Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity
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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
https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/calvin-and-hobbes-and-the-price-of
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I'm sure I've told this story, but I'll tell it again ... just in case.

As an undergraduate at Kenyon, I was pulled into working on the college newspaper (The Collegian) by this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Winkler_(journalist)
He taught me how to write concisely, and instructed me more clearly and personally than any professor did in a formal class. That was my sophomore year, which would have been 1975-76.
At that time, this guy was our paper's political cartoonist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Borgman
Borgman lived next door to me that year, but we weren't friends. He was a senior. Borgman went on to the Cincinnati Enquirer where he won a Pulitzer in 1991.
We on the paper's staff knew that Borgman was graduating so we pondered whether we were going to have political cartooning as part of our offerings for the 1975-76 academic year. Well, at the beginning of the following term (fall of 76) a young kid (he was a sophomore and I was now a junior!) walks in and says that he would give it a go.
Of course, that was Watterson. His stuff was good so we said "sure!" And the rest is history.
I wish I had been even more involved in the paper than I was. I sort of treated it as a minor pastime.
Here's another person I worked with on that school paper. She edited the paper after Matt Winkler left. She was just let go by CBS as they shut down their storied London bureau. Here's a great NY Times article about her.
We had quite a group ...
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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
https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/p/calvin-and-hobbes-and-the-price-of
@wtg that was a great read, thank you for posting it!
My step father was a huge fan of comics in general (and he loved all that merch, the coffee mugs, the t-shirts etc) and he was a pretty big fan of Calvin and Hobbes. I always looked at the Sunday comics growing up and then whenever I had access to a paper. I can't remember when I stopped following Calvin and Hobbes closely (probably when I started studying Japanese and basically stopped consuming English language media of almost all kinds). But I have a vague memory of people talking about the comic ending. I googled and I do remember seeing this last strip.

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