Buckthorn Removal Singles Club is a club focused on environmental and community restoration. The group is open to adults of all ages, genders, and sexualities.

Much as the capitalist landscape has led to natural spaces which are polluted, non-diverse, eroding, and choked by invasive species; capitalist management of our social environment has resulted in an online dating scene which is toxic, transactional, and unrooted in community. With online dating accounting for over 50% of new relationships (2025) and all other methods of meeting people in quick decline, it can begin to feel taboo to get friends to set you up on a date or ask out a stranger in public. The aim of this group is to bring people together in community over shared values and provide an alternative to the monoculture of online dating, where friendships and relationships can grow rooted in the nourishing soil of community care.

“I’m very happy that people enjoy the strip and have become devoted to it,” Watterson said. They certainly have. After little more than a year of syndication, Calvin and Hobbes appears in 250 newspapers. “But it seems that with a lot of the marketing stuff, the incentive is just to cash in. It’s not understanding what makes the strip work.”

So despite dangled millions, Watterson has ended discussions to license Calvin and Hobbes for greeting cards. Proposals to animate the strip for television have been placed on hold. One day, there could be a Calvin doll or a stuffed Hobbes because “they (items) are pretty much advertisements for the strip . . . they’re not trying to do the job of the comic strip, they’re not giving jokes or developing characters.”

Preserving the integrity and fullness of his characters, is cardinal with Watterson.

Similarly, he’s opposing attempts to intrude upon his unassuming life style. Sleeping late, enjoying slow moments, knowing only simple concerns are his pleasures. Maybe as a superstition, he feels that if anything is allowed to change Watterson it also will change Calvin and Hobbes.