Bring on the headless snowmen! Calvin and Hobbes have returned.

Starting today, and for the next 17 weeks, the Honolulu Advertiser is re-running select classics from Bill Watterson's much-loved comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes," about an imaginative and impetuous 6-year-old boy and his stuffed (but never stuffy) feline co-conspirator.

Universal Press Syndicate is releasing this limited run of Sunday and daily strips exclusively to newspapers that used to carry the comic in conjunction with the new book collection, "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes," which hits bookstores this fall.

The strip — often a curious cobbling-together of slapstick violence, post-modernist satire, Robert Frost-inspired naturalism and apolitical anti-consumerism — has often been credited, along with Berkeley Breathed's "Bloom County/Outland" and Gary Larson's "The Far Side," as ushering in a modern golden age of comics in the 1980s.

Watterson retired the strip in 1995 with Calvin and Hobbes skipping into a winter landscape.

Consistent with Watterson's much-noted disdain for cross-marketing and merchandising and his belief in the simple, two-dimensional medium of the comic strip, newspapers and book collections are the only place his characters legally appear.

Watterson is also notoriously allergic to interviews, preferring instead to let his work speak for itself — a reasonable handoff given the volumes and volumes of philosophically playful, artistically subversive ideas floated during the strips 10-year run.

Calvin is named after the 16th century theologian John Calvin, best known for his belief in predestination over self-determination, a position the lead character artfully employs as a defense for his wild indiscretions and transgressions. Hobbes takes his name from the famously misanthropic philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

In Calvin's reality, Hobbes is a six-foot tiger who pounces on his owner after school, frolics with him in the woods near his home, and offers mostly ignored tidbits of reason to counter Calvin's more creative rants. He also has the annoying (to Calvin) habit of pointing out the superior qualities of tigers compared to humans.

To the rest of the world, Hobbes is a stuffed doll that Calvin carries around. In a 1987 interview with Andrew Christie, Watterson said that he illustrates both perspectives of the tiger as an invitation to the reader "to decide which is truer."

To be sure, Calvin's take on reality was and is markedly distinct from other pop culture pre-adolescents.

Where the officious tykes from the "Little Rascals" had the He-Man Women Haters Club, Calvin and Hobbes had the much less formal but no less exclusive (to Susie Derkins, at least) G.R.O.S.S. — Get Rid Of Slimy girlS.

Where Lucy from "Peanuts" offered psychiatric advice for a nickel, Calvin charged $5 for "frank appraisal of your looks."

As we welcome back "Calvin and Hobbes" for the rest of the year, we also bid adieu to our eternally frazzled pal "Cathy," who no doubt will live happily (and neurotically) ever after with new hubby Irving.

A permanent replacement for "Cathy" will be announced before the end of the year.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.