I certainly don't blame Jim Davis for "selling out". He made a marketable character, and I don't blame him for trying to make his money because of it. I don't have a ton of artistic talent but if I created a lovable comic character and someone offered me a dumptruck full of money to sell toys and t-shirts and cartoons, I'm pretty sure I would take it, and I might even take it even if I felt like it diminished my vision of the comic. I would like to think I have integrity, and I think I do to some extent (there are certain types of companies I will not work for e.g. casinos), but Waterson is on another level.
And I have to say, it has made Calvin and Hobbes age a lot better for me. Garfield is almost more of a "brand" than a comic at this point, and it has made it such that I find the character and even the comics kind of (for want of a better word) "cheap" or "tacky". The same can be said for Dilbert (Scott Adams himself not withstanding...I used to genuinely like the comics).
C&H, on the other hand, reads about as well now as it did when I was a kid. The jokes still work, the art is appealing, and since there hasn't been this mass-marketing push for it, it has retained a purity unlike anything else.
I don't have the integrity or will power that Bill Waterson has, and I probably never will, but it can be something I strive to have some day.
Garfield was always about marketing. Davis was in it to sell merchandise. It was practically designed in a lab to be the ideal comic strip for moving product.
And as such, Garfield has never had any sort of message or meaning. It's just a cartoon that kids and some adults like.
Waterson, on the other hand, very obviously enjoyed his work and pushing boundaries. C&H was chock full of his personal beliefs, messages, and morals. And he loved causing newspapers headaches. He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this".
The two are such polar opposites it's almost amazing they both ran comics in the same papers.
I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media.
That's what Jim Davis tells everyone. He always cheerfully said he decided to become a cartoonist in order to make money. When asked about anything related to Garfield, he basically always denies having any artistic ambitions. That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield's entire life with Jon was just the hallucinations of him slowly starving to death alone, for instance? Oh, he saw a market survey suggesting the thing people feared most was loneliness, and thought it'd make for a good Halloween strip.
Not to go into an hour long Lasagna Cat speech here, but maybe Jim Davis isn't entirely sincere here?
To me it looks like he made the strip at first to laugh at himself (Jon) and his own cynical tendencies (Garfield). The "I thought becoming a cartoonist was a good way to make money" is an obvious joke at his own expense - it's a terrible way to make money, even with full Snoopy-level merchandising.
It's also notable that he's been very positive to people doing weird things like Garfield minus Garfield. He's not at all possessive to his creation. He accepted ages ago that as the comic became a phenomenon, it wasn't wholly his anymore.
I always kind of thought that the "it was meant to be marketable, not funny" thing was a cope, in the same way that Tommy Wiseau says that The Room was always meant to be a comedy.
People would say that the cat who hates Mondays and loves lasagna isn't very funny, so he responds with "uhh, it wasn't ever meant to be that funny anyway!!!".
Regardless, I do really respect how cool he's been with stuff like Garfield Minus Garfield.
Jim Davis did however write the script for that story in "Garfield: his 9 lives" (1984) where Garfield suddenly goes feral and is implied to kill his elderly owner.
So yeah, even imsorryjon-level Garfield isn't offensive to Davis at all
It's clear to me that he never loved his characters or were so defensive over his art as Watterson was - at least not in Garfield. But he also seems to have respected that his audience was more invested in his characters than he was, which was probably why he kept making it (and kept the right to the comic strip itself when selling everything to Viacom a few years ago).
Despite the mediocrity of the Garfield comic strip, I think a lot of Garfield's enduring popularity among late Gen X / early Millennials can be attributed to the late 80s Garfield and Friends cartoon [1]. It was actually funny, largely due to the writing by Mark Evanier. He's also known for his snappy dialogue on Groo the Wanderer, among other comic books.
And then in the late 00s, Garfield got an indie-cred boost from Garfield Minus Garfield [2], the surreal and often humorously bleak webcomic.
Groo was always a favorite of mine as a child. The amazing art of Sergio Aragones and the sarcasm and double speak that pervade the comic always connected better with me. That came across in the Aragones panels in Mad much of the time as well.
Same! They actually still put out new issues, in the form of a new 4-issue mini series roughly once per year. It's the only comic book I regularly read as an adult. Pretty amazing that Sergio is still doing this at age 88!
My understanding is that Davis quit drawing the strip pretty early on and has other people drawing it ever since.
Something I think a lot of people don't realize is that Japan has a much healthier media ecosystem in many respects. Like we just don't get new comic strips here and haven't in decades whereas in Japan they get new 4-koma like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door all the time and these get anime and video games and merchandise and make tons of money.
Our media industry has to realize that it doesn't just have a cyclical problem but that it is stuck recycling the same old properties over and over again as it shrinks. It's got to give a chance to some new blood.
Japan will certainly drive a property into the ground (Dragonball, Naruto) though at least they keep coming up with new/inventive stories to go along with it. I'd also say Japanese media isn't without it's tropes that it repeats ad nauseam if they are successful once.
But comparatively the US and most of the rest of the world is in a media dark age. The US seems to only manage to invent a new good property every decade or so. Everything else is rehashing existing ideas.
I really would like to know what Japan does differently to nurture new properties. It clearly works. It seems South Korea and China are also doing pretty well in that aspect.
the publishers seem to have more interest in trying new writers and ideas and letting them sink or swim, basically. Like the same weekly magazine that publishers one piece might let your little idea get in there too, and if readers seem to like it they'll open up spots for you in the schedule, or it can die as a one shot or get cancelled after a few chapters.
Lots of new interesting stuff comes out and dies or doesn't survive, but it means they do have some constant incubation. The American version of this for comics is basically letting new writers try their hand at a big existing property to see if they're any good, but that means the new ideas are "fun spin on batman" or etc. (And of course the indie scene exists in both to different extents, but the publishers for non DC/Marvel stuff in the US are anemic.)
I hear scholastic is genuinely good, but they have a very specific audience ofc.
The very beginning was. Most japanese comics are designed to be serialized for a long time, and are built to change direction if needed: Getting serialized is difficult, and low enough reader scores get you kicked out of the magazines, so it's common for a story to be built to swerve. Early Dragon Ball is a light thing like Dr Slump but a little more some fighting, but anything related to the old folk tale was dead and gone by, say, the second time there's a martial arts tournament. Most of what most people think about regarding dragon ball is past the moment where we randomly learn, through the power of retconning, that our main character was an alien all along, and people of his race are invading earth. Not quite the kind of thing from Journey to the West
Some viewers will remember growing up with the TV series Monkey, whose bizarre images and stories of Pigsy and the titular flying Monkey I shall never forget.
There are certain elements of Journey to the West found in DB but not even Goku is similar to Wukong. Yes, monkey-like features, extending stick, perhaps a couple of early characters but everything else is not even close. So I don't think it's fair to say that is a rehash.
Judging from the initial portion of the anime Dragonball pivoted gradually from a loose adaptation of Journey to the West (with Goku as the protagonist among funny versions of traditional characters) to a more original and specific setting and plot (with Goku as the most important of many Saiyan and martial artists).
Another Chinese classic is The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I think that might be one of the oldest character-rich media franchises of all times. Drawings of Cao Cao and other characters have been identifiable for hundreds of years. They are still making video games (Dynasty Warriors) and TV shows based on it.
I find 20% or so people in the general population in my town recognize who I am right away because they watched either Naruto or Demon Slayer and those are both in my queue so I can understand better what they know about me.
... but it is hard because there is Slayers and Futari Wa Precure and many many anime that have a few 12 epsiode seasons in my queue. And a lot of that is in the "so bad it's good category". One of my guilty pleasures is
which gets really good over time because the crazy overpowered protagonist and his Level 9999 friends almost meet their match and I never would have discovered the light novel and manga if I hadn't been willing to watch a truly atrocious J.C. Staff anime. Only in Japan can some ordinary person write a web novel, get a contract for a light novel, get a manga made, then get an anime, video games, etc. The "media mix" strategy lets their industry market test content with low risk and the anime doesn't even have to be profitable on its own if it convinces 10,000 or so obsessive fans to shell out $150 to buy all the books of the light novel and another $150 to buy the books of the manga.
The cost structure of the US media industry is a lot worse and divides between super-expensive prestige content and a tier of slop. It's all a gatekeeping-industrial complex and no wonder people are pissed about DEI, "woke" and all that because it's a zero sum game. The industry would love to get another J. K. Rowlings and we've probably had 10 of them who never got greenlit because of low risk tolerance.
> crazy overpowered protagonist and his Level 9999 friends almost meet their match
Is this the origin of that trope? I've seen a couple of anime/manga that use the same story as a jump off point. Character that doesn't know their own strength kicked out of the party for being "weak" only for us to later find out they are one of the strongest/most powerful individuals in the world.
Nah, that one is too new. Turns out this guy's power is only useful at the very bottom of the most dangerous dungeon which has dense enough mana that he can summon people and items stronger than the surface world. It's marketed as a crazy revenge fantasy and it is that, but it would be unfair it to compare it to the really mean-spirited revenge stories that come out of Korean and China.
It’s healthy in that there is a lot of interesting stuff constantly going on, but the actual work conditions are incredibly unhealthy for a lot of those creators.
I guess, but I’d just say it’s moved to other distribution models because who reads newspapers now? Mostly people who want to read Family Circus reruns (okay, that’s uncharitable).
I can’t speak to other countries, but we have a very healthy ecosystem in webcomics. I back several on Patron, buy the compilations of others on Kickstarter, and otherwise grab new issues at my local comic book store or library.
Heh I never expect to see Demon Girl Next Door in public let alone in HN of all places. Seems like I'll have to see that backstabbed whatever too eventhough I never touched any work of that genre.
Women who dress like Marlene Dietrich are also acceptable, but that's where I draw the line.
More seriously, I should have capitalized the "M" to make clear that it was Men, as in Mankind, but this is the internet in 2026 and most people are only semi-literate. I'm not certain it would have helped.
Especially if someone wants to be offended. You just can't stop them if that was their goal going into it.
> He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this".
In his defense, this was also partially because they kept shrinking the space he had so he was trying to work with what he had while also forcing their hands into giving him more room to work with.
I think it was on the front page here a few weeks ago about the creation of garfield.
Apparently Davis had been struggling with a previous comic strip and when an editor told him that his characters just weren't what people wanted to see, he rethought his entire strategy and decided to emulate the success of Snoopi:
- Cute character, but instead of going for dog lovers, there was a hole in the market for cat lovers
- Few, related jokes that can recur all the time (Love lasagna, hates mondays)
- No word plays - should be easy to translate
- No political jokes
- No deep jokes - should be accessible
- Lots of merchandise
I think it is super interesting that he set out from the start to build a "sell out"-brand and after reading this, I kinda respect the whole thing a lot more.
Setting out to do something commercial (and succeeding), is different from setting out to do something firmly non-commercial and then commercialising it. The second one will almost always involve compromise that was never intended, which often undermines the original, non-commercial version.
Maybe not for what-ever-reason, but I do respect someone who can read the market and build what the market needs, more than someone who stumbles into it. It also means that he stuck with his guns. He didn't "sell out", he decided to just "sell".
Note that you're asking whether it's more impressive that someone managed to analyze and intentionally create an appealing, cross-cultural, and marketable product, rather than creating something appealing completely by accident. Of course the former is far more impressive than the latter, assuming it really was intention as laid out by the OP. It requires intelligence and understanding of the world.
I think building a business is hard, and people that succeed at it (in a generally non-harmful way) are impressive. Setting out to build a business and succeeding, as opposed to stumbling into it unawares, is indeed more impressive to me, I think.
Obviously. You're not a "sell-out" if you are honest up front about your work being commercial.
I find both doing it for money, and doing it for personal or benevolent reasons to be good. What I find despicable is claiming you're doing something for selfless reasons, but actually doing it for profit. That's what dishonest and shows ill will towards other human beings.
(Doesn't have to be strictly about money either. The amount of voices you could hear saying they won't be writing blog articles or OSS because it'll become training data for LLMs, and that this thus deprives the world of their pro bono work, clearly shows there's plenty of such dishonest attitudes in OSS circles too.)
There's this quote from the 2010 interview with Waterson:
> If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.
But don't we all feel sure he could have rolled along for three or two or one more year? Surely it's not like his creativity ran out suddenly on Jan 1 1996 and he had no more comic strips in him. And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline, so... couldn't we have got one more year of cartoons?
I'm kidding really. Bill Watterson doesn't owe us anything; if he was no longer enjoying creating the comics, why should we get to enjoy reading them? And we'd just have the same complaint if he quit after eleven years instead of ten, or worse, we'd be saying how the last couple of years it was clear his heart wasn't in it.
Watterson and Larson (both who retired at or near the "top" of their game) could easily have gone on for a year or two more - or three, or five, or twenty.
But they both knew that the font was running low, if not completely dry; likely triggered by starting a joke and realizing they'd done it before years ago.
Both have "come back" here and there to dabble, as appropriate for someone who actually knows how to retire.
The Simpsons used to be my favorite show, but I feel like the quality dropped dramatically after season ~13 or so. Part of that is because I got older, I'll admit, but even rewatching the older seasons, I still find them funny while season 13 and onward I simply don't.
I would have so rather they ended the show twenty years ago and use whatever budget they spent making it on new cartoons.
Schultz, who is still fairly universally beloved (including by Watterson I think?) went on forever. So did Johnny Hart (BC). The trick is that they're not really trying to get a laugh out of you every day. They're a slightly surreal setting with warmth, and a few recurring gags.
Larson and Watterson were high intensity in a way classic cartoonists weren't. That's not bad, but most people are probably going to burn out or worse (e.g. ending up like Scott Adams).
Another example of retiring at the top was Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary. A 20 year run of daily comics with about 16-17 years of that being a reasonably consistent storyline.
