That happened in the Sunday strips more and more as time went on. There’d usually be some funny and absurd stuff distributed throughout, but Watterson stopped giving a shit about setup-punchline on Sundays once he strong-armed the syndicate into giving him promises that whatever size a given paper published them at, nobody could alter his layout or trim the area that was traditionally the top row. Instead, he’d draw what he wanted, and it was generally glorious, but kid-me did sometimes want some bigger guffaws.
EDIT: I can see from the date and layout that we weren’t even there yet. Technically a paper could drop the top row and not lose the flow of the strip, and everything is still spaced out “normally.” He was already over it from a writing perspective though.
In this one, I think the punchline is secondary to the glorious T-rex art.
That happened in the Sunday strips more and more as time went on. There’d usually be some funny and absurd stuff distributed throughout, but Watterson stopped giving a shit about setup-punchline on Sundays once he strong-armed the syndicate into giving him promises that whatever size a given paper published them at, nobody could alter his layout or trim the area that was traditionally the top row. Instead, he’d draw what he wanted, and it was generally glorious, but kid-me did sometimes want some bigger guffaws.
EDIT: I can see from the date and layout that we weren’t even there yet. Technically a paper could drop the top row and not lose the flow of the strip, and everything is still spaced out “normally.” He was already over it from a writing perspective though.