17 ms·

Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)

• deng 4y ago
  > In the old days, there was this idea of “selling out” and we as a culture decided that it was bad. Monetizing a thing immediately called into question its integrity, and more importantly, the integrity of the artist. But then an interesting thing began happening in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation. It did? I completely missed that, but it's probably because I'm old...
  • adastra22 4y ago
    It did in the sense that kids these days don’t worry about selling out. It’s a generational change.
    • nickelpro 4y ago
      "Hustling" is viewed as an on-the-whole good, even if various archetypes associated with it (the Logan Pauls of the world) aren't viewed positively. Being able to monetize a personal brand is viewed as more than just benign, it's viewed as a societal endorsement of the individual and their ideas/perspectives/strategies.
      • tristor 4y ago
        To be fair, nobody dislikes Logan Paul due to his “hustle”, it’s that he’s arrogant and a d-bag. Hustling is almost universally seen positively be anyone under 35.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          Hustle is probably an overloaded word in this context. I don't think you'll find a lot of people who say "hustle" in the abstract is bad. What you will probably find--especially among older better-off people--is a certain distaste for trying to aggressively turn everything into a side-hustle and monetization opportunity.
        • RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
          Consider me from a different universe.
    • deng 4y ago
      > It did in the sense that kids these days don’t worry about selling out. It’s a generational change. I mean, I can understand that establishing a "brand" is more important nowadays, but it must still be important to carefully curate it and not mindlessly promoting anything that earns you money. When Tony Hawk promoted crypto.com, I immediately regretted any kind of respect I ever had for that man. Does the younger generation really not care at all?
      • adastra22 4y ago
        That’s not what the article is talking about. When I was growing up (mid 90’s) and earlier, ANY commercial success was selling out. Playing your guitar at the local cafe? Awesome. Signing your first album deal? You’re selling out, man. It was a weird remembrance of the punk movement, and maybe counterculture before it, where basically any capitalist interaction was working with The Man and considered selling out.
        • TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
          I grew up around then, and definitely noticed the only people who weren't selling out where those who didn't have the opportunity to.
          • toto444 4y ago
            That's probably true but people were reminded that they were losing agency on their creation to businessmen. The creation was losing a bit of its soul. Nowadays most 'creations' are designed to make money from the very beginning. Very few people still create something for the sake of creating something great. If you are aware of some of them please share !
            • dotancohen 4y ago
              Not "art" per se, but SpaceX has a little cottage industry of followers who make terrific content, and successfully monetize it, while staying true to the ideals of producing the content for enthusiasts' sake. Marcus House, Tim Dodd, etc. Of course they cover other content too, and had established products before pivoting heavily towards SpaceX, but they certainly keep the sense of community.
    • hans1729 4y ago
      [citation needed]
    • ekianjo 4y ago
      Its not that they dont worry. They completely embrace selling out. Its almost as if everything they do is for the purpose of selling out.
    • simonh 4y ago
      I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation. Going to market with something was so hugely expensive, and required extensive marketing and distribution infrastructure, which was all internal to these big concerns. The problem was these companies expected a lot of invasive creative control and long term contracts to give access to those capabilities, which to be fair were hugely expensive to build and operate. Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc. The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so creatives have a much stronger hand than they used to. So I really don't think this is down to the generation themselves, the world they live in is just different. [0] https://youtu.be/xFFs9UgOAlE?t=935 https://youtu.be/xFFs9UgOAlE?t=935
      • bsenftner 4y ago
        It was hip hop, declaring "selling out" (specifically) to be propaganda. An entire decade and genre of music focused on this idea and the negative impacts of not selling one's work. "Getting paid" became the repeated mantra of many an artists' music. And that changed our culture.
        • simonh 4y ago
          That's actually a good point, I'm not sure how much broad influence that had but it's definitely an element.
      • coldtea 4y ago
    • willcipriano 4y ago
      The corporations won the culture war. I never realized it but looking at the cultural wasteland that we have now, they won.