Doing a daily anything is hard. Garry Trudeau sort of did a good compromise by pivoting to just a Sunday entry--that is still pretty solid. But my general observation is that it's really hard to keep things flowing day-in and day-out as a cartoonist/columnist/etc.
I didn't read the comics when they were new, but I started reading the daily rerun comics of Doonesbury, and I hadn't realized how funny they actually are.
I guess as a kid I always thought it was the comic that "old people" liked, and never gave it much of a shot, but I kind of inadvertently found it recently and it actually pretty good.
One of my favourite comic artists, Mads Eriksen [1][2] basically "disappeared" in 2008-2009 and didn't start regularly publishing comics again for more than a decade (at a much slower pace) because of the pressure and burnout.
Maybe Watterson could have squeezed another year or two out of himself, but it's by no means a given it wouldn't have meant unreasonable personal sacrifice.
> And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline
We have had threads on HN before about C&H where people identify a slight but noticeable change in the strip in the last years. Watterson was naturally growing more ornery as he moved towards dad age, and that more dismal view of the world did grind against the strip’s basis in the wonder and magic of childhood.
Also, culture changes, and treatening a little kid with psychological or physical harm isn't as funny as it was back then. You had to grow up in that era to appreciate it. Despite loving and being loved by their parents, Calvin is frequently terrified of them.
I think this implies that Calvin is not as unruly as it appears, and he was raised with good values, so he still obeys his parents most of the time because he knows they want the best for him.
If we still had Calvin and Hobbes nowadays, it wouldn't be as well received if it didn't change with the times. I can't picture them going to family theraphy, for example, although I haven't read all the strips.
I have similar feelings about TV shows. There are shows that I wish hadn’t ended after a couple of seasons, but there are also a ton of shows that dragged on for 6, 8, 15 seasons when it clearly would have been better to end them years earlier.
Overall I lean toward appreciating things that end early more than things that end late.
Joke is on him. The comic section of the paper (if it even has one anymore) is filled with fossilized strips that weren't even fresh in the 80s. The comic cartel in the US basically killed off the medium.
Do any households with young children present even get the newspaper anymore? I would wager if I asked my nephews and nieces they would all say they've never actually read a newspaper comic strip. I don't think any amount of freshness would have saved that
Whenever I read something about Bill Watterson, I end up thinking about how, during the '80s and early '90s, Watterson, Tom Batiuk, and Harvey Pekar were all producing some of their best work.
Three Northeast Ohio creators, working in different areas of the comics world, yet it's easy to imagine a shared universe where Calvin and Hobbes, Funky Winkerbean, and American Splendor all occupy the same map and interact.
They also had in common that the work itself was the product. The strips and stories came first; merchandising, branding, and other empires were either absent or beside the point.
That's probably a coincidence. Or it says something about what 1970s acid rain did to the water in Lake Erie. But Northeast Ohio did seem to have produced an unusual number of artists who were more interested in the work than in building a franchise.
BW got thrown under the buss for taking a stance, his stance. He is a nonconformist and really, he puts in his comics a one of a kind mixture of childish silliness, questions, statements, and philosophical topics.
There is no politics other than being a nonconformist who gets bullied today now, which not even ironically proves his point as well reinforces it.
It is like he is simply protecting the purity of his characters, not the other way around. He appears to be a medium, not so much an artist.
He is a treasure, and a singularity. I ordered all of his comics back then and to this day hold them dearly and the books are treated with so much decency, they appear as never opened. I for example never fold the book cover, nothing. It is a weird thing of mine, but it is out of respect for an author with whom I have a conversation.
I think the newspapers and books alone still probably made Waterson a decent amount of money. More than enough to live comfortably forever. I remember Scott Adams (of Dilbert) once saying his syndication deal was something like $6 million per year, I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes was at least comparable and the books certainly sold well. Newspapers used to be absolute cash cows.
If I were offered a dump truck full of money from a casino in order to help the casino optimize their gambling, then I think I would have enough restraint to say no.
I say this because I did turn down a very lucrative job opportunity at an online casino recently. It wasn’t as much money as Bill Waterson almost certainly turned down, but it would be a very significant bump in my salary.
If I were a trillionaire like Elon Musk, Bill Watterson would be one of those people I would anonymous gift enough money so that the rest of their lives would be comfortable. We need more people like him, and he should be rewarded for it.
In 2023 his publisher said that his printed collections had sold 50 million copies worldwide, and that the strip had appeared in 2,400 newspapers. That's at least tens of millions of dollars over many years, and with little spending and risk-averse investments, it's not unreasonable to conclude $100M for the total net worth figure.
Ah, I think it's safe to say you wouldn't. Nothing against you, but the personality required to acquire a trillion (!!!) dollars is incompatible with the kind of philanthropic thinking you clearly possess.
Eh. There is one thing I don't agree with in the name of integrity: Waterson didn't allow sales of a stuffed pet tiger akin to Hobbes, which millions of children (me included) must've dreamt of. He could've made it affordable and so keep his integrity.
As the article points out, the reason for that particular lack of merchandise is even deeper.
> Watterson insisted that if he wasn’t going to settle the question of Hobbes, then he definitely wouldn’t let some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes “into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic”.
Having a toy representation of the tiger doesn't mean anything about what the tiger is or represents. I'm with the downvoted OP, it's a holier than thou position and many people would've had even extra joy compared to just having the comic books. Plus, people make their own anyway.
Someone making their own is exactly how it should be. This is perfectly aligned with the spirit of the character. A factory churning out clones of Hobbes, and Watterson essentially making a statement that Hobbes is in fact just a toy would go against that spirit.
Some things really are better when you need to use your imagination.
What a brilliantly written piece. Maintaining one's integrity is unfortunately rare enough that it makes Watterson's story so remarkable. I completely respect and admire his dedication to doing something for its own sake, for holding himself to the highest standards imaginable, and from walking away from it all for his own reasons - even if selfishly I'd rather him keep writing so that there would be more to enjoy. Time to go pull some old volumes of Calvin & Hobbes off the shelf for the hundredth time, I suppose.
I have so much nostalgia for Watterson's work. I occasionally will buy another of the hard bound 3 volume set. I always wind up giving them away and then buying another.
I'm waiting until my kids are out of the house (just a couple of years now) to repurchase the 3-volume set. The first purchase didn't survive my kids' childhood - which, yes, I think Watterson would have approved.
The three volume hard-book bound set is one of my favorite possessions. It has been a little while since I read them, but I must have read them cover to cover twice. The print quality and feeling of the hefty books makes them feel like really high end comics in the material sense. I really respect Watterson in keeping the comic pure in the sense that the characters only exist in that one medium.
I bought my 8 year old daughter the hardcover box set for Christmas. When she opened it her initial reaction was definitely "oh...thanks" (she was clearly not excited about it but wanted to be nice). Within a week it was borderline impossible to get her to put them down and go to sleep at night.
Yeah, our boys read my old C&H collection more than almost any of their modern kids books. Downside, it's inspired all sorts of mischievous ideas.
Roald Dahl, too, and the Uncle series. These old books have more of an edge to them that our kids seem to light up at, and I've had a hard time finding modern equivalents. Most of the modern kids books seem too saccharine/sterile by comparison. Maybe it's just survivorship bias, these are just the old books that people bothered to keep reading.
And Dahl’s foundation or whatever it’s called had the audacity to try to rewrite the books; removing references to people as ugly, or fat, etc.
You don’t get to rewrite books because they make you feel uncomfortable. Don’t read them. Even Disney has had the common sense to not alter the problematic parts of its films, they just issue a warning at the beginning that it doesn’t represent their current values.
Ah yeah, I heard about that, I think we have the older edition. I think it's fine to just stop and provide some parental commentary about it - it can be a good forcing function for talking about that stuff.
Hopefully they didn't take out the Oompa Loompa's judgemental songs, the kids find those hilarious. The humor's the sugar that makes the moral tale about how to be and not to be in the world go down - don't be a glutton, don't be greedy, try to be humble, kind, and empathetic like Charlie. It's not actually about superficial traits.
Exact same story here. I got my father in law the box set as a gift, and when my daughter was about seven she started reading them when we were visiting them. So I bought her a set of her own. She still reads them all the time at 11.
My wife and I take turns each night doing bedtime for our two girls, 4/6. I have the full C&H box set and, a whiiiiile back, my oldest asked what it was and if we could read it.
For over a year now, any time it's my time to do bedtime, we have to read C&H and cannot read anything else. We've been cruising through it from start to finish and are, within the next week or so, going to reach the end.
Both kiddos, especially my oldest, have been demanding that we start it over. I'll probably table it for a couple of years and then come back to it when they're just a bit older, but yeah... kids definitely know about it and really do appreciate/enjoy it.
Edit: To say nothing of the idea that, eventually, everything fades into obscurity. I feel like what you're lamenting is something that actually jives with Watterson philosophically.
It makes the accidental discovery of C&H all the more special. I remember the day a school friend showed me a C&H book he got from his dad. It was never in the newspapers where I grew up, so I would never have discovered it otherwise.
Not everything in this world needs to obtain global reach and fame.
I think that's just a natural part of the times changing and generations having their own icons. In contrast to the shambling undead of Mickey Mouse and other eternally recycled franchises, I think it's OK to for things to fade a little. If nothing else, it leaves things for future generations to rediscover and make their own.
I'm not a kid, but I asked for some calvin and hobbes books for my birthday. The postmodernism laid out in the first comic of each anthology gets the main thrust across. It's a timeless piece of art. It doesn't need boosting. It will be there for me to reach for if I have kids who might enjoy them.
Everything comes to an end friend, not everything needs to go on forever. Maybe it is forgotten, left behind, but that's not really important. What's important is it ended on his terms and some of us had the privilege to experience it.
There will still be people that find Calvin for the first time, and they will get the same privilege. I'm glad he did it his way and I think most of his new fans will as well.
Is that the main goal, though? Making sure your characters stay in the public conciousness?
I am not sure that is the most important thing, or even that important at all. The characters matter a LOT to people of a certain age, and his decisions helped maintain that.
I once posted Bill Watterson's speech to the 1990 graduating class of his alma mater, but it never got to the front pages. I think I tried posting it again, no go. I just made this account so I can try it a third time. More than any comment I could write to some HN post, I wished people would click on the link and read it.
Here's hoping some of you will do it, before it's wiped out from the net:
Great speech. I appreciate how he talked about not selling out, but only after he described how tough it is to earn money in the real world. Especially because Kenyon is one of those places you would hear "I don't care about money" from people who already got it the easy way.
A quote that stood out: "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."
> A quote that stood out: "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."
This quote more than ever seems like taking the road less travelled by in this day and age
I take advice from rich people with a grain of salt. It's easier to praise the value of money over integrity when you have both. They don't ask starving artists to give graduation speeches.
Watterson appears to have genuine integrity and I applaud him. There is a point where you have enough money, and the ones who deserve the most scorn are those who cheat to get even more when they have orders of magnitude more than that. But don't forget that a lot of people really do have to choose between integrity and dinner, and I don't judge their decision.
It is my opinion that while you do not judge people who have to choose between integrity and dinner, you can definitely judge people who made decisions and structured their life in such a way that they had that choice, and not only did they choose money, but did it in such a way that what other people would call riches was subsistence for them because of the lifestyle they led.
> There is a point where you have enough money
You forego the option of choosing when you end up chasing a goal or living a standard of living which requires you to continuously choose money every time. It takes a lot of thinking to come to what "enough" means. For some, enough is a few hundred thousand dollars max. For some, even a billion is not enough. You can definitely appreciate the former when they reach that goal and stay there, but it becomes difficult to appreciate the latter (and they are the focus of most of the criticism here), because you do need to sacrifice more than a bit of integrity in that case.
I model my parenting style on Calvin’s dad. I actually had almost the identical conversation with my kids about why old pictures are in black and white. When they were in fourth grade my daughter came home from school angry at me about having let her and her brother believe for four years that the world used to be in black and white.
They haven’t brought up bridges and weight limits yet so I can only assume they still believe that.
One thing is letting them develop a sense of humor; another thing is lying to them when they're clearly not able to distinguish between a lie and the truth.
I've pondered on this my whole adult life. Are we doing kids wrong with things like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, fairy tales, tall tales, etc.? I think not. I think kids come up with their own childish and wrong explanations for things on their own, whether or not other kids, parents, relatives tell them the world was black and white until the late 1950's or that Santa delivers presents down the chimney. Part of growing up is learning to question those childhood ideas and beliefs (misunderstandings) and move past them.
And really, it's something that shouldn't stop with childhood beliefs. There are a lot problems we have as adults because of stories we have been told and stories we tell ourselves that are not true.
> Part of growing up is learning to question those childhood ideas and beliefs (misunderstandings) and move past them.
Yeah, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy were all a sort of mini rite-of-passage when I was a kid, with everyone figuring it out at different times. Made us feel a little more grown up, especially among other kids who hadn't figured it out yet. And for some reason I don't remember us spoiling it for them - instead we were in on the secret to make the holiday more fun.
Despite the downvotes, I'm with you in this hill. Kids are gullible because they instinctively trust adults, especially their parents. It's fine to prank them and teach them afterwards how not to be as credulous, it helps their growth. It's bad to abuse their trust for fun, specially long-term falsehoods. It stalls their growth.
It's clear from the comics that Calvin's dad is just having a bit of fun with his son by telling him funny lies about how the world works. It's not about tricking kids, it rather about playing a mostly harmless prank on them.
There's a sign next to a bridge that says "Weight Limit: 10 tons". Calvin asks how they know the limit and his dad says they build the bridge, then drive progressively heavier trucks across it until it falls down. Then they rebuild it exactly how it was and put up the sign for the how heavy the last truck was.
