Hobbes: Our poster didn't win?
Calvin: I still can't believe it. What a miscarriage of justice! This contest was a joke! Obviously the judges were biased against us from the start!
Hobbes: Well, the important thing is that we tried our best.
Calvin: The important thing is that we lost!
Hobbes: Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers.
Calvin: What's the point of trying if you can't be a winner?

The world never looked quite as funny as it did through the eyes of 6-year-old Calvin and Hobbes, his stuffed tiger. But then again, Calvin was not your average 6-year-old. After all, how many 6-year-olds can talk about the need to obey "the inscrutable exhortations of my soul" (which that day prompted him to collect frogs and weird bugs)? And Hobbes, who was more real to Calvin than even his parents, was not your average tiger. But on New Year's Day, after a Sunday sled ride into a magical new world, "Calvin and Hobbes" disappeared from almost 2,400 newspapers. Bill Watterson, their reclusive creator who has no children of his own, called it quits from the pressure of meeting daily deadlines. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Watterson has resisted all licensing--no Hobbes dolls or Calvin T-shirts. Fans looking for Calvin will only have several volumes of collected strips and their memories.

Calvin, who first appeared in 1985, articulated the unprejudiced and sometimes inane views of a child discovering the quirks of the world. "Paul Gauguin asked `Whence do we come? What are we? Where are we going?'º" he once observed. "Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I came from my room. I'm a kid with big plans, and I'm going outside! See ya later!" Then he added: "Say, who the heck is Paul Gauguin anyway?"

His namesake was John Calvin, the 16th-century theologian. His tiger's was Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century philosopher. Together, they explored subjects as light as spinach for dinner and as weighty as religion and gender. (Both were proud members of GROSS, the Get Rid Of Slimy girlS club.) In the reds, greens and yellows of the Sunday comics, Calvin often became Spaceman Spiff, examining new worlds in his sandbox-turned-alien landscape.

Now, a sandbox is just a sandbox. There is, however, always hope that Calvin will return and, with his lucky stuffed tiger, take us exploring again.