow wanting only to play with his dad. His father has his own work responsibilities and can't. However, as he watches his boy play outside, what's really important comes to him, and together they build a snowman before going back in to Mom. Calvin and Hobbes was often dark, but this one is all about the family this lonely boy is lucky to have. 4 Calvin and Susie Play Doctor (November 18, 1990) Image via Bill Watterson He'll never admit it, but Calvin is totally smitten with his next-door neighbor, Susie Derkins. She's a normal girl who only wants to be friends with Calvin. Calvin wants this too, but because this friend is a girl, he resists his romantic feelings, which are often mocked by Hobbes. In this strip, Calvin and Susie play doctor. The majority of the strip, with its amazing animation, is like a soap opera, with Calvin portrayed as an older doctor and Susie his patient. Upset that her pretend injury is nothing more than a hurt foot, Calvin insists on giving her a lobotomy, resulting in an argument. Now all alone with Hobbes, Calvin is upset about how she acted. What he's really upset with, though, is that Susie is gone, as shown by Hobbes, who smiles as he dreams of playing doctor with his crush. 3 Farmer Brown's Demise (April 11, 1993) Image via Bill Watterson This strip is a brilliant piece of art, with so much going on in just a few frames. It begins with a commercial plane on fire plummeting to Earth. At the same time, a freight train is shown jumping the tracks as an earthquake begins below. A far-away shot shows these three acts of destruction all heading to the country home of Farmer Brown, just as he's about to light a match in front of a gas leak. The last panel shows that this is all from the imagination of Calvin, who is holding toys in his hands. Hobbes is there too, but this is too much. Before the impending explosion, Hobbes shares that he'd like to play something else. The comic portrays how demented Calvin's boyish imagination can be. It's also a showcase for Watterson's skills as an amazing artist. 2 The Dead Bird (September 19, 1993) Image via Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes is funny, dark, weird, and sometimes sweetly wholesome. Bill Watterson also takes a look at very serious subjects, such as death, and how it's seen through the eyes of a learning child. The initial image reels you in with a highly detailed black-and-white illustration of a dead bird. The following panels show Calvin and Hobbes finding the dead bird and having a conversation about it. Calvin is trying to comprehend the fragility of life and how people take everything for granted despite our limited time on Earth. He lets go of it by supposing it'll all make sense when he grows up. Sitting under a tree silently, Calvin and Hobbes ponder it all. They're not taking each other for granted. 1 The Final Strip (December 31, 1995) Image via Universal Press Syndicate On New Year's Eve 1995, Calvin and Hobbes came to an end. Just how do you sum up such an influential strip with one comic? It's like trying to come up with the perfect series finale for a TV show. Bill Watterson didn't go for some shocker, with Hobbes coming to life. Instead, he summed up everything the comic was with Calvin and Hobbes going sledding in the woods. They are excited about the new snow and all the possibilities it holds. Calvin calls it a magical world and says, "Let's go exploring." Calvin and Hobbes has always been about two friends, even if one is imaginary, exploring life together and having fun. As we say goodbye, we know they'll continue on okay without us.