Some interesting discussion here about Bill Watterson and Jim Davis and it makes me wonder about this word, "integrity," that's being used. In my mind, integrity is to be honest and to do what you promise to do (unless we are talking about physical structures, which we aren't here, are we?). When an artist "sells out" is that really showing a lack of integrity? I guess it depends on what promises they made to... themselves? To others? What if things have changed since they made those promises? We aren't talking about moral absolutes like "thou shall not kill," here (if even that is an absolute). I feel like "integrity" is possibly the wrong word to use for all this, but as someone who grew up very religious and who strives to maintain his own integrity, I can see why people might use the word here. I think my concern is for when other artists who make different decisions than Bill Watterson are ridiculed for not having integrity, as if they have broken some moral code. They haven't.
I agree. Davis intended to do what he did all along.
If Watterson deviated and sold the merchandise he would have lacked integrity, sure. But someone like Davis is acting according to their ideals and intentions and so on; there is a lot of integrity present in the matter.
People use it to mean “they did something I disagree with” which doesn’t inherently overlap with integrity concerns.
I suppose you could argue that art isn’t meant to be commercialized in such a way, and so Davis lacked integrity to the discipline and trade. Some comic artists might say his approach takes away from comic artistry and lacks integrity in that manner. I’m not sure if that’s true or reasonable to say at all. Someone can make a comic for any reason they want as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t know what Davis is like personally, but from the outside and looking only at Garfield, it doesn’t appear that he lacked integrity.
I think I'm taking it a step further even and asking that if Watterson decided that he would never merchandise Calvin and Hobbes and then 10 years later saw things differently and changed his mind, would that be an integrity violation? I don't think so.
No, arguably not. People change their minds over time. We learn things, change, our environment changes. I'm not who I was 10 years ago, but not for a lack of integrity.
Sometimes I entertain the fantasy that Watterson continued writing Calvin and Hobbes as a hobby-- whenever a particularly good idea came to him he'd put it to paper. And someday he'll drop a collection that dwarfs the original strip.
I can safely say the three biggest influences in my teens were Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The Muppet Show, and Calvin and Hobbes. Sagan ignited my passion for learning and made me realise I a rare ability to understand complicated things visually.
The Muppets taught me that nothing in life should be beyond ridicule, and that I should be the first one to laugh at myself, and to never be afraid to do stupid things. Also that a touch of surrealism is key to a healthy life.
Calvin gave me a sense of belonging, and made me realise I was not as weird as I originally thought. If people enough like it to the point newspapers publish the strips, I would not be alone. The final strip really hit me hard. I miss those two.
I didn’t know Calvin and Hobbes so well until recently. My wife recently got me the integral of Calvin and Hobbes and I read it in full in a few weeks. What a masterpiece!
What struck me the most is the magical balance between humor, philosophical tale, and ode to childhood. I have two kids and it helped me numerous time approaching their silliness in a more constructive and patient way.
This is one of the reasons I have Stupendous Man on my forearm. It's the version of him running into his classroom on the back of one of the books (arms flexing triumphantly), only I had that artist style the costume based on how he appears in Calvin's imagination.
I can't imagine getting Garfield or Snoopy on my skin. CnH was massively important to me growing up. It had so much meaning.
I also remember Watterson writing, in the CnH retrospective anthology (on the topic of Moe, the school bully), that he didn't identify with people who were nostalgic for childhood because he remembered it being a very difficult time. Poignant and true.
Thats very interesting to me that Watterson remembers his childhood as a difficult time. Calvin’s moments of sadness/anxiety/anger are a big part of why I found those comics so relatable and endearing as a kid.
> I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that’s how life works.
Not to spoil a beautiful joke by explaining it, but all of the strips are based on this. Two characters see things differently. Sometimes it’s because Calvin is in the grip of his (psychosis|childhood) and sometimes it’s a totally ex machina Watterson idea that they’re exploring, but there’s always two worlds colliding hilariously.
I have no idea if a truly competent director could catch lightning in a bottle. The movie Fight Club has been correctly compared to Calvin and Hobbes. There’s no way for stuffed toys to capture this at all. Good for Watterson for allowing his genius not to be trampled.
> The movie Fight Club has been correctly compared to Calvin and Hobbes.
Bit of a tangent, but I recently watched Fight Club with my son. He was surprised he liked it because he'd gotten the impression it was a dog whistle for manosphere spazzes. I was like "exactly, Matrix is actually good too...".
Avoiding a work of art because of identity politics is no way to live life. That is true whether it is right wing or left wing identity politics. One should just give the work an honest go, and form one's own conclusions, without worrying about whether "those people" might have enjoyed it as well.
I remember when Fight Club came out and joke was along the lines of ”you mean the gayest movie like, ever?!” Palahniuk, the author of the book (the film changes very little) came out himself only years later. And it is so very very very queer coded, back in the early 00’s even straight people noticed it. And Matrix trilogy is of course made by two transwomen.
I don’t really understood why manosphere thinks these films as some tough guy films or something. Then again, I think I do.
"A few weeks later, the project is finished. Watterson probably takes a moment to stand in the middle of the room and look up, contemplating the months of work, the tins of paint he went through, the things he learned about technique, about the joy of a job done for its own sake, about himself. Then he opens a tin of whitewash, climbs up the bed-chairs-table one last time, and paints over his work. He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh."
Is it Zen where they do this with mandalas? The monks spend forever building intricate sand paintings and then wipe/blow them away in an instant. Love it.
A lot of artists do this a lot of times. Especially work that pushes your boundaries is often not of the best quality, not suited for release. We finish it, we enjoy it, we share it perhaps with a small group of friends, and then it goes in the bin. It's just the way of it, and why I'm so skeptical of so many social media influencers who create stuff but the creation of that stuff becomes the media of their particular medium, not the thing they're meant to be making. Like game developers who post a lot about whatever game they're making, and get such engagement that the thing they're making and the quality of it almost takes a back seat to simply continuing the work for the sake of documenting it and posting about it.
It's also why despite using AI for work and for occasional brainstorming, it never, ever will find it's way into my actual artistic processes and works. The friction of creating is the point of creating, and where AI removes that friction, it renders the product pointless. An AI image feels empty precisely because there were, by definition, no long nights spent with it, no difficult to solve problems, no taste to reckon with: it was simply made with precision and perfection by a machine being told what to make. An achievement certainly, but not a human one.
Man, I always wonder what would have happened if Bill Watterson had been around for the era of webcomics. Much more creative freedom, and no editor or syndicate to tell you how to layout your panels. Would he have loved it?
Or would he have hated it? He certainly wouldn't have wanted to build a website for it.
There are some absolutely fantastic web comics out there but none of them have had the cultural impact of Calvin and Hobbes. I don't see how any of them could, to be honest. Even though the technical means of distribution are there at near-zero cost, there's no logistical way in practice to get a webcomic in front of a vast cross-section of society for an entire decade.
We can never go back to a pre-internet/streaming era.
While that means it's pretty isolating to find favorite media (hard to talk about something like "Solo Leveling" with anyone that's not into that sort of thing). What it also has meant is an explosion of new media to tickle almost anyone's tastes. It's as if everything has become "underground music".
For me, it's hard to imagine him giving up the printed newspaper strip's connection to the physical world. Calvin and Hobbes is filled with references to the basic elements of physical reality: dirt, rocks, water, snow, speed, collisions, temperature, light, sound. Webcomics exist in a world of pure information.
Webcomics exist in the physical world because they appear on screens, which are just as physical as paper. Neither newspapers nor screens usually come into contact with dirt, rocks, water, snow, or collisions. Newspapers make more noise than screens, but screens emit more light. Printed cartoons exist as pure information too, in the sense that they can be copied and printed on different things.
I think he's a product of his time (pre-internet). He stopped because he felt he hit the limits of what he could create, and while a large part of it was the restrictions the newspapers put on him, it was also that he was running out of ideas. It's something he's specifically said in his very rare interviews, and he seems to enjoy living a very quiet life.
While webcomics are thriving, they don't quite have the same cultural impact that every kid growing up had for a few decades where the newspaper would be out on the kitchen table and the kids would nosedive for the comics. When I think about it, it was a brilliant move for newspapers. As I got older and closer to being an adult, I started reading the rest of the paper.
There were several excellent comics, but only C&H has stood the test of time and I am so proud that my 8 year old daughter recently pulled down the books are started getting lost in them. Sometimes the restrictions and limitations produce creativity in their own right, and I often wonder if something like C&H could even make it in today's cultural environment (both from a political point of view and in the modern social media landscape).
I think he would have enjoyed the creative freedom, run with it, and maybe even have managed to make some interesting new expression, say something along the lines of:
I've been on something of a webcomic kick for a while now, and while I'd love to shill for _Girl Genius_ https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20021104 (oops, guess I just did), the artist whom I find most striking and who best epitomizes the evolution of webcomics (Kaja and Phil Foglio have their origin firmly planted in traditional print work) is "Tailsteak":
where each is published once a week or so, with a story plotted out to run for 1,000 strips --- ~two decades each --- curiousity over what other such stories are out there has me searching/reading a lot, and a "Webcomics" browser bookmarks/favorites folder which is beginning to scroll....
Oh my god, 1/0 is an absolutely brilliant piece of art and I recommend everyone here to check it out. It starts out unassuming, but that's part of the point -- it ended up becoming about the author's growth through talking to characters he himself made up (and the characters talking back in protest), and he also ended up meeting his wife through it :)
I guess if I had to sell the idea... in its own words: it's as far removed from the average sitcom as possible. It's not at all like anything else you have ever read. (https://www.undefined.net/1/0/?strip=961)
See my other comment. Webcomic creators got their own problems that aren't much different than his were. Be it having to deal with Social Media algorithms, or working for a recently-public company that wants to force people to an app, or having to be both a web designer AND a comic writer/drawer (smbc-comics /still/ having problems with their commenting system on their website comes to mind).
Great piece but definitely makes me even more annoyed by the obviously bootleg Calvin pissing stickers on pickups. And even further annoyed that my kids will never know the joy of a quality broadsheet newspaper, especially on Sunday.
Aw man, you just hit me with a wave of nostalgia. Looking back, the Sunday comics were such an indulgence! To just sit on the floor with huge sheets of paper covered in colorful illustrated jokes and enjoy each one slowly. I need to take time like that each week again.
When I was quite young I attended a lecture by Bill Watterson held at the Akron Art Museum. He spoke without notes, with an easel and a large pad of paper, describing his career. He illustrated his story with the pad, drawing his unsuccessful characters (I remember one looked like a short Hobbes) as he told his story about how he created Calvin and Hobbes. I was really struck by how much Watterson looked like Calvin's dad.
I stayed after the end of the lecture hoping that he would give me one of his drawings. He politely declined. As I recall, he said he had to be very careful about how his work was distributed. I don't know if this was b/c of his contract with the syndicate, or b/c he was already thinking about the legacy of the strip.
I, like so many others, LOVE Calvin and Hobbes! I started loving it as a kid, a boy against "the establishment" (a.k.a., parents and school). Today, I am loving it as a parent with a little Calvin of my own running around the house. The wife and I are constantly laughing at how much our son reminds us of Calvin. We try to encourage his imagination as much as we can, and hope it never leaves him. It is absolutely amazing how this one comic can have such an effect on my during two completely different times of my life.
> It looked like the syndicate’s warnings to Watterson were well-founded: Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation.
Oh, that sounds bad.
> It says something about the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes — not to mention Watterson’s pulling power as a cartoonist — that after all the outrage and arguments, only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened to remove it from their pages. And only seven followed through.
What. This directly contradicts the first statement, does it not?
Remember his strip was popular enough that papers didn't have a choice. People were buying newspapers to get the latest Calvin and Hobbes. They may not like what he did but he had the power. Most cartoonists people read and sometimes laugh but if they get replaced nobody will care.
The contrast between "Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation." and "only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened" is quite stark.
If you are running a paper and are already under stress and trying to streamline operations and now some cartoonist demands you use a format that requires significant extra work, you'd probably complain too, even threaten to drop that content. Threats are free, and they might work, especially if a lot of papers made similar complaints and threats.
But, when it came right down to the actual decision, knowing how many readers really love that particular artwork, and would even cancel their subscriptions if it were absent from your paper, and the math told you those losses would exceed the costs you were trying to avoid, so you'd find the papers collectively lost the conflict, and you'd keep it, do the extra work, and keep the subscribers.
Thinking about it for a minute, it seems unsurprising the difference between the initial cost-free bluster vs the final whimper of a handful of costly cancellations would be quite stark?
My comment was not about what happened, which does not need to be justified, in my opinion, especially at this late date.
My comment was about the contrast between "widespread" and the actual number that threatened, which was immediately stated to be 15/1800. The actual number that canceled was even smaller, but the characterization of one one-hundred-twentieth as "widespread" was interesting.
Yup, but I'd bet the number who complained approached 1800 and the number of complaints that verbally threatened, or alluded to "having to reconsider whether we run it" vs making a specific written threat was much higher. And yes, they could have been more clear about it.
I think the first threatened is from groups like moral majority or similar threatening we will get your papers to remove it, and then the second is the actual papers making the threat based on threats from moral watchdog groups. Anyway that is my interpretation of what happened.
ah sorry I had it confused in my mind with Berkley Breathed, should have read article first but I saw the cancellation thing and I thought oh yeah I remember that.
Hate to advocate for the devil but, as somebody involved in fanart, people want objects for the media properties they love and if they can't get them legitimately they will make their own or get them from somebody who didn't license the property. And if Waterson didn't spend his own time and money sicing lawyers on the latter his syndicate wasn't going to do it for him if he didn't license it.
Then there's the fact that anyone who wants more C&H comics can now just ask for them. I hate to think about how Watterson will feel the first time he sees that happen.
"licensing usually cheapens the original creation by saturating a market with characters until readers are bored of seeing them" makes the most sense to me out of this. When I think of Shrek, I don't even think of the movies, I think of all the random stuff like Burger King that licensed it.
Also, now that I've read this, I'm kinda sad about the bootleg peeing Calvin truck decal.
