Why I Love the Internet
I love the Internet, especially Wikipedia, because you can find all kinds of information on it that cannot be found anywhere else. For instance, I learned today that there is a long-lost Calvin and Hobbes strip that appeared only in some newspapers on Nov. 28, 1985, instead of the normal one that appeared in most papers and in the book collections. I couldn't find out why this was so, but I was able to find the long, lost strip. I also learned that two strips that refer to adoption have been altered in The Complete Calvin & Hobbes (which I would like to get but it would be kind of silly since I already own all the books) in order to eliminate references to adoption. I am not surprised because, in The 10th Anniversary Collection, Bill Waterson commented on one of the strips how much hate mail he got for it, in which adoption is compared to cannibalism (not seriously, of course).
There was an even more illuminating discovery, though. Many years ago I bought The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, which was the first anthology, because I no longer had the first two books. Reading it, I discovered a strip I could not remember at all, which was astounding given that I read those books over and over and over again as a kid. Today I found out why: for some reason the strip never appeared in either of the first two books. Since I had never read the anthology version before, I had never seen that lost-and-found strip.
As long as we're talking about comic books, I learned a few interesting things about some while looking up various books (all of this because my dad asked for some for Christmas). One: On the first day of this year Foxtrot switched to a Sunday-only strip. I haven't read Foxtrot in several years so I was unaware. Two: Also at the beginning of the year, For Better and For Worse was semi-retired. Apparently the characters no longer age and some old strips are being reprinted with updated art or something (it wasn't clear exactly from what I read). Three: Garfield is being reprinted in color in new "Garfield Classics" books. These might actually be worth checking out as Garfield didn't always suck as much as it does now (and by now, I mean ten years ago when I gave up on it).