For the last five years, Berkeley Breathed has been doing an April Fool's "prank" in his comic strip, Bloom County, by having crossovers with Bill Watterson's iconic Calvin and Hobbes characters. However, this year, there was no strip in April and instead, Breathed shocked the world by having Hobbes simply show up as part of Bloom County starting on June 9th and he has been part of the series ever since!
During the 1980s, Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes were two of the most acclaimed comic strips in the world of syndicated comic strips and Breathed and Watterson were good friends. While Watterson ended Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, Breathed has continued working in the comic strip field and now Breathed has been authorized to use Hobbes for an extended storyline in Bloom County.
The original run of Bloom County (a political satire comic set around the residents of a boarding house in Middle America) actually ended before Calvin and Hobbes in 1989, just two years after Breathed won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning (a controversial aware due to Bloom County not appearing on the editorial page of newspapers). Breathed launched a Sunday-only strip, Outland a month later, an experimental strip based on a minor Bloom County character that soon evolved into essentially a Sundays-only Bloom County, as Opus and Bill the Cat each came to Outland. That series lasted until 1995, the same year Calvin and Hobbes came to an end.
Breathed then re-continued the Outland story in a new strip called Opus in 2003. That series ran until 2008. Finally, in 2015, Breathed brought Bloom County back, posting the strips on Facebook. A year later, he started the April Fool's tradition, pretending that Watterson had sold him the rights to Calvin and Hobbes, explaining that Watterson was "continent and looking forward to some well-earned financial security."
He and Watterson (well, Watterson would sign the strips, it is unclear if he was literally doing the strips with Breathed) would then do yearly crossover strips...
But instead of an April Fool's crossover this year, instead, on June 9th, we learned that the character covered in a mask and medical garment during COVID lockdown was not actually Bill the Cat but...Hobbes!
Opus has spent the last month introducing Hobbes to the other cast members of Bloom County, with the cynical young reporter, Milo Bloom, and the town's only defense attorney, Steve Dallas, refusing to acknowledge Hobbes as anything but a decades-old stuffed animal.
More recently, Opus has now tried to reunite Hobbes with Calvin, only Hobbes doesn't actually know what Calvin's last name is, making the search a bit difficult. It will be fascinating to see how Hobbes returns home.