Dang man, C & H taught me so much as a young lad. Unconditional love, amor fati, the importance of being yourself. I think the way he left it all was perfect. We were robbed of future delights but in the end it could not have been more in character. I hope Mr. Watterson is enjoying his final sebatical.
Calvin & Hobbes have always been such a joy. In childhood, it was a reflection of all the naughtiness you could come up with. As a middle aged adult today, I look at the bigger meanings of those simple adventures. Reading a few stories is a reminder that happiness could be found in simple things & vivid imaginations.
Bill Watterson's dedication to not commercialize it preserves the charm about 'simple life, simple joys' of our childhood. He could have raked in the money, but his integrity is admirable. It isn't easy to be in his position & make such difficult choices to preserve the ethos of his art.
Another anecdote (where it came from I do not remember) stuck in my brain was that Watterson's editor called him one day to tell him that STEVEN SPIELBERG was on the phone to talk with him about a Calvin and Hobbes movie. Watterson refused to take the call.
Or how he was mailed a box of Calvin and Hobbes plushies to try to get sign-off on the quality of the toys.
He mailed back a picture of the box on fire.
IMO Calvin and Hobbes will always be special because of Watterson's integrity. It says everything it needed to say, and those comics will almost always be relevant.
The danger of "more" is that it dilutes the purpose and voice of the original. "Cowboy Bebop" fits in this same realm, I think. It had a single season. They did a movie. They said everything they needed to say and left it at that.
Firefly is an interesting example of that. If it had not been cancelled so quickly, would anybody remember it these days? A lot of shows start out strong and then completely fall apart.
It wasn't so bad that I couldn't wait to stop watching it but... it wasn't good enough that I couldn't help but finish it. I still want to finish it...
So instead we ended up with the only Calvin and Hobbes items in the physical world being those vinyl bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on things, because those were cheap and easy for random unscrupulous printers to make. Some artistic vision. As someone born in the late 80s, I recall seeing those far more than the actual comics.
>So instead we ended up with the only Calvin and Hobbes items in the physical world being those vinyl bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on things...
... and, of course, all of the various collections of the comics in print form, up to and including the full box set, that everyone can check out from libraries or purchase and keep in perpetuity. Ya know, the actual thing, the meat of it, the heart, the soul - not tangential merchandise.
> Watterson has a recurring dream about his old college where he doesn’t know what class he’s taking or where he’s meant to be. He roams the grounds, growing more flustered with each confused step. Right before he wakes, he thinks, “How many more years until I graduate…? Wait, didn’t I graduate already? How old am I?”
I’m 44 and I have this dream every few months about high school and university. Something deep inside.
Sometimes things are black and white. The syndicate needs people like Watterson and without them they’re broke. The Cartoon Network fell apart not heeding this law and its great artists continue on.
I think about Bluey a lot in these situations. Fantastic show but because of the contract the Australian entity has sold licensing for everything. I wish they didn’t do sugary foods and a few other items. But it would be hard to turn down generational wealth
Have to say, I've always admired Watterson's determination to keep Calvin and Hobbes a comic strip and not compromise on its vision for money/fame. As the article itself points out, it would have been very easy for it to become the next Peanuts or Garfield, and most artists probably would have taken that route the minute it became available. Heck, given the obsession with side hustles and grifting and get rich quick schemes, I don't think I could see any present day comic creator (or creator in general) making that sort of decision.
But yeah, it's admirable. Especially given how the average comic strip runs for decades on end with less and less humour or charm until its eventual cancelation.
Very well written!
Now let’s wait to see what happens with the rights to Calvin and Hobbes when Waterson is not around. I’m sure we’ll see a reboot/re-run with merchandise, series and perhaps a movie, when the heirs take the rights.
I dont know. I would have loved to buy a calvin t shirt or a hobbes toy for my son.
All this means is: Calvin and Hobbes will die out, as hardly anyone in the new generation (kids born in 2000s) know about this comic.
I can understand the art vs commercialism debate, but this is going too far in the other direction.
And before people start lecturing me: Yes I know some corproations are evil. Tintin's new owners didnt allow the original country Belgium to host a Tintin event because they wanted more money.
Corporate greed can totally kill art; but this is the other extreme, and will also lead to a slow death by people just forgetting about it
Question: Imagine it is right after Watterson stopped working with Universal Press Syndicate and making Calvin and Hobbes. You know someone who can get you in touch with Watterson. What do you do?
I ask because I humbly think the closest we have in the last 30 years to Watterson is Shen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_(cartoonist) . So much of what he did mirrors Watterson. More specifically, so much of his evolution mirrors Watterson. He clearly had a style that was working, but he evolved and it worked (not everyone evolves and it works, Matthew Inman comes to mind--still does great stuff, his new style just doesn't resonate with me personally, could just be me). I mean, it's not a one-for-one comparison, Shen has a plushie, for example (not much else). But there's a spirit there that I feel resonates with people deeply.
He recently left Webtoon and his 3x-a-week Blue Chair. I wrote him an email that he responded to, which is how I know if someone has a good response here, I can probably get it to him. I mention in my email Smol Web (aka Small Web, other names as well, heavily mentioned here on Hacker News) and he said "I like the principles in it." But I get the impression he still feels he must pay fealty to the social media gods (relevant The Oatmeal https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people ) and everything else is secondary. the tricky part is creating something that will pay the bills. If anyone wants to lend him a hand in that, let me know and I'll pass it on. Like, how /does/ do Small Web and make money?
Here's nearly all of my email to him, if you are curious. One of the things I hated was that during Shen's tenure at Webtoon they got more and more hostile to users browsing without using their app. I don't know if it figured into his leaving, or even if it was 100% his decision, but I do rant a bit about it. I also mention "We Go Forward." That is referenced in the Wikipedia article. Sadly, can't link to it without linking to a social media site.
---
Anyway, Webtoon's loss. They went public, they thought that meant they should act like Big Tech and force people into apps. Presumably to harvest all that data, make all their users the product, and sell that data to data brokers. They then wipe their hands of what happenns [sic] as that data is sold to surveillance states or worse. Of course, it's all predicated on the fact they can act as monopolies, following the Peter Thiel handbook. But assuming they could even become the next Meta or Alphabet going the way they did, regardless that the very ickiness of it should repulse one, is just hubris. Maybe they thought the app numbers, and the app data it would mean, would be enough to merger into a Meta or Alphabet. But you can't get there by simply forcing users bluntly and harshly. Forcing users is a late-stage Meta or Alphabet move, and it never starts blunt or harsh.
I see nothing wrong with them going public, per se, provided they can convince the shareholders to not be short-sighted. But I don't think they could, thus, it probably was wrong to do a traditional IPO. Shareholders want "growth" at all costs. So they will hinge on app downloads and engagement numbers with every earnings report. And so the stock price will hinge on those numbers, to the point where unless the stock price is unrelated to decision making--e.g. a non-voting arrangement for retail buyers like Zuck got--stupid decisions will be made. If not by the original company, by the "activist investment company" that buys all the shares and makes the same stupid decisions. Assuming the activist investor doesn't just turn it private again and vampires the equity.
Yes, they right now should have an app. But a simple browser wrapper app for those younger people who think everything should be an app. The core product should support browser viewing first. At least at first. Then assuming there's enough moat (which there definitely isn't yet) it's a question of morals, do you stay on that path, or do start to force people to the app little by little? Hobbling this or that. You don't go to "can't view this webcomic except in the app" right away. That's definitely a much later Darth Vader move which, again, no one should do (but if you're Zuck, you will do anyway).
I'll be glad to see you go somewhere new. Have your own site! Use federated social media! Realize there are fans who remember We Go Forward when it came out! You know, over twenty years ago, I spent two weeks on a web comic [removed, just in case it goes afoul of this Guideline "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." This comment is about Shen after all]. I should have Gone Forward. I gave up. It had such charm in retrospect. Good for you! Keep at it! Web comics are genius, you never have to worry about handling large data or keeping systems secure. You just make a cool .png and throw it on a smol site. (Look up smol web as a concept, Smol Ghost would approve.)
"Don't stop" is what someone wrote to me once, and it meant a lot. The beauty of what you do is you /can/ Go Forward and not have to leave others behind. I think it's time for a reboot of that original comic. Like how they made a Diablo II remake with better graphics and toggles to go between old and new. You could start out new version of Go Forward with fancy graphics, then show a settings screen, toggle to old. Toggle back to new (people will get what's going on). Go all the way to the end and switch back to old. Then do some speed-runner type thing involving jumping on hidden objects and make the parents' house show up on the same screen and they can cheer him on to the end.
I think about Bill Waterson a lot.
I certainly don't blame Jim Davis for "selling out". He made a marketable character, and I don't blame him for trying to make his money because of it. I don't have a ton of artistic talent but if I created a lovable comic character and someone offered me a dumptruck full of money to sell toys and t-shirts and cartoons, I'm pretty sure I would take it, and I might even take it even if I felt like it diminished my vision of the comic. I would like to think I have integrity, and I think I do to some extent (there are certain types of companies I will not work for e.g. casinos), but Waterson is on another level.
And I have to say, it has made Calvin and Hobbes age a lot better for me. Garfield is almost more of a "brand" than a comic at this point, and it has made it such that I find the character and even the comics kind of (for want of a better word) "cheap" or "tacky". The same can be said for Dilbert (Scott Adams himself not withstanding...I used to genuinely like the comics).
C&H, on the other hand, reads about as well now as it did when I was a kid. The jokes still work, the art is appealing, and since there hasn't been this mass-marketing push for it, it has retained a purity unlike anything else.
I don't have the integrity or will power that Bill Waterson has, and I probably never will, but it can be something I strive to have some day.
Garfield was always about marketing. Davis was in it to sell merchandise. It was practically designed in a lab to be the ideal comic strip for moving product.
And as such, Garfield has never had any sort of message or meaning. It's just a cartoon that kids and some adults like.
Waterson, on the other hand, very obviously enjoyed his work and pushing boundaries. C&H was chock full of his personal beliefs, messages, and morals. And he loved causing newspapers headaches. He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this".
The two are such polar opposites it's almost amazing they both ran comics in the same papers.
I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media.
That's what Jim Davis tells everyone. He always cheerfully said he decided to become a cartoonist in order to make money. When asked about anything related to Garfield, he basically always denies having any artistic ambitions. That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield's entire life with Jon was just the hallucinations of him slowly starving to death alone, for instance? Oh, he saw a market survey suggesting the thing people feared most was loneliness, and thought it'd make for a good Halloween strip.
Not to go into an hour long Lasagna Cat speech here, but maybe Jim Davis isn't entirely sincere here?
To me it looks like he made the strip at first to laugh at himself (Jon) and his own cynical tendencies (Garfield). The "I thought becoming a cartoonist was a good way to make money" is an obvious joke at his own expense - it's a terrible way to make money, even with full Snoopy-level merchandising.
It's also notable that he's been very positive to people doing weird things like Garfield minus Garfield. He's not at all possessive to his creation. He accepted ages ago that as the comic became a phenomenon, it wasn't wholly his anymore.
I always kind of thought that the "it was meant to be marketable, not funny" thing was a cope, in the same way that Tommy Wiseau says that The Room was always meant to be a comedy.
People would say that the cat who hates Mondays and loves lasagna isn't very funny, so he responds with "uhh, it wasn't ever meant to be that funny anyway!!!".
Regardless, I do really respect how cool he's been with stuff like Garfield Minus Garfield.
> That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield
If you think that's dark you should see all the Zalgo Garfield comics Davis did...
> Zalgo Garfield
Those were a fan parody, and were nothing to do with Jim Davis.
Jim Davis did however write the script for that story in "Garfield: his 9 lives" (1984) where Garfield suddenly goes feral and is implied to kill his elderly owner.
So yeah, even imsorryjon-level Garfield isn't offensive to Davis at all
It's clear to me that he never loved his characters or were so defensive over his art as Watterson was - at least not in Garfield. But he also seems to have respected that his audience was more invested in his characters than he was, which was probably why he kept making it (and kept the right to the comic strip itself when selling everything to Viacom a few years ago).
Available for borrowing at https://archive.org/details/garfieldhis9live00davi
7th life is dark. 5th life is a close second.
Whoosh.
Despite the mediocrity of the Garfield comic strip, I think a lot of Garfield's enduring popularity among late Gen X / early Millennials can be attributed to the late 80s Garfield and Friends cartoon [1]. It was actually funny, largely due to the writing by Mark Evanier. He's also known for his snappy dialogue on Groo the Wanderer, among other comic books.
And then in the late 00s, Garfield got an indie-cred boost from Garfield Minus Garfield [2], the surreal and often humorously bleak webcomic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_and_Friends
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Minus_Garfield
Groo was always a favorite of mine as a child. The amazing art of Sergio Aragones and the sarcasm and double speak that pervade the comic always connected better with me. That came across in the Aragones panels in Mad much of the time as well.
Same! They actually still put out new issues, in the form of a new 4-issue mini series roughly once per year. It's the only comic book I regularly read as an adult. Pretty amazing that Sergio is still doing this at age 88!
My understanding is that Davis quit drawing the strip pretty early on and has other people drawing it ever since.
Something I think a lot of people don't realize is that Japan has a much healthier media ecosystem in many respects. Like we just don't get new comic strips here and haven't in decades whereas in Japan they get new 4-koma like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door all the time and these get anime and video games and merchandise and make tons of money.
Our media industry has to realize that it doesn't just have a cyclical problem but that it is stuck recycling the same old properties over and over again as it shrinks. It's got to give a chance to some new blood.
Japan will certainly drive a property into the ground (Dragonball, Naruto) though at least they keep coming up with new/inventive stories to go along with it. I'd also say Japanese media isn't without it's tropes that it repeats ad nauseam if they are successful once.
But comparatively the US and most of the rest of the world is in a media dark age. The US seems to only manage to invent a new good property every decade or so. Everything else is rehashing existing ideas.
