Was a major fan. Here are my two favorite strips:
Calvin was very relatable to me as a kid and the whole premise was super original. I don’t lightly term something “the best ever produced,” but as comic strips go, I would be hard-pressed to find another candidate for the title.
My favorite.
But then, I enjoy subversive answers to easy questions.
Born early sixties. I loved Pogo, still do.
Never did get into Krazy Kat though.
This is JUST A RUMOR at this point.
Look, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum keeps pushing for this (he even tried to bribe Hobbes with Dubai chocolate!), but even the nightime climate there is just too hot for Calvinball.
Even the “friendly” games in Arizona resulted in heat stroke … of every single player! As well as the announcers, a third of the spectators, and the Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs vendor.
People underestimate the sheer physicality (as well as the psychological toll) of Calvinball.
It’s definitely not going to happen. Maktoum forgot to sing “Mary had a little lamb” backwards, so his bid doesn’t count.
While his opponent wowed the crowd with his rendition of “Knick Knack Paddy Whack” on a nuclear powered harpsichord.
Where would you have been reading Krazy Kat in the 60s/ 70s?
I think that most of the “bad mouthing” here is about the strip’s later years.
Obviously, no one was going to tell Charles Schulz to hang it up, and it was clear that he still very much enjoyed creating the strip in his later years, but even many fans of the strip recognized that, by the 1980s, it had become formulaic and overly focused on Snoopy, and it had become a shadow of the groundbreaking, award-winning strip it had been in the 1960s and early 1970s.
These criticisms apply to the majority of comic strips. Is Garfield formulaic? No doubt the earlier works of many artists are more subversive or impactful. If all Schulz ever did was the TV specials, he would still be a great artist.
Wow. I’m of the same vintage, but adored Pogo strips basically from the time I was old enough to read them, as did my siblings and parents. Well, de gustibus non est disputandum.
Of course, some gustus are simply better than others. 
Spaceman Spiff, a formidable opponent.
In my grouchy old fart opinion that decline started in 1966.
Good for you, that’s awesome! I have heard of entire semester college courses on the philosophy of/in Calvin + Hobbes. Could you have inadvertently written the entire syllabus for them?
Calvin & Hobbes is an all-time favorite. Sometimes, though, when I see a panel that has his mom, I think “That’s Michael J. Fox.”