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Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

therepublicofletters.substack.com

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Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#71

Post by cogman10 »

tombert wrote: post #50

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 i…

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#73

Post by leephillips »

clutchdude wrote: post #39
randallsquared wrote: post #14

> 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 pag…

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#74

Post by blindriver »

tombert wrote: post #50

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 i…

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#75

Post by goolz »

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#76

Post by tombert »

ghaff wrote: post #66
dmurray wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#77

Post by jeronimobomfim »

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

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#78

Post by jjulius »

echelon wrote: post #40
dgritsko wrote: post #5

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. T…

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.

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#79

Post by cogman10 »

defen wrote: post #25
Tyr42 wrote: post #11

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".

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#80

Post by jjulius »

NKosmatos wrote: post #72

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.
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