[This post’s title alludes to this little tidbit of news: 2008 will last
a second longer than most years.]
The New Year, per usual, calls to mind resolutions about what we hope will come within the next 365ish days. I’ll get to that in a moment.
First, though, I want to note that whatever else it stands for, December 31 also marks the anniversary of a pop-culture phenomenon’s passing. I speak of the final Calvin & Hobbes strip, December 31, 1995.
The frames reproduced in this post aren’t from that last strip. Its creator, Bill Watterson, had for years fought with newspapers about the constraints imposed on cartoonists by conventional newspaper page size and layout. Eventually he won that battle, at least for his Sunday strips, and the final one (like many others preceding it) shows the result: a gorgeous sprawl of irregularly-sized and completely non-rectangular moments in his characters’ lives, much of the space simply blank. The idea of either (a) reducing the whole strip to fit RAMH‘s layout or (b) slicing it up for the same reason, well, it just felt blasphemous.
