Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity

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ppseudolus about 5 hours ago 44 commentsRead Article on therepublicofletters.substack.com

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dgritsko•about 2 hours ago

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.

all2•about 2 hours ago

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.

Cider9986•about 2 hours ago

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.

echelon•16 minutes ago

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.

willis936•10 minutes ago

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

conception•12 minutes ago

Rather than bombard children with advertising to buy plastic junk? Y…yes it was the right choice?

pydry•12 minutes ago

I saw a little girl reading it on public transport just yesterday.

apparent•35 minutes ago

The last Calvin and Hobbes strip [1].

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/6pig9h/hon...

alsetmusic•about 1 hour ago

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

aqfamnzc•about 1 hour ago

You have linked to your own comment.

biophysboy•about 1 hour ago

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.

Tyr42•about 2 hours ago

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.

defen•about 1 hour ago

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.

blt•about 2 hours ago

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.

card_zero•about 1 hour ago

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.

InitialLastName•about 2 hours ago

He's had more than 2 decades to reject that opportunity.

bena•about 1 hour ago

Yeah. He's not dead. He could have gone into webcomics if he had wanted.

hylaride•12 minutes ago

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).

FatherOfCurses•about 2 hours ago

"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...

ToucanLoucan•about 1 hour ago

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.

helterskelter•about 1 hour ago

I believe those are the Tibetan Buddhists.

hyperhello•about 2 hours ago

> 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.

rapind•about 2 hours ago

> 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...".

tanseydavid•about 1 hour ago

> the impression it was a dog whistle for manosphere spazzes

Everyone thinks this until they see the movie or read the book.

scubbo•41 minutes ago

I mean...they _are_. That doesn't mean that they doesn't have quality beyond what those dregs see.

bigstrat2003•about 1 hour ago

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.

randallsquared•about 2 hours ago

> 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?

bluGill•about 1 hour ago

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.

clutchdude•27 minutes ago

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.

toss1•about 1 hour ago

>>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.

bryanrasmussen•about 2 hours ago

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.

duskwuff•about 1 hour ago

The threatened cancellation was over Watterson demanding an unmodifiable half-page for his Sunday strips, not over the content of his strips.

bryanrasmussen•about 1 hour ago

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.

Cider9986•about 2 hours ago

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...

aBioGuy•about 2 hours ago

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.

jameskilton•about 2 hours ago

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.

wincy•8 minutes ago

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.

all2•about 2 hours ago

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.

hiccuphippo•about 1 hour ago

And I guess the live action remake of Cowboy Bebop is the box on fire in this analogy?

CM30•about 2 hours ago

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.

recursivedoubts•about 2 hours ago

Reminds me of why the lucky stiff for some reason...

philipallstar•about 2 hours ago

There's no art that can be stopped. You only need to convince someone else to print it if you want money.