Noodle Incident/Newspaper Comics

• The Trope Namer is Calvin and Hobbes.
  • Bill Watterson may, at one point, have intended to visit the Noodle Incident someday, but in the Tenth Anniversary Calvin and Hobbes collection, he explains that the reason he never did was because nothing he could come up with would ever be as fantastic or as interesting as anything the readers would be able to come up with while trying to work out exactly what happened.

Hobbes: What about your explanation of the noodle incident?
Calvin: That wasn't a story! That was the unvarnished truth!
Hobbes: Oh, don't be so modest. You deserved a Pulitzer.

• • Half the fun of the Noodle Incident is watching how flustered and angry Calvin gets whenever Hobbes brings it up.
  • A "Salamander Incident" was referenced in an earlier strip.
  • Also, in one strip, Calvin complains to Hobbes about how much trouble he got into that day in school, but when Hobbes asked what happened, Calvin says he doesn't even want to talk about. When Hobbes asks if it had "anything to do with those sirens [he] heard around noon," Calvin repeats, louder this time, "I SAID I don't want to talk about it!" In the strip that immediately preceded this one, Calvin is getting dressed for school, complaining about how it never changes, and then says, "Well, not today. Today, I go for the gusto." and puts on a cape and space helmet, which seems to suggest the obvious. Moderate consensus among fans is that this is indeed the specific date/strip that the Noodle Incident occurred, as no other school exploit of his ever got all the way up to the level of emergency sirens.
    • The earliest reference to it, perhaps, was when Calvin's mom goes to a parent-teacher conference, which Calvin is dreading her return from. When she gets home she catches him packing, which prompts him to immediately protest that everything was a lie, at one point bringing up "the noodles," which his mother had not heard of yet.

Calvin: She told you about the noodles, right? It wasn't me! Nobody saw me! I was framed! I wouldn't do anything like that! I'm innocent, I tell you!
Mom: What noodles?
Calvin: Oh... Uh... Ha ha! Did I say noodles? You must have heard wrong. I didn't say noodles.

• • And according a later Christmas strip. even SANTA doesn't know what happened, or whether or not Calvin is innocent.
  • We the readers were also never privy to Calvin's favorite bedtime story Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey. At times, Calvin's dad gets irritated with the actual story and begins to ad-lib; in once such incident, Calvin wonders at the end whether the townspeople find Hamster Huey's head, whereas we wonder what happened to Hamster Huey's head in the first place.
    • The only hint revealed of what was in the book, is that there is a dance called the "Happy Hamster Hop".

Mom: But you look cute doing the Happy Hamster Hop.
Dad: I don't WANT to look cute!

• A literal noodle incident happens in FoxTrot, and as a result Jason gets all of his Calvin and Hobbes collections confiscated.
• In Get Fuzzy, the purported reason that the veterinarian doesn't make calls to the Wilco house is "the Hockey Stick" incident, for which Bucky is responsible.
• The unspecified "incident" that caused Brian to swear off GMing Hackmaster in Knights of the Dinner Table.
  • A few other "incidents", like the Bag War, are expanded into full story arcs as extras for the back issue collections.
• In the popular comic strip Pearls Before Swine, Pig is enemies with a sea anemone due to an unknown event that occurred years in the past.
  • All just a Feghoot for "Annie-May, my anemone enemy".
• In the Heathcliff comic, it's never explained why the protagonist's father is in prison (which he's always breaking out of) although the animated adaptation suggests it's for far worse crimes than anything his son does.