I really would like to know what Japan does differently to nurture new properties. It clearly works. It seems South Korea and China are also doing pretty well in that aspect.
the publishers seem to have more interest in trying new writers and ideas and letting them sink or swim, basically. Like the same weekly magazine that publishers one piece might let your little idea get in there too, and if readers seem to like it they'll open up spots for you in the schedule, or it can die as a one shot or get cancelled after a few chapters.
Lots of new interesting stuff comes out and dies or doesn't survive, but it means they do have some constant incubation. The American version of this for comics is basically letting new writers try their hand at a big existing property to see if they're any good, but that means the new ideas are "fun spin on batman" or etc. (And of course the indie scene exists in both to different extents, but the publishers for non DC/Marvel stuff in the US are anemic.)
I hear scholastic is genuinely good, but they have a very specific audience ofc.
Hilariously, Dragonball is a rehashing of a far older folktale.
The very beginning was. Most japanese comics are designed to be serialized for a long time, and are built to change direction if needed: Getting serialized is difficult, and low enough reader scores get you kicked out of the magazines, so it's common for a story to be built to swerve. Early Dragon Ball is a light thing like Dr Slump but a little more some fighting, but anything related to the old folk tale was dead and gone by, say, the second time there's a martial arts tournament. Most of what most people think about regarding dragon ball is past the moment where we randomly learn, through the power of retconning, that our main character was an alien all along, and people of his race are invading earth. Not quite the kind of thing from Journey to the West
Some viewers will remember growing up with the TV series Monkey, whose bizarre images and stories of Pigsy and the titular flying Monkey I shall never forget.
Monkey Magic theme song anyone? https://youtu.be/wddJnq-D3XM?si=J2xAgXoygreTD73w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_(TV_series)
Rehashing and inspired by are different things.
There are certain elements of Journey to the West found in DB but not even Goku is similar to Wukong. Yes, monkey-like features, extending stick, perhaps a couple of early characters but everything else is not even close. So I don't think it's fair to say that is a rehash.
Judging from the initial portion of the anime Dragonball pivoted gradually from a loose adaptation of Journey to the West (with Goku as the protagonist among funny versions of traditional characters) to a more original and specific setting and plot (with Goku as the most important of many Saiyan and martial artists).
Which one?
‘journey to the west’ [https://collider.com/dragon-ball-journey-to-the-west/], about 400 years old.
Another Chinese classic is The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I think that might be one of the oldest character-rich media franchises of all times. Drawings of Cao Cao and other characters have been identifiable for hundreds of years. They are still making video games (Dynasty Warriors) and TV shows based on it.
I hardly ever watch those anime which go on forever like Bleach.
When I go out as
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116484198935085911
I find 20% or so people in the general population in my town recognize who I am right away because they watched either Naruto or Demon Slayer and those are both in my queue so I can understand better what they know about me.
... but it is hard because there is Slayers and Futari Wa Precure and many many anime that have a few 12 epsiode seasons in my queue. And a lot of that is in the "so bad it's good category". One of my guilty pleasures is
https://w1.backstabbedinabackwaterdungeon.xyz/chapters/1/
which gets really good over time because the crazy overpowered protagonist and his Level 9999 friends almost meet their match and I never would have discovered the light novel and manga if I hadn't been willing to watch a truly atrocious J.C. Staff anime. Only in Japan can some ordinary person write a web novel, get a contract for a light novel, get a manga made, then get an anime, video games, etc. The "media mix" strategy lets their industry market test content with low risk and the anime doesn't even have to be profitable on its own if it convinces 10,000 or so obsessive fans to shell out $150 to buy all the books of the light novel and another $150 to buy the books of the manga.
The cost structure of the US media industry is a lot worse and divides between super-expensive prestige content and a tier of slop. It's all a gatekeeping-industrial complex and no wonder people are pissed about DEI, "woke" and all that because it's a zero sum game. The industry would love to get another J. K. Rowlings and we've probably had 10 of them who never got greenlit because of low risk tolerance.
> crazy overpowered protagonist and his Level 9999 friends almost meet their match
Is this the origin of that trope? I've seen a couple of anime/manga that use the same story as a jump off point. Character that doesn't know their own strength kicked out of the party for being "weak" only for us to later find out they are one of the strongest/most powerful individuals in the world.
Nah, that one is too new. Turns out this guy's power is only useful at the very bottom of the most dangerous dungeon which has dense enough mana that he can summon people and items stronger than the surface world. It's marketed as a crazy revenge fantasy and it is that, but it would be unfair it to compare it to the really mean-spirited revenge stories that come out of Korean and China.
[dead]
It’s healthy in that there is a lot of interesting stuff constantly going on, but the actual work conditions are incredibly unhealthy for a lot of those creators.
I guess, but I’d just say it’s moved to other distribution models because who reads newspapers now? Mostly people who want to read Family Circus reruns (okay, that’s uncharitable).
I can’t speak to other countries, but we have a very healthy ecosystem in webcomics. I back several on Patron, buy the compilations of others on Kickstarter, and otherwise grab new issues at my local comic book store or library.
Heh I never expect to see Demon Girl Next Door in public let alone in HN of all places. Seems like I'll have to see that backstabbed whatever too eventhough I never touched any work of that genre.
> I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media.
The world needs Watersons now more than ever. And Calvins and Hobbeses.
The world has no place for men like Waterson, and it is precisely when the world leaves no place for them that men like him are most necessary.
Only men?
Women who dress like Marlene Dietrich are also acceptable, but that's where I draw the line.
More seriously, I should have capitalized the "M" to make clear that it was Men, as in Mankind, but this is the internet in 2026 and most people are only semi-literate. I'm not certain it would have helped.
Especially if someone wants to be offended. You just can't stop them if that was their goal going into it.
There is a gender-indeterminate alternative: people.
Using "man" to refer to all people stopped being popular last century.
Popularity and correctness are unrelated concepts.
The word "Men" was gender neutral long before it became masculine, and Armstrong did not take "one giant leap for peoplekind".
> He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this".
In his defense, this was also partially because they kept shrinking the space he had so he was trying to work with what he had while also forcing their hands into giving him more room to work with.
I think it was on the front page here a few weeks ago about the creation of garfield.
Apparently Davis had been struggling with a previous comic strip and when an editor told him that his characters just weren't what people wanted to see, he rethought his entire strategy and decided to emulate the success of Snoopi:
- Cute character, but instead of going for dog lovers, there was a hole in the market for cat lovers
- Few, related jokes that can recur all the time (Love lasagna, hates mondays)
- No word plays - should be easy to translate
- No political jokes
- No deep jokes - should be accessible
- Lots of merchandise
I think it is super interesting that he set out from the start to build a "sell out"-brand and after reading this, I kinda respect the whole thing a lot more.
You respect someone who plans to be a sell-out more than someone who sells out later for whatever other reason?
Not the commenter, but yeah, I think I do.
Setting out to do something commercial (and succeeding), is different from setting out to do something firmly non-commercial and then commercialising it. The second one will almost always involve compromise that was never intended, which often undermines the original, non-commercial version.
Maybe not for what-ever-reason, but I do respect someone who can read the market and build what the market needs, more than someone who stumbles into it. It also means that he stuck with his guns. He didn't "sell out", he decided to just "sell".
Note that you're asking whether it's more impressive that someone managed to analyze and intentionally create an appealing, cross-cultural, and marketable product, rather than creating something appealing completely by accident. Of course the former is far more impressive than the latter, assuming it really was intention as laid out by the OP. It requires intelligence and understanding of the world.
I think building a business is hard, and people that succeed at it (in a generally non-harmful way) are impressive. Setting out to build a business and succeeding, as opposed to stumbling into it unawares, is indeed more impressive to me, I think.
Obviously. You're not a "sell-out" if you are honest up front about your work being commercial.
I find both doing it for money, and doing it for personal or benevolent reasons to be good. What I find despicable is claiming you're doing something for selfless reasons, but actually doing it for profit. That's what dishonest and shows ill will towards other human beings.
(Doesn't have to be strictly about money either. The amount of voices you could hear saying they won't be writing blog articles or OSS because it'll become training data for LLMs, and that this thus deprives the world of their pro bono work, clearly shows there's plenty of such dishonest attitudes in OSS circles too.)
Well, at least he sold something. Only halfway joking. Because probably worse than knowing you put slop out is putting thing out nobody likes.
There's this quote from the 2010 interview with Waterson:
> If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.
But don't we all feel sure he could have rolled along for three or two or one more year? Surely it's not like his creativity ran out suddenly on Jan 1 1996 and he had no more comic strips in him. And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline, so... couldn't we have got one more year of cartoons?
I'm kidding really. Bill Watterson doesn't owe us anything; if he was no longer enjoying creating the comics, why should we get to enjoy reading them? And we'd just have the same complaint if he quit after eleven years instead of ten, or worse, we'd be saying how the last couple of years it was clear his heart wasn't in it.
Watterson and Larson (both who retired at or near the "top" of their game) could easily have gone on for a year or two more - or three, or five, or twenty.
But they both knew that the font was running low, if not completely dry; likely triggered by starting a joke and realizing they'd done it before years ago.
Both have "come back" here and there to dabble, as appropriate for someone who actually knows how to retire.
I respect it honestly.
The Simpsons used to be my favorite show, but I feel like the quality dropped dramatically after season ~13 or so. Part of that is because I got older, I'll admit, but even rewatching the older seasons, I still find them funny while season 13 and onward I simply don't.
I would have so rather they ended the show twenty years ago and use whatever budget they spent making it on new cartoons.
Schultz, who is still fairly universally beloved (including by Watterson I think?) went on forever. So did Johnny Hart (BC). The trick is that they're not really trying to get a laugh out of you every day. They're a slightly surreal setting with warmth, and a few recurring gags.
Larson and Watterson were high intensity in a way classic cartoonists weren't. That's not bad, but most people are probably going to burn out or worse (e.g. ending up like Scott Adams).
I take Schultz as the epitome of the “danger” of going forever - the early Peanuts is substantially different than the later ones.
But he’s also a good example of “growing with his audience” - the latter strips pleased his readers even if they didn’t gain many additional.
I do find that it’s sad that in an era of increasingly cheaper and cheaper printing that comics continue to shrink.
Another example of retiring at the top was Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary. A 20 year run of daily comics with about 16-17 years of that being a reasonably consistent storyline.
Berke Breathed should have taken their example more seriously.
Doing a daily anything is hard. Garry Trudeau sort of did a good compromise by pivoting to just a Sunday entry--that is still pretty solid. But my general observation is that it's really hard to keep things flowing day-in and day-out as a cartoonist/columnist/etc.
I didn't read the comics when they were new, but I started reading the daily rerun comics of Doonesbury, and I hadn't realized how funny they actually are.
I guess as a kid I always thought it was the comic that "old people" liked, and never gave it much of a shot, but I kind of inadvertently found it recently and it actually pretty good.
The old ones vs the current ones really do hit different.
One of my favourite comic artists, Mads Eriksen [1][2] basically "disappeared" in 2008-2009 and didn't start regularly publishing comics again for more than a decade (at a much slower pace) because of the pressure and burnout.
Maybe Watterson could have squeezed another year or two out of himself, but it's by no means a given it wouldn't have meant unreasonable personal sacrifice.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mads_Eriksen_(cartoonist)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(comic_strip)
> And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline
We have had threads on HN before about C&H where people identify a slight but noticeable change in the strip in the last years. Watterson was naturally growing more ornery as he moved towards dad age, and that more dismal view of the world did grind against the strip’s basis in the wonder and magic of childhood.
Also, culture changes, and treatening a little kid with psychological or physical harm isn't as funny as it was back then. You had to grow up in that era to appreciate it. Despite loving and being loved by their parents, Calvin is frequently terrified of them.
I think this implies that Calvin is not as unruly as it appears, and he was raised with good values, so he still obeys his parents most of the time because he knows they want the best for him.
If we still had Calvin and Hobbes nowadays, it wouldn't be as well received if it didn't change with the times. I can't picture them going to family theraphy, for example, although I haven't read all the strips.
I have similar feelings about TV shows. There are shows that I wish hadn’t ended after a couple of seasons, but there are also a ton of shows that dragged on for 6, 8, 15 seasons when it clearly would have been better to end them years earlier.
Overall I lean toward appreciating things that end early more than things that end late.
Joke is on him. The comic section of the paper (if it even has one anymore) is filled with fossilized strips that weren't even fresh in the 80s. The comic cartel in the US basically killed off the medium.
Do any households with young children present even get the newspaper anymore? I would wager if I asked my nephews and nieces they would all say they've never actually read a newspaper comic strip. I don't think any amount of freshness would have saved that
I don't think I've seen a newspaper in anyone's house in like 15-20 years.
Whenever I read something about Bill Watterson, I end up thinking about how, during the '80s and early '90s, Watterson, Tom Batiuk, and Harvey Pekar were all producing some of their best work.
Three Northeast Ohio creators, working in different areas of the comics world, yet it's easy to imagine a shared universe where Calvin and Hobbes, Funky Winkerbean, and American Splendor all occupy the same map and interact.
They also had in common that the work itself was the product. The strips and stories came first; merchandising, branding, and other empires were either absent or beside the point.
That's probably a coincidence. Or it says something about what 1970s acid rain did to the water in Lake Erie. But Northeast Ohio did seem to have produced an unusual number of artists who were more interested in the work than in building a franchise.
I totally agree.
BW got thrown under the buss for taking a stance, his stance. He is a nonconformist and really, he puts in his comics a one of a kind mixture of childish silliness, questions, statements, and philosophical topics.
There is no politics other than being a nonconformist who gets bullied today now, which not even ironically proves his point as well reinforces it.
It is like he is simply protecting the purity of his characters, not the other way around. He appears to be a medium, not so much an artist.
