https://ephemerality.net/tag/calvin-and-hobbes
This may or may not be an edit. It’s possible that it’s a minor printing error, maybe unique to my copy, but I noticed something odd in this strip. And it’s not immediately obvious that it wasn’t intentional.
April 3, 1988
Notice in the 8th panel in the first photo, Hobbes has what appears to be a visual representation of a dream above his head. Here’s a closeup:
Now the question is: is that meant to be a recognizable object, or is it a printing error, given its color similarity to the background? It looks like a solid object though, with crisp lines and a defined halo surrounding it. Also of note, he was after tuna, explained by the final panel:
Given the limited resolution of hand-drawn reprinted comics, I could see that it is indeed a chunk of tuna that Hobbes is dreaming about. But if that’s true, it really doesn’t add much value to the strip to have made the modification later, so it hardly seems worth the effort.
Was it an editorial change, or a printing error? This one, for the time being, remains a mystery.
–Simon