Hobbes & Bacon From Pants Are Overrated

After all the Calvin Ball games have been completed and the monstrous snowmen have melted away and Spaceman Spiff has hung up his goggles for the last time, there is love and marriage and a child...named Bacon. On one particular night when the really for real monsters came scraping at the closet door, an old friend is called on for support.

Pants Are Overrated was an ongoing web strip from Dan and Tom Heyerman, who wear their love of Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" on their collective sleeves. I scoured the internet (in the 10 minutes I allotted for this task) to find some comment on the strips and what inspired them out of the blue, but could find nothing. I can report that, while "Bacon" seems like just a silly name, Tom commented "I had the idea for naming her bacon partly because it’s a nickname I use for my niece, and partly because it would nicely fit in with the canon of Calvin & Hobbes. (with Calvin being named after John Calvin and Hobbes after Thomas Hobbes and so..) She’s named after Francis Bacon."


Watterson never did license "Calvin and Hobbes" and when he ended the comic strip back in 1995, that was that. I'd like to think he has seen these strips and understood the love for his work that, no doubt, sparked its creation..and then read all the comments from people around the world, in tears, begging for new work. Of course, Watterson was right to end things the way he did, leaving right when he did instead of driving the reoccurring themes into the ground, and so these few tribute strips seem just perfect.