Tuesday 2 March 2021

A Little Variety


Anyone with some level of familiarity with Calvin and Hobbes is probably aware of the story concerning the "missing" cartoon. Here's a quick link to the two strips for 28 November 1985, just ten days into the strip's run; the alternate strip appeared in half the newspapers running the comic at the time, and the one that appears in the books (including The Complete Calvin and Hobbes) in the other half. Whilst no official statement was made, the generally accepted theory is that the one not archived was altered out of fear that children might try and imitate Calvin's desire to bathe in a washing machine.

Whilst that is the only case of a strip completely changing, there are five other C&H strips with two different versions. In three cases, these are dialogue changes, and Wikipedia's article on the strip gives the dates for the comics in question but not exactly what's different. So, if like me, you Googled those strips to see what was different about them after reading the Wikipedia article on Calvin and Hobbes... here you go.

Firstly, from the 7th of January, 1987:



The Complete Calvin and Hobbes goes with "Was I genetically engineered or cloned?"; this being relatively early in the strip's run, before the story arcs about Calvin cloning himself, it's possible there was either concern that younger readers might not have known what genetic engineering or cloning was, or mention of adoption being inappropriate (probably the latter; see the third changed strip below). This seems to be a less extreme case of what happened to the washing machine strip (in The Calvin and Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book, a book compiling selected strips with annotations from Watterson, this strip appears with the "adopted" line; the commentary implies there was a certain level of backlash from even daring to mention adoption, the implication being that that is indeed how the strip originally appeared, but it doesn't elaborate on where the two different versions appeared, or indeed mention the change at all).

Next up, from the 24th of November of that same year:



The Complete Calvin & Hobbes' version is "because our hemisphere is tilted away from the sun", which, unlike the original, is scientifically correct, but it's not clear when the change was made. 

And finally, from the 25th November 1988, a change similar to the January '87 case:



As you can probably tell from my low-quality photograph, The Complete... goes with "good" over "biological", which again is likely down to not bringing up the idea of adoption; "biological" seems to me to be both funnier and more in-character for Calvin, as does the punchline.

Anyway, as long as you have The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, that's everything (note that whilst that compendium featured pretty much all of the content specially done for the previous collections, even including clean versions of their cover art, the completist may wish to track down the Tenth Anniversary Book and the Sunday Pages collection of selected Sunday strips for Watterson's annotations and original sketches, as well as Exploring Calvin and Hobbes, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name that ran at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum) although there are two other strips worth talking about. Watterson's nonstandard approach to formatting for Sunday strips led to this appearing on the 28th August, 1988:


Since the original version would not fit on the page in the original treasuries, when this strip appeared in The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book and The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, it was totally redrawn (the original was used for The Complete... as well as Sunday Pages):


A similar fate befell the strip that ran on Christmas Eve 1989 (several other template-breaking Sundays were not available in colour until the release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes):


And its revised version, as seen in The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes:


With thanks to the Calvin & Hobbes Wiki for some of the information here. See also Platypus Comix's "Bill Watterson's Rarest" page for some related ephemera and rarities.

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