“It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy! Let’s go exploring!”

If you’re a comic lover, the world of iBooks just got a little bit more magical, as Bill Watterson’s classic comic strip about a boy and his stuffed tiger has come to Apple’s e-book store.

Calvin And Hobbes — Bill Watterson’s beautiful elegy to imagination, impishness and inquisitiveness — is still a comic strip that is unmatched in my affections over fifteen years after the final strip ran. In fact, it’s always been interesting to me to imagine what Calvin might be doing now if he’d aged in real-time. He’d be around 32, and really, what company better for him to explore his imagination and his inquisitiveness than Apple?

Since such musings tend to pop around my head, I was delighted to stumble upon this great Reddit thread, in which Redditor ClassicWinger merged Calvin And Hobbes with OS X Lion’s default wallpaper to come up with an all new wallpaper, in which Calvin and his tiger look up at a densely packed universe in the hushed awe it deserves. You can download it in full-resolution here.

Love the wallpaper above, but wishing for something more appropriate to Mountain Lion? We’ve got it after the jump, alone withan even better wallpaper, featuring my favorite Calvin alter-ego, Spaceman Spiff!