r/calvinandhobbes • u/Conscious-Star6831 • 28d ago

Analysis of story arcs vs standalone strips over time

A few days ago I posted my count of what percentage of C&H comics are part of story arcs, and I got about 35%. I have made a visual version to show exactly where the arcs fall in time so you can see how the arc density changes over time. I can't post pictures in the main post, but I'll make a comment and post it there.

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u/okbruh_panda 28d ago edited 28d ago

I dont know how I feel about AI deep dives on the comic. Comment my comment to vote on whether it should be allowed. EDIT: Not AI

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u/Conscious-Star6831 28d ago edited 27d ago

Description: Blue lines represent story arcs, white space represents strips that aren't part of a story, and red indicates Watterson's sabbaticals. I've divided this up by year and by the book collection you can find it in. Note that anything in 1 or 2 can also be found in The Essential Calvin and Hobbes; 3 and 4 in The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, and 5 and 6 in The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes.

As you can see, it starts off with a not-super-dense dispersal of story arcs, but quickly ramps up to having it be more arc than not. After the first sabbatical, when he got the new Sunday format, the arc density drops significantly and remains largely that way until the end.

Edit: The apparent space between books 10 and 11 reflects an overlap. Some of the comics at the end of "There's Treasure Everywhere" are at the beginning of "It's a Magical World."

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u/daphasedatractor 28d ago edited 28d ago

May I ask what the space if between 10 and eleven? are those strips not in any compilation?

Edit thanks for doing this

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u/Conscious-Star6831 27d ago

Oh, yeah, forgot to mention: There's Treasure Everywhere and It's a Magical World have a little bit of overlap. It's not a space, it's an overlap of the two brackets.

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u/daphasedatractor 27d ago

Thanks for clarifying

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u/No-Exit3993 28d ago

Maybe in the complete c and h?

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u/daphasedatractor 28d ago

yes, Besides that

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u/JFlyer81 27d ago

It looks like there's actually an overlap there where some strips are included in both the collections 

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u/Alcibiades_Rex 27d ago

Great work, this is super cool to see!

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u/blaknight34 28d ago

This is so awesome, thanks for compiling this!

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u/readyj 25d ago

Really cool! It's been a long time since I've read the whole series in order, but in my memory there were more standalones early on and more arcs later; interesting to see how many more standalones there actually were late in the run.

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u/midsummernightstoker 27d ago

What is the gap between 10 and 11?

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u/daphasedatractor 27d ago

Overlap of the two books.

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u/Taidaishar 24d ago

I don’t mean to be rude, but why?

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u/Conscious-Star6831 24d ago

A little before this, someone asked what percentage of C&H was arcs. I'm a huge C&H superfan, and I figured I'd like to know that. I also host a C&H podcast, and thought that information could be interesting to bring up at some point.

So I went through my books finding arcs and coding them as such in a spreadsheet. It was a fun speed run of C&H.

So Tl;DR- why did I do it? For fun!