"I clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo." - Bill Watterson

So I bought a real, physical copy of the newspaper for the first time in months recently. I saw this in the comics section:



It's not particularly funny -- in fact, it doesn't really make any sense -- but there's a certain, what shall we say, familiarity to its execution.


It will only get stronger when you read a few more comics -- the main character, the eponymous Frazz, is a brilliant underachiever with blond, spikey hair. I remember when Frazz came out, but it was right at the end of the my regular paper reading days, and I never followed it online. So, it's news to me.

It turns out that the strip's creator, Jef Mallett, is not Bill Watterson. He simply draws like him. I don't read the strip regularly, so I have no idea if it's as much a copy or effort to replace Calvin and Hobbes as it looks like. Mallett says it is not, but frankly I don't believe him.

The real point of all this is for me to point out how much I miss Calvin and Hobbes, a magnificent creation that was the last really good comic strip. I wish Watterson would start producing comics again online. He could completely avoid all the hassles (syndication, merchandising, etc) that seemed to bother him so much as a newspaper cartoonist.