Home Again

Berke Breathed and Bill Watterson made the comics pages paradise for readers during a brief decade. The creators of Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes had interesting characters, funny stories and good laughs more days than not. Both put and end to their strips well before fans were ready to let them go. With a couple of exceptions, Watterson has stayed retired, but in 2015 Breathed began drawing Bloom County again, with the strip appearing on his Facebook page.

In recent weeks, the County crew has been faced with the task of returning a certain stuffed tiger to his original owner, using all the tools at their disposal to locate the adult Calvin and mail him the lost Hobbes. In a series that surely had Watterson's blessing, Opus the penguin and Oliver Wendell Jones the computer genius teamed up on the project. Breathed has carried off the story with the poignancy and humor that characterized Bloom County in its best moments. For the poignancy, there's the sledgehammer simplicity of the strip that showed how a picture of the adult Calvin had been found:

Then, with an almost unmatched ability to synthesize disparate current events into a funny and unashamedly adolescent punchline, we see the picture the image search found:

And in today's post, the story concludes with the reunion imminent, leaving to the imagination what will happen as the pair "go exploring" as they did in the last C&H panel Watterson drew:

Speculation in the comments is that these panels have been meant to set up Watterson's return to his own strip, or some kind of collaboration between the two. I'd doubt it -- Watterson's well-known disgust with the shrinking comics page in his day would only be magnified when he confronted the shriveled-up remains of the daily newspaper that exist now. And given his immovable stand against merchandising, I can't imagine he'd want to try to produce something in the modern commercial or online environment.

That's OK. These strips have been more fun for a middle-aged guy than a comic strip ought to be and called to mind good days. That'll do nicely.