He is a treasure, and a singularity. I ordered all of his comics back then and to this day hold them dearly and the books are treated with so much decency, they appear as never opened. I for example never fold the book cover, nothing. It is a weird thing of mine, but it is out of respect for an author with whom I have a conversation.
I think the newspapers and books alone still probably made Waterson a decent amount of money. More than enough to live comfortably forever. I remember Scott Adams (of Dilbert) once saying his syndication deal was something like $6 million per year, I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes was at least comparable and the books certainly sold well. Newspapers used to be absolute cash cows.
> but if I created a lovable comic character and someone offered me a dumptruck full of money
> would like to think I have integrity, and I think I do to some extent (there are certain types of companies I will not work for e.g. casinos)
What if a casino offered you a dumptruck full of money?
If I were offered a dump truck full of money from a casino in order to help the casino optimize their gambling, then I think I would have enough restraint to say no.
I say this because I did turn down a very lucrative job opportunity at an online casino recently. It wasn’t as much money as Bill Waterson almost certainly turned down, but it would be a very significant bump in my salary.
If I were a trillionaire like Elon Musk, Bill Watterson would be one of those people I would anonymous gift enough money so that the rest of their lives would be comfortable. We need more people like him, and he should be rewarded for it.
Bill Watterson is worth a hundred million dollars. He’s not hurting for cash.
He didn't license his characters, he's not worth a hundred million dollars.
In 2023 his publisher said that his printed collections had sold 50 million copies worldwide, and that the strip had appeared in 2,400 newspapers. That's at least tens of millions of dollars over many years, and with little spending and risk-averse investments, it's not unreasonable to conclude $100M for the total net worth figure.
Yes, but what fraction of that money ever reached him?
I think a hundred million is probably a bit optimistic.
That said, I would be surprised if he's not at least a multi-millionaire.
The guy that never sold out won't have the island next to supreme sellouts, jared and ivanka.
Citation? I’m sure he’s fine but $100M?
Sure, he's sold 10s of millions of books plus all the syndication money. Sounds about right.
Bill Watterson is comfortable for life - even without merchandising he's easily a millionaire multiple times over.
Ah, I think it's safe to say you wouldn't. Nothing against you, but the personality required to acquire a trillion (!!!) dollars is incompatible with the kind of philanthropic thinking you clearly possess.
Most philanthropic spending is from rich people, believe it or not.
Eh. There is one thing I don't agree with in the name of integrity: Waterson didn't allow sales of a stuffed pet tiger akin to Hobbes, which millions of children (me included) must've dreamt of. He could've made it affordable and so keep his integrity.
As the article points out, the reason for that particular lack of merchandise is even deeper.
> Watterson insisted that if he wasn’t going to settle the question of Hobbes, then he definitely wouldn’t let some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes “into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic”.
Having a toy representation of the tiger doesn't mean anything about what the tiger is or represents. I'm with the downvoted OP, it's a holier than thou position and many people would've had even extra joy compared to just having the comic books. Plus, people make their own anyway.
Someone making their own is exactly how it should be. This is perfectly aligned with the spirit of the character. A factory churning out clones of Hobbes, and Watterson essentially making a statement that Hobbes is in fact just a toy would go against that spirit.
Some things really are better when you need to use your imagination.
I mean, I think he was just afraid that the comic would become a merchandise machine instead of a comic, and I think he didn't want that.
There's like 100 of them on Etsy right now.
What a brilliantly written piece. Maintaining one's integrity is unfortunately rare enough that it makes Watterson's story so remarkable. I completely respect and admire his dedication to doing something for its own sake, for holding himself to the highest standards imaginable, and from walking away from it all for his own reasons - even if selfishly I'd rather him keep writing so that there would be more to enjoy. Time to go pull some old volumes of Calvin & Hobbes off the shelf for the hundredth time, I suppose.
I have so much nostalgia for Watterson's work. I occasionally will buy another of the hard bound 3 volume set. I always wind up giving them away and then buying another.
A worthy cause, I hope.
I'm waiting until my kids are out of the house (just a couple of years now) to repurchase the 3-volume set. The first purchase didn't survive my kids' childhood - which, yes, I think Watterson would have approved.
The three volume hard-book bound set is one of my favorite possessions. It has been a little while since I read them, but I must have read them cover to cover twice. The print quality and feeling of the hefty books makes them feel like really high end comics in the material sense. I really respect Watterson in keeping the comic pure in the sense that the characters only exist in that one medium.
It makes everybody’s day a little bit more surreal. Certainly a worthy cause.
For those who do not know, this comment is itself a C&H reference.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/09/27
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F4...
Good to see you here, Liam.
This is why I love this community.
It's great that he wasn't tricked or coerced. I imagine some artists have the integrity, but not the knowledge to prevent being taken advantage of.
Was this the right choice, though?
Interest in Calvin & Hobbes has fallen off a cliff. I don't see any references to it in public anymore, and it used to be everywhere.
Kids today probably don't even know about it.
I bought my 8 year old daughter the hardcover box set for Christmas. When she opened it her initial reaction was definitely "oh...thanks" (she was clearly not excited about it but wanted to be nice). Within a week it was borderline impossible to get her to put them down and go to sleep at night.
Yeah, our boys read my old C&H collection more than almost any of their modern kids books. Downside, it's inspired all sorts of mischievous ideas.
Roald Dahl, too, and the Uncle series. These old books have more of an edge to them that our kids seem to light up at, and I've had a hard time finding modern equivalents. Most of the modern kids books seem too saccharine/sterile by comparison. Maybe it's just survivorship bias, these are just the old books that people bothered to keep reading.
And Dahl’s foundation or whatever it’s called had the audacity to try to rewrite the books; removing references to people as ugly, or fat, etc.
You don’t get to rewrite books because they make you feel uncomfortable. Don’t read them. Even Disney has had the common sense to not alter the problematic parts of its films, they just issue a warning at the beginning that it doesn’t represent their current values.
> Even Disney has had the common sense to not alter the problematic parts of its films
True, Disney don't merely alter them..... they bury them!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
Ah yeah, I heard about that, I think we have the older edition. I think it's fine to just stop and provide some parental commentary about it - it can be a good forcing function for talking about that stuff.
Hopefully they didn't take out the Oompa Loompa's judgemental songs, the kids find those hilarious. The humor's the sugar that makes the moral tale about how to be and not to be in the world go down - don't be a glutton, don't be greedy, try to be humble, kind, and empathetic like Charlie. It's not actually about superficial traits.
Yeah. Ronald Dahl once said something to the effect that to make a good children’s book the first thing you have to do is kill off the parents!
Sometimes by having a rhinoceros suddenly and unceremoniously gobble them up.
Sadly the same happened to modern publications of Enid Blyton. Best to find old editions.
Exact same story here. I got my father in law the box set as a gift, and when my daughter was about seven she started reading them when we were visiting them. So I bought her a set of her own. She still reads them all the time at 11.
My wife and I take turns each night doing bedtime for our two girls, 4/6. I have the full C&H box set and, a whiiiiile back, my oldest asked what it was and if we could read it.
For over a year now, any time it's my time to do bedtime, we have to read C&H and cannot read anything else. We've been cruising through it from start to finish and are, within the next week or so, going to reach the end.
Both kiddos, especially my oldest, have been demanding that we start it over. I'll probably table it for a couple of years and then come back to it when they're just a bit older, but yeah... kids definitely know about it and really do appreciate/enjoy it.
Edit: To say nothing of the idea that, eventually, everything fades into obscurity. I feel like what you're lamenting is something that actually jives with Watterson philosophically.
Hmm, where have I seen a story before where a kid wants their parents to read the same book over and over. I can't quite put my finger on it...
And that's perfectly fine!
It makes the accidental discovery of C&H all the more special. I remember the day a school friend showed me a C&H book he got from his dad. It was never in the newspapers where I grew up, so I would never have discovered it otherwise.
Not everything in this world needs to obtain global reach and fame.
Rather than bombard children with advertising to buy plastic junk? Y…yes it was the right choice?
I think that's just a natural part of the times changing and generations having their own icons. In contrast to the shambling undead of Mickey Mouse and other eternally recycled franchises, I think it's OK to for things to fade a little. If nothing else, it leaves things for future generations to rediscover and make their own.
I'm not a kid, but I asked for some calvin and hobbes books for my birthday. The postmodernism laid out in the first comic of each anthology gets the main thrust across. It's a timeless piece of art. It doesn't need boosting. It will be there for me to reach for if I have kids who might enjoy them.
https://youtu.be/P5ivZLTMhso
I saw a little girl reading it on public transport just yesterday.
Everything comes to an end friend, not everything needs to go on forever. Maybe it is forgotten, left behind, but that's not really important. What's important is it ended on his terms and some of us had the privilege to experience it.
There will still be people that find Calvin for the first time, and they will get the same privilege. I'm glad he did it his way and I think most of his new fans will as well.
It’s still there in libraries and bookstores, and even online. It’s not going anywhere.
My son enjoys reading the collection I had when I was young.
Is that the main goal, though? Making sure your characters stay in the public conciousness?
I am not sure that is the most important thing, or even that important at all. The characters matter a LOT to people of a certain age, and his decisions helped maintain that.
I haven't looked at the comics in a physical newspaper in a while but it was still there maybe 12 years ago (in Australia at least).
My teenage boys are hooked on Calvin & Hobbes.
My 7y old nephew inherited my complete collection and is a big fan.
I suggested it to my young kids and it became an instant favorite.
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I once posted Bill Watterson's speech to the 1990 graduating class of his alma mater, but it never got to the front pages. I think I tried posting it again, no go. I just made this account so I can try it a third time. More than any comment I could write to some HN post, I wished people would click on the link and read it. Here's hoping some of you will do it, before it's wiped out from the net:
https://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html
Great speech. I appreciate how he talked about not selling out, but only after he described how tough it is to earn money in the real world. Especially because Kenyon is one of those places you would hear "I don't care about money" from people who already got it the easy way.
A quote that stood out: "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."
> A quote that stood out: "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."
This quote more than ever seems like taking the road less travelled by in this day and age
I take advice from rich people with a grain of salt. It's easier to praise the value of money over integrity when you have both. They don't ask starving artists to give graduation speeches.
Watterson appears to have genuine integrity and I applaud him. There is a point where you have enough money, and the ones who deserve the most scorn are those who cheat to get even more when they have orders of magnitude more than that. But don't forget that a lot of people really do have to choose between integrity and dinner, and I don't judge their decision.
It is my opinion that while you do not judge people who have to choose between integrity and dinner, you can definitely judge people who made decisions and structured their life in such a way that they had that choice, and not only did they choose money, but did it in such a way that what other people would call riches was subsistence for them because of the lifestyle they led.
> There is a point where you have enough money
You forego the option of choosing when you end up chasing a goal or living a standard of living which requires you to continuously choose money every time. It takes a lot of thinking to come to what "enough" means. For some, enough is a few hundred thousand dollars max. For some, even a billion is not enough. You can definitely appreciate the former when they reach that goal and stay there, but it becomes difficult to appreciate the latter (and they are the focus of most of the criticism here), because you do need to sacrifice more than a bit of integrity in that case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38751452
That is a wonderful speech, I have never read it before. Thank you for sharing.
Inspiring and thoughtful! Thanks for sharing
Thanks for sharing that!
I model my parenting style on Calvin’s dad. I actually had almost the identical conversation with my kids about why old pictures are in black and white. When they were in fourth grade my daughter came home from school angry at me about having let her and her brother believe for four years that the world used to be in black and white.
They haven’t brought up bridges and weight limits yet so I can only assume they still believe that.
I hope you are joking. Calvin's dad is not supposed to be a role model father figure. Please don't trick your kids like that.
Don't ever joke or trick your kids, they might develop a sense of humor
One thing is letting them develop a sense of humor; another thing is lying to them when they're clearly not able to distinguish between a lie and the truth.
I've pondered on this my whole adult life. Are we doing kids wrong with things like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, fairy tales, tall tales, etc.? I think not. I think kids come up with their own childish and wrong explanations for things on their own, whether or not other kids, parents, relatives tell them the world was black and white until the late 1950's or that Santa delivers presents down the chimney. Part of growing up is learning to question those childhood ideas and beliefs (misunderstandings) and move past them.
And really, it's something that shouldn't stop with childhood beliefs. There are a lot problems we have as adults because of stories we have been told and stories we tell ourselves that are not true.
> Part of growing up is learning to question those childhood ideas and beliefs (misunderstandings) and move past them.
Yeah, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy were all a sort of mini rite-of-passage when I was a kid, with everyone figuring it out at different times. Made us feel a little more grown up, especially among other kids who hadn't figured it out yet. And for some reason I don't remember us spoiling it for them - instead we were in on the secret to make the holiday more fun.
Despite the downvotes, I'm with you in this hill. Kids are gullible because they instinctively trust adults, especially their parents. It's fine to prank them and teach them afterwards how not to be as credulous, it helps their growth. It's bad to abuse their trust for fun, specially long-term falsehoods. It stalls their growth.
It's clear from the comics that Calvin's dad is just having a bit of fun with his son by telling him funny lies about how the world works. It's not about tricking kids, it rather about playing a mostly harmless prank on them.
That last truck really shows off the engineering work
What was the one about bridges and weight limits? I remember the one about the sun being the size of a quarter.
There's a sign next to a bridge that says "Weight Limit: 10 tons". Calvin asks how they know the limit and his dad says they build the bridge, then drive progressively heavier trucks across it until it falls down. Then they rebuild it exactly how it was and put up the sign for the how heavy the last truck was.
One of my favorites!
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/u3dqja/how...
Ah, I remember now. It's been too long, maybe I need to read them again :)
This is really well written, which is refreshing with all the AI.
