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Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

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Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#151

Post by thatguy0900 »

jandrese wrote: post #146
kemayo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#152

Post by esikich »

jandrese wrote: post #146
kemayo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I don't think I've seen a newspaper in anyone's house in like 15-20 years.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#153

Post by esikich »

jonstewart wrote: post #123
hackmack10 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill Watterson is worth a hundred million dollars. He’s not hurting for cash.

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#154

Post by alex0015 »

blindriver wrote: post #110
hackmack10 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#155

Post by mekael »

fragmede wrote: post #131
cogman10 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deca…

Hilariously, Dragonball is a rehashing of a far older folktale.

Which one?

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#157

Post by sometimes_all »

jfengel wrote: post #133
jeronimobomfim wrote: post #77

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/j…

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…

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#158

Post by ckw »

apparent wrote: post #38

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.

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#159

Post by evanelias »

cogman10 wrote: post #71
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, an…

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

Re: Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

#160

Post by telesilla »

fragmede wrote: post #131
cogman10 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deca…

Hilariously, Dragonball is a rehashing of a far older folktale.

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)

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