From the afterward in The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book (1989):

Long ago the Sunday comics were printed the size of an entire newspaper page. Each comic was like a color poster. Not surprisingly, with all that space to fill, cartoonists produced works of incredible beauty and power that we just don’t see anymore, now that strips are a third or a quarter of their former size… All the things that make comics fun to read–the stories, the dialogue, the pictures–have gotten simpler and simpler in order to keep the work legible at smaller and smaller sizes. The art form has been in a process of retrograde evolution for decades. For those of us trying to return some of the childhood fun we had marveling at comic drawings, the opportunities today are discouraging.

I like to think that Bill Watterson is pleasantly surprised with the flourishing success of web-based comics. The economies of newspapers may have drained comics of their original unrestricted creativity, but the free expression of the Internet provides an outlet for even the most underrepresented comic artist to showcase the full extent of their work. The full-featured Sunday comics of Watterson’s youth may never make a resurgence, yet I think the movement toward online consumerism will revive the spirit of Watterson’s vision in a way almost unthinkable when he wrote those words nearly twenty years ago.

This place is magical.