Past:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116184 Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016) 464 points July 16, 2022 311 comments
More on Calvin and Hobbes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Some interesting discussion here about Bill Watterson and Jim Davis and it makes me wonder about this word, "integrity," that's being used. In my mind, integrity is to be honest and to do what you promise to do (unless we are talking about physical structures, which we aren't here, are we?). When an artist "sells out" is that really showing a lack of integrity? I guess it depends on what promises they made to... themselves? To others? What if things have changed since they made those promises? We aren't talking about moral absolutes like "thou shall not kill," here (if even that is an absolute). I feel like "integrity" is possibly the wrong word to use for all this, but as someone who grew up very religious and who strives to maintain his own integrity, I can see why people might use the word here. I think my concern is for when other artists who make different decisions than Bill Watterson are ridiculed for not having integrity, as if they have broken some moral code. They haven't.
I agree. Davis intended to do what he did all along.
If Watterson deviated and sold the merchandise he would have lacked integrity, sure. But someone like Davis is acting according to their ideals and intentions and so on; there is a lot of integrity present in the matter.
People use it to mean “they did something I disagree with” which doesn’t inherently overlap with integrity concerns.
I suppose you could argue that art isn’t meant to be commercialized in such a way, and so Davis lacked integrity to the discipline and trade. Some comic artists might say his approach takes away from comic artistry and lacks integrity in that manner. I’m not sure if that’s true or reasonable to say at all. Someone can make a comic for any reason they want as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t know what Davis is like personally, but from the outside and looking only at Garfield, it doesn’t appear that he lacked integrity.
I think I'm taking it a step further even and asking that if Watterson decided that he would never merchandise Calvin and Hobbes and then 10 years later saw things differently and changed his mind, would that be an integrity violation? I don't think so.
No, arguably not. People change their minds over time. We learn things, change, our environment changes. I'm not who I was 10 years ago, but not for a lack of integrity.
The last Calvin and Hobbes strip [1].
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/6pig9h/hon...
Sometimes I entertain the fantasy that Watterson continued writing Calvin and Hobbes as a hobby-- whenever a particularly good idea came to him he'd put it to paper. And someday he'll drop a collection that dwarfs the original strip.
Still brings a lump to my throat.
I can safely say the three biggest influences in my teens were Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The Muppet Show, and Calvin and Hobbes. Sagan ignited my passion for learning and made me realise I a rare ability to understand complicated things visually.
The Muppets taught me that nothing in life should be beyond ridicule, and that I should be the first one to laugh at myself, and to never be afraid to do stupid things. Also that a touch of surrealism is key to a healthy life.
Calvin gave me a sense of belonging, and made me realise I was not as weird as I originally thought. If people enough like it to the point newspapers publish the strips, I would not be alone. The final strip really hit me hard. I miss those two.
I didn’t know Calvin and Hobbes so well until recently. My wife recently got me the integral of Calvin and Hobbes and I read it in full in a few weeks. What a masterpiece!
What struck me the most is the magical balance between humor, philosophical tale, and ode to childhood. I have two kids and it helped me numerous time approaching their silliness in a more constructive and patient way.
This is one of the reasons I have Stupendous Man on my forearm. It's the version of him running into his classroom on the back of one of the books (arms flexing triumphantly), only I had that artist style the costume based on how he appears in Calvin's imagination.
I can't imagine getting Garfield or Snoopy on my skin. CnH was massively important to me growing up. It had so much meaning.
I also remember Watterson writing, in the CnH retrospective anthology (on the topic of Moe, the school bully), that he didn't identify with people who were nostalgic for childhood because he remembered it being a very difficult time. Poignant and true.
Edit: Btw, CnH lovers: See new book The Mysteries
https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=48560976
Thats very interesting to me that Watterson remembers his childhood as a difficult time. Calvin’s moments of sadness/anxiety/anger are a big part of why I found those comics so relatable and endearing as a kid.
You have linked to your own comment.
Ha! What the eff. I don't know how that happened. Too late to edit.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mysteries/Bill-Wa...
> I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that’s how life works.
Not to spoil a beautiful joke by explaining it, but all of the strips are based on this. Two characters see things differently. Sometimes it’s because Calvin is in the grip of his (psychosis|childhood) and sometimes it’s a totally ex machina Watterson idea that they’re exploring, but there’s always two worlds colliding hilariously.
I have no idea if a truly competent director could catch lightning in a bottle. The movie Fight Club has been correctly compared to Calvin and Hobbes. There’s no way for stuffed toys to capture this at all. Good for Watterson for allowing his genius not to be trampled.
> The movie Fight Club has been correctly compared to Calvin and Hobbes.
Bit of a tangent, but I recently watched Fight Club with my son. He was surprised he liked it because he'd gotten the impression it was a dog whistle for manosphere spazzes. I was like "exactly, Matrix is actually good too...".
Avoiding a work of art because of identity politics is no way to live life. That is true whether it is right wing or left wing identity politics. One should just give the work an honest go, and form one's own conclusions, without worrying about whether "those people" might have enjoyed it as well.
> the impression it was a dog whistle for manosphere spazzes
Everyone thinks this until they see the movie or read the book.
I mean...they _are_. That doesn't mean that they doesn't have quality beyond what those dregs see.
A lot of them praised The Boys right up to the point they realised it was making fun of them. They took years of the TV series to get it.
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I remember when Fight Club came out and joke was along the lines of ”you mean the gayest movie like, ever?!” Palahniuk, the author of the book (the film changes very little) came out himself only years later. And it is so very very very queer coded, back in the early 00’s even straight people noticed it. And Matrix trilogy is of course made by two transwomen.
I don’t really understood why manosphere thinks these films as some tough guy films or something. Then again, I think I do.
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"A few weeks later, the project is finished. Watterson probably takes a moment to stand in the middle of the room and look up, contemplating the months of work, the tins of paint he went through, the things he learned about technique, about the joy of a job done for its own sake, about himself. Then he opens a tin of whitewash, climbs up the bed-chairs-table one last time, and paints over his work. He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh."
Is it Zen where they do this with mandalas? The monks spend forever building intricate sand paintings and then wipe/blow them away in an instant. Love it.
I wish I could explain why, but this is the C+H comic I think of the most: https://i0.wp.com/www.thedockchurch.org/blog/wp-content/uplo...
A lot of artists do this a lot of times. Especially work that pushes your boundaries is often not of the best quality, not suited for release. We finish it, we enjoy it, we share it perhaps with a small group of friends, and then it goes in the bin. It's just the way of it, and why I'm so skeptical of so many social media influencers who create stuff but the creation of that stuff becomes the media of their particular medium, not the thing they're meant to be making. Like game developers who post a lot about whatever game they're making, and get such engagement that the thing they're making and the quality of it almost takes a back seat to simply continuing the work for the sake of documenting it and posting about it.
It's also why despite using AI for work and for occasional brainstorming, it never, ever will find it's way into my actual artistic processes and works. The friction of creating is the point of creating, and where AI removes that friction, it renders the product pointless. An AI image feels empty precisely because there were, by definition, no long nights spent with it, no difficult to solve problems, no taste to reckon with: it was simply made with precision and perfection by a machine being told what to make. An achievement certainly, but not a human one.
> He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh.
Did anyone ever try and recover the painting/palimpsest?
Some things are meant to be made, not necessarily seen.
I believe those are the Tibetan Buddhists.
And boy, do they get sore when some tourists' kid runs through the sand, Calvin-like, the day before the big ceremony.
Man, I always wonder what would have happened if Bill Watterson had been around for the era of webcomics. Much more creative freedom, and no editor or syndicate to tell you how to layout your panels. Would he have loved it?
Or would he have hated it? He certainly wouldn't have wanted to build a website for it.
There are some absolutely fantastic web comics out there but none of them have had the cultural impact of Calvin and Hobbes. I don't see how any of them could, to be honest. Even though the technical means of distribution are there at near-zero cost, there's no logistical way in practice to get a webcomic in front of a vast cross-section of society for an entire decade.
We can never go back to a pre-internet/streaming era.
While that means it's pretty isolating to find favorite media (hard to talk about something like "Solo Leveling" with anyone that's not into that sort of thing). What it also has meant is an explosion of new media to tickle almost anyone's tastes. It's as if everything has become "underground music".
Hipsters got jobs in tech and now every band is a band no one has heard of?
The monoculture is dead for better or worse.
For me, it's hard to imagine him giving up the printed newspaper strip's connection to the physical world. Calvin and Hobbes is filled with references to the basic elements of physical reality: dirt, rocks, water, snow, speed, collisions, temperature, light, sound. Webcomics exist in a world of pure information.
Webcomics exist in the physical world because they appear on screens, which are just as physical as paper. Neither newspapers nor screens usually come into contact with dirt, rocks, water, snow, or collisions. Newspapers make more noise than screens, but screens emit more light. Printed cartoons exist as pure information too, in the sense that they can be copied and printed on different things.
He's had more than 2 decades to reject that opportunity.
Yeah. He's not dead. He could have gone into webcomics if he had wanted.
I think he's a product of his time (pre-internet). He stopped because he felt he hit the limits of what he could create, and while a large part of it was the restrictions the newspapers put on him, it was also that he was running out of ideas. It's something he's specifically said in his very rare interviews, and he seems to enjoy living a very quiet life.
While webcomics are thriving, they don't quite have the same cultural impact that every kid growing up had for a few decades where the newspaper would be out on the kitchen table and the kids would nosedive for the comics. When I think about it, it was a brilliant move for newspapers. As I got older and closer to being an adult, I started reading the rest of the paper.
There were several excellent comics, but only C&H has stood the test of time and I am so proud that my 8 year old daughter recently pulled down the books are started getting lost in them. Sometimes the restrictions and limitations produce creativity in their own right, and I often wonder if something like C&H could even make it in today's cultural environment (both from a political point of view and in the modern social media landscape).
TIL that Bill Watterson is still alive.
I think it's because he retired relatively early. He was 37 when he ended Calvin and Hobbes. And he's always been relatively private.
He published a book not too long ago.
FYI Berke Breathed (Bill's contemporary, occasional collaborator and pen-pal) is still posting new Bloom County comics on his Patreon.
I think he would have enjoyed the creative freedom, run with it, and maybe even have managed to make some interesting new expression, say something along the lines of:
https://xkcd.com/1190/
(which won a well-deserved Hugo if memory serves)
I've been on something of a webcomic kick for a while now, and while I'd love to shill for _Girl Genius_ https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20021104 (oops, guess I just did), the artist whom I find most striking and who best epitomizes the evolution of webcomics (Kaja and Phil Foglio have their origin firmly planted in traditional print work) is "Tailsteak":
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6852154.Mason_Tailstea...
who has gone from: 1/0 https://www.undefined.net/1/0/?strip=1
to Leftover Soup: https://www.leftoversoup.com/first.php
and is now working on: https://forwardcomic.com/firstpage.html
where each is published once a week or so, with a story plotted out to run for 1,000 strips --- ~two decades each --- curiousity over what other such stories are out there has me searching/reading a lot, and a "Webcomics" browser bookmarks/favorites folder which is beginning to scroll....
Oh my god, 1/0 is an absolutely brilliant piece of art and I recommend everyone here to check it out. It starts out unassuming, but that's part of the point -- it ended up becoming about the author's growth through talking to characters he himself made up (and the characters talking back in protest), and he also ended up meeting his wife through it :)
I guess if I had to sell the idea... in its own words: it's as far removed from the average sitcom as possible. It's not at all like anything else you have ever read. (https://www.undefined.net/1/0/?strip=961)
Thank you for the link to 1/0 — it had a link to Absurd Notions that I had been searching for to read again but couldn’t remember the name of!
I don't get the first one.
There's an explanation here: https://explainxkcd.com/1190
Originally, the frame at the xkcd link changed once per 30 minutes, now if you click the comic you can read it as an archive.
See my other comment. Webcomic creators got their own problems that aren't much different than his were. Be it having to deal with Social Media algorithms, or working for a recently-public company that wants to force people to an app, or having to be both a web designer AND a comic writer/drawer (smbc-comics /still/ having problems with their commenting system on their website comes to mind).
Great piece but definitely makes me even more annoyed by the obviously bootleg Calvin pissing stickers on pickups. And even further annoyed that my kids will never know the joy of a quality broadsheet newspaper, especially on Sunday.
Aw man, you just hit me with a wave of nostalgia. Looking back, the Sunday comics were such an indulgence! To just sit on the floor with huge sheets of paper covered in colorful illustrated jokes and enjoy each one slowly. I need to take time like that each week again.
When I was quite young I attended a lecture by Bill Watterson held at the Akron Art Museum. He spoke without notes, with an easel and a large pad of paper, describing his career. He illustrated his story with the pad, drawing his unsuccessful characters (I remember one looked like a short Hobbes) as he told his story about how he created Calvin and Hobbes. I was really struck by how much Watterson looked like Calvin's dad.
I stayed after the end of the lecture hoping that he would give me one of his drawings. He politely declined. As I recall, he said he had to be very careful about how his work was distributed. I don't know if this was b/c of his contract with the syndicate, or b/c he was already thinking about the legacy of the strip.
I, like so many others, LOVE Calvin and Hobbes! I started loving it as a kid, a boy against "the establishment" (a.k.a., parents and school). Today, I am loving it as a parent with a little Calvin of my own running around the house. The wife and I are constantly laughing at how much our son reminds us of Calvin. We try to encourage his imagination as much as we can, and hope it never leaves him. It is absolutely amazing how this one comic can have such an effect on my during two completely different times of my life.
Mr. Bill Watterson ... thank you!
> It looked like the syndicate’s warnings to Watterson were well-founded: Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation.
Oh, that sounds bad.
> It says something about the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes — not to mention Watterson’s pulling power as a cartoonist — that after all the outrage and arguments, only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened to remove it from their pages. And only seven followed through.
What. This directly contradicts the first statement, does it not?
Remember his strip was popular enough that papers didn't have a choice. People were buying newspapers to get the latest Calvin and Hobbes. They may not like what he did but he had the power. Most cartoonists people read and sometimes laugh but if they get replaced nobody will care.
