Oh God, No: Bill Watterson Cancels New “Calvin & Hobbes” Book In Advance of Upcoming NYT Story

This was my childhood, don’t fucking do this to me

In the wake of damning reports from The New York Times and other publications that have brought down sexual assaulters Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K. and Harvey Weinstein, please God, please, oh my God please not this one.

Bill Watterson, creator of the unimpeachable classic comic strip “Calvin & Hobbes,” was set today to debut a brand-new book of strips detailing the further adventures of the beloved Calvin and his stuffed pet tiger Hobbes. However, murmurs of an upcoming New York Times article have caused him to shutter the book premiere and cancel his promotional guest appearance on Conan.

God is dead. He’s fucking dead if He ever even existed.

the clues were in front of us, even as kids. so blind were we, in a fog of Capri Sun and soccer tryouts

When asked for a statement, Watterson’s reps said “Mr. Watterson will not be commenting on these allegations today,” which of course he did. This boring-ass statement from a publicist absolutely ripped through my goddamn gut like a knockout punch from Sugar Ray Robinson. This really is not the shit we needed right now.

Notorious for his extremely private life both during and after the life of the strip (which now makes so much garbage sense goddammit, why does it make so much sense), Watterson shaped our lives and taught us unshakable lessons about morality with the charming adventures of Calvin: Wise beyond his years with a glorious imagination, but complex and petulant. We could laugh with him, laugh at him, see ourselves in him, and wish we had an imaginary friend as tangible and true as Hobbes.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Now it’s apparent that Calvin was either a shield for the worst excesses Watterson’s white male privilege, or worse, an avatar. The more we relate to his strip, this old monument to our youth, the worse we come off too. Complicit in this culture of decay and unchecked power. Content to stay quiet even as the evidence swirled around us, so long as we could bathe in the nostalgia of the one good fucking thing that still existed in this piece of shit world.

Twitter, of course, is already starting in before the article even releases:

please stop being right about it all, i’m crying

Everything is gone. It’s all ashes now. Someone in a foreign country was killed for the food we eat, slaves built the phones we type on, your parents never really loved you, and the creator of Calvin & Hobbes is about to go down in flames.

How could it be any worse?

Oh right.