>>This directly contradicts the first statement, does it not?
It does not.
The former was threats in the before times, the latter was the lackluster result after the dust had settled.
The contrast between "Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation." and "only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened" is quite stark.
>>quite stark
Yes it is.
If you are running a paper and are already under stress and trying to streamline operations and now some cartoonist demands you use a format that requires significant extra work, you'd probably complain too, even threaten to drop that content. Threats are free, and they might work, especially if a lot of papers made similar complaints and threats.
But, when it came right down to the actual decision, knowing how many readers really love that particular artwork, and would even cancel their subscriptions if it were absent from your paper, and the math told you those losses would exceed the costs you were trying to avoid, so you'd find the papers collectively lost the conflict, and you'd keep it, do the extra work, and keep the subscribers.
Thinking about it for a minute, it seems unsurprising the difference between the initial cost-free bluster vs the final whimper of a handful of costly cancellations would be quite stark?
My comment was not about what happened, which does not need to be justified, in my opinion, especially at this late date.
My comment was about the contrast between "widespread" and the actual number that threatened, which was immediately stated to be 15/1800. The actual number that canceled was even smaller, but the characterization of one one-hundred-twentieth as "widespread" was interesting.
Yup, but I'd bet the number who complained approached 1800 and the number of complaints that verbally threatened, or alluded to "having to reconsider whether we run it" vs making a specific written threat was much higher. And yes, they could have been more clear about it.
Yeah, so? Turns out the papers were bluffing/complaining. This sort of thing happens in many parts of life.
Watterson was known for being very much a stickler for the format and color of the comic.
He'd eschew printing norms for the Sunday format and more or less force papers to either print it how he wanted or not get it at all.
The response was that the papers would just cancel the whole strip rather than give in to his artistic demands.
Sounds like you would be interested in the article linked at the top of the page.
Only 7 out of 1800 cancelled, according to the article.
I think the first threatened is from groups like moral majority or similar threatening we will get your papers to remove it, and then the second is the actual papers making the threat based on threats from moral watchdog groups. Anyway that is my interpretation of what happened.
The threatened cancellation was over Watterson demanding an unmodifiable half-page for his Sunday strips, not over the content of his strips.
ah sorry I had it confused in my mind with Berkley Breathed, should have read article first but I saw the cancellation thing and I thought oh yeah I remember that.
Hate to advocate for the devil but, as somebody involved in fanart, people want objects for the media properties they love and if they can't get them legitimately they will make their own or get them from somebody who didn't license the property. And if Waterson didn't spend his own time and money sicing lawyers on the latter his syndicate wasn't going to do it for him if he didn't license it.
Then there's the fact that anyone who wants more C&H comics can now just ask for them. I hate to think about how Watterson will feel the first time he sees that happen.
You are correct. Also, copyrights do expire eventually (takes longer than it should, but they still aren't perpetual)
I think I remember reading this, some time back.
Watterson had (still has) a great deal of Personal Integrity.
I dig Personal Integrity. People like him, are kind of mythic heroes, to me.
"licensing usually cheapens the original creation by saturating a market with characters until readers are bored of seeing them" makes the most sense to me out of this. When I think of Shrek, I don't even think of the movies, I think of all the random stuff like Burger King that licensed it.
Also, now that I've read this, I'm kinda sad about the bootleg peeing Calvin truck decal.
> Owing to spite or just a foul mood, have you ever peeled one of those stupid Calvin stickers off of a pickup truck?
I figure that, long after the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to immortality.
(from the Mentalfloss article linked a few comments down)
This reminds me of an old piece I really love about Fred Rogers, who faced many of the same pressures with exactly the same integrity:
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-...
Dang man, C & H taught me so much as a young lad. Unconditional love, amor fati, the importance of being yourself. I think the way he left it all was perfect. We were robbed of future delights but in the end it could not have been more in character. I hope Mr. Watterson is enjoying his final sebatical.
I hope he’s secretly drawing Calvin and Hobbes and that, somehow, the two are enjoying their adventures. As long as they are drawn, they are alive.
A man is not dead while his name is still spoken.
Calvin & Hobbes have always been such a joy. In childhood, it was a reflection of all the naughtiness you could come up with. As a middle aged adult today, I look at the bigger meanings of those simple adventures. Reading a few stories is a reminder that happiness could be found in simple things & vivid imaginations.
Bill Watterson's dedication to not commercialize it preserves the charm about 'simple life, simple joys' of our childhood. He could have raked in the money, but his integrity is admirable. It isn't easy to be in his position & make such difficult choices to preserve the ethos of his art.
I saw this video recently, about Bill Waterson and 'Robotman'
https://youtu.be/gP01pIB99ws?si=rnUOUom_MRYQcPkP
Another anecdote (where it came from I do not remember) stuck in my brain was that Watterson's editor called him one day to tell him that STEVEN SPIELBERG was on the phone to talk with him about a Calvin and Hobbes movie. Watterson refused to take the call.
Or how he was mailed a box of Calvin and Hobbes plushies to try to get sign-off on the quality of the toys.
He mailed back a picture of the box on fire.
IMO Calvin and Hobbes will always be special because of Watterson's integrity. It says everything it needed to say, and those comics will almost always be relevant.
Watterson said It was only my head that burst into flames.[1]
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53216/mental-floss-exclu...
The danger of "more" is that it dilutes the purpose and voice of the original. "Cowboy Bebop" fits in this same realm, I think. It had a single season. They did a movie. They said everything they needed to say and left it at that.
Firefly is an interesting example of that. If it had not been cancelled so quickly, would anybody remember it these days? A lot of shows start out strong and then completely fall apart.
The show that happened before your fourth birthday? That is interesting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48563354
And I guess the live action remake of Cowboy Bebop is the box on fire in this analogy?
I watched a few episodes of it.
It wasn't so bad that I couldn't wait to stop watching it but... it wasn't good enough that I couldn't help but finish it. I still want to finish it...
I think so, yes. I didn't hear great things about that. Eventually I'll probably watch it. But also maybe not.
I actually like it better, but it’s because I prefer live action over animation.
So instead we ended up with the only Calvin and Hobbes items in the physical world being those vinyl bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on things, because those were cheap and easy for random unscrupulous printers to make. Some artistic vision. As someone born in the late 80s, I recall seeing those far more than the actual comics.
>So instead we ended up with the only Calvin and Hobbes items in the physical world being those vinyl bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on things...
... and, of course, all of the various collections of the comics in print form, up to and including the full box set, that everyone can check out from libraries or purchase and keep in perpetuity. Ya know, the actual thing, the meat of it, the heart, the soul - not tangential merchandise.
>Some artistic vision.
Talk about completely missing the point.
> Watterson has a recurring dream about his old college where he doesn’t know what class he’s taking or where he’s meant to be. He roams the grounds, growing more flustered with each confused step. Right before he wakes, he thinks, “How many more years until I graduate…? Wait, didn’t I graduate already? How old am I?”
I’m 44 and I have this dream every few months about high school and university. Something deep inside.
Sometimes things are black and white. The syndicate needs people like Watterson and without them they’re broke. The Cartoon Network fell apart not heeding this law and its great artists continue on.
I would have loved to buy my children some small C&H figurines or, especially, a stuffed tiger, but I do respect Waterson's decision
I think about Bluey a lot in these situations. Fantastic show but because of the contract the Australian entity has sold licensing for everything. I wish they didn’t do sugary foods and a few other items. But it would be hard to turn down generational wealth
Have to say, I've always admired Watterson's determination to keep Calvin and Hobbes a comic strip and not compromise on its vision for money/fame. As the article itself points out, it would have been very easy for it to become the next Peanuts or Garfield, and most artists probably would have taken that route the minute it became available. Heck, given the obsession with side hustles and grifting and get rich quick schemes, I don't think I could see any present day comic creator (or creator in general) making that sort of decision.
But yeah, it's admirable. Especially given how the average comic strip runs for decades on end with less and less humour or charm until its eventual cancelation.
I'm always amazed at how a cartoonist can turn out 6 cartoons a week, every week, every month, every year.
Very well written! Now let’s wait to see what happens with the rights to Calvin and Hobbes when Waterson is not around. I’m sure we’ll see a reboot/re-run with merchandise, series and perhaps a movie, when the heirs take the rights.
Knowing Watterson, I'd wager he's taken certain paths to prevent this from happening.
I don't think he has the power to do anything.
Look at what happened to Frida Kalho. Her face has sadly become a synonymous for cheap stuff sold anywhere.
I dont know. I would have loved to buy a calvin t shirt or a hobbes toy for my son.
All this means is: Calvin and Hobbes will die out, as hardly anyone in the new generation (kids born in 2000s) know about this comic.
I can understand the art vs commercialism debate, but this is going too far in the other direction.
And before people start lecturing me: Yes I know some corproations are evil. Tintin's new owners didnt allow the original country Belgium to host a Tintin event because they wanted more money.
Corporate greed can totally kill art; but this is the other extreme, and will also lead to a slow death by people just forgetting about it
Great works get shared and passed on to others, even without T-shirts and stuffies. Also, the copyright will expire at some point.
What an excellent piece. Watterson is one of the greats and I have the utmost respect for people that do things because they enjoy it.
thank you for sharing this. It was a lovely read!
Reminds me of why the lucky stiff for some reason...
Absolutely incredible writing! Loved every word.
There's no art that can be stopped. You only need to convince someone else to print it if you want money.
Question: Imagine it is right after Watterson stopped working with Universal Press Syndicate and making Calvin and Hobbes. You know someone who can get you in touch with Watterson. What do you do?
I ask because I humbly think the closest we have in the last 30 years to Watterson is Shen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_(cartoonist) . So much of what he did mirrors Watterson. More specifically, so much of his evolution mirrors Watterson. He clearly had a style that was working, but he evolved and it worked (not everyone evolves and it works, Matthew Inman comes to mind--still does great stuff, his new style just doesn't resonate with me personally, could just be me). I mean, it's not a one-for-one comparison, Shen has a plushie, for example (not much else). But there's a spirit there that I feel resonates with people deeply.
He recently left Webtoon and his 3x-a-week Blue Chair. I wrote him an email that he responded to, which is how I know if someone has a good response here, I can probably get it to him. I mention in my email Smol Web (aka Small Web, other names as well, heavily mentioned here on Hacker News) and he said "I like the principles in it." But I get the impression he still feels he must pay fealty to the social media gods (relevant The Oatmeal https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people ) and everything else is secondary. the tricky part is creating something that will pay the bills. If anyone wants to lend him a hand in that, let me know and I'll pass it on. Like, how /does/ do Small Web and make money?
Here's nearly all of my email to him, if you are curious. One of the things I hated was that during Shen's tenure at Webtoon they got more and more hostile to users browsing without using their app. I don't know if it figured into his leaving, or even if it was 100% his decision, but I do rant a bit about it. I also mention "We Go Forward." That is referenced in the Wikipedia article. Sadly, can't link to it without linking to a social media site.
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Anyway, Webtoon's loss. They went public, they thought that meant they should act like Big Tech and force people into apps. Presumably to harvest all that data, make all their users the product, and sell that data to data brokers. They then wipe their hands of what happenns [sic] as that data is sold to surveillance states or worse. Of course, it's all predicated on the fact they can act as monopolies, following the Peter Thiel handbook. But assuming they could even become the next Meta or Alphabet going the way they did, regardless that the very ickiness of it should repulse one, is just hubris. Maybe they thought the app numbers, and the app data it would mean, would be enough to merger into a Meta or Alphabet. But you can't get there by simply forcing users bluntly and harshly. Forcing users is a late-stage Meta or Alphabet move, and it never starts blunt or harsh.
I see nothing wrong with them going public, per se, provided they can convince the shareholders to not be short-sighted. But I don't think they could, thus, it probably was wrong to do a traditional IPO. Shareholders want "growth" at all costs. So they will hinge on app downloads and engagement numbers with every earnings report. And so the stock price will hinge on those numbers, to the point where unless the stock price is unrelated to decision making--e.g. a non-voting arrangement for retail buyers like Zuck got--stupid decisions will be made. If not by the original company, by the "activist investment company" that buys all the shares and makes the same stupid decisions. Assuming the activist investor doesn't just turn it private again and vampires the equity.
Yes, they right now should have an app. But a simple browser wrapper app for those younger people who think everything should be an app. The core product should support browser viewing first. At least at first. Then assuming there's enough moat (which there definitely isn't yet) it's a question of morals, do you stay on that path, or do start to force people to the app little by little? Hobbling this or that. You don't go to "can't view this webcomic except in the app" right away. That's definitely a much later Darth Vader move which, again, no one should do (but if you're Zuck, you will do anyway).
I'll be glad to see you go somewhere new. Have your own site! Use federated social media! Realize there are fans who remember We Go Forward when it came out! You know, over twenty years ago, I spent two weeks on a web comic [removed, just in case it goes afoul of this Guideline "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." This comment is about Shen after all]. I should have Gone Forward. I gave up. It had such charm in retrospect. Good for you! Keep at it! Web comics are genius, you never have to worry about handling large data or keeping systems secure. You just make a cool .png and throw it on a smol site. (Look up smol web as a concept, Smol Ghost would approve.)
"Don't stop" is what someone wrote to me once, and it meant a lot. The beauty of what you do is you /can/ Go Forward and not have to leave others behind. I think it's time for a reboot of that original comic. Like how they made a Diablo II remake with better graphics and toggles to go between old and new. You could start out new version of Go Forward with fancy graphics, then show a settings screen, toggle to old. Toggle back to new (people will get what's going on). Go all the way to the end and switch back to old. Then do some speed-runner type thing involving jumping on hidden objects and make the parents' house show up on the same screen and they can cheer him on to the end.
Don't stop, awbvious
Another good reason to buy the collection. again.