      • mbg721 4y ago
        I don't know about that; the corporations certainly think they won, but I'm more inclined to believe they already killed the golden goose. There's no money in top-40 payola; the time to the grocery store soundtrack has never been shorter. The average age of cable TV viewers gets a year older every year, and there's much less patience for sitting around watching ads than in the 90s or 00s. Big corps are trying to win loyalty by loudly believing all the right things, only to find that they're alienating more of their customers than they thought. It's cool to be a foodie and do your own cooking, so fewer people are buying ever-shrinking prepared meals. Everyone's hugely cynical and expects a sales pitch around every corner. Culture is an incoherent wasteland largely because the big corps lost control.
        • coldtea 4y ago
          >I don't know about that; the corporations certainly think they won, but I'm more inclined to believe they already killed the golden goose. There's no money in top-40 payola; the time to the grocery store soundtrack has never been shorter They don't care. They do "hollistic deals", and sell Billie Eilish merchandize and Taylor Swift dog collars and barf bags. Music is just a byproduct of the whole thing...
          • mbg721 4y ago
            Sure, but they're only doing that because they're desperate and have no other ideas. They'd make way more money if they had a monolithic gaggle of 18-35 fans, and they don't.
    • avgcorrection 4y ago
      The only selling out buy-in I’ve seen is on HN with all the talk about being at “faang” or wanting to get into “faang”, all the while being very aware of how problematic big tech is.
    • watwut 4y ago
      They however care a lot about "shilling" as in trying to promote yourself on discussion forums.
  • nabla9 4y ago
    The phenomenon is not new. The difference seems to be that there is no limit at all. Today nobody thinks "this is so tasteless that I don't want to work with it anymore". I think it's more honest. Art's and creative jobs have had the aura of being form of uncompromising self-expression, vehicle of social and political change and beauty. Pretending adds layer of deceit. That can't coexist with the goal of maximizing mass market popularity and income. I think this is the logical conclusion when something turns into pure commerce. Only thing valuable is visibility, recognizably, hype. What makes Bill Watterson look like mystical figure is that "having enough" and "shutting up after you have said what you wanted" is alien concept in business.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      There are a fair number of examples in cartooning (to greater or lesser degrees) where creators have partially or wholly walked away. Being engaging and funny day in and day out must be incredibly difficult and I imagine that many at the top of their field who aren't doing formulaic creations just burn out and--once out--don't really have the motivation to get back in again.
      • nabla9 4y ago
        Walking away when there is diminishing return from the effort is common. Walking away from opportunity to earn 1000X with little effort is not that common.
    • swayvil 4y ago
      Can't tell truth and lies at the same time. Or can you? I haven't actually given the idea serious thought.
      • ConceptJunkie 4y ago
        You can, but everyone starts assuming that it's all lies.
  • stareatgoats 4y ago
    I remember way back when no real athlete would carry sponsorship messages - it would be "selling out". People who participated in sports for money were banned from participating in "clean sports" (and shamed). Maybe it wasn't like that in the US, but in Scandinavia it certainly was. In the good old days, in many ways. Kudos to Bill Watterson.
    • Rastonbury 4y ago
      I'm a millennial, I don't see how licensing IP would be selling out compared with carrying sponsorship messages. I understand how the latter can be seen as selling out
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        If you saw Calvin in a Cola commercial, you wouldn't feel that lessens the artistic value of Calvin and Hobbes?
        • ConceptJunkie 4y ago
          Sure, but what if there were Calvin and Hobbes plushies, or something similar. Setting aside, of course, all the reasons Watterson gave for not wanting to do that sort of thing. There's licensing and there's licensing. You can buy an Opus doll, but he's not flogging soft drinks.
        • jsymolon 4y ago
          I feel the same way about music licensed to shows or commercials. Due to the amount of airplay a show or commercial gets, the music becomes overused. The USPS use of "Fly like an Eagle", and overplayed CSI: X shredded The Who songs. Although, "Love and Marriage" used in "Married with Children" (90's) doesn't have the same tiredness, probably because that Sinatra really wasn't in my listening list.
          • hyperman1 4y ago
            I was wondering why I heared 'Running up that hill' from Kate Bush so much on the different radio stations. Then HN had an article about someone recreating the synth sound of it. Why the renewed interest? Yesterday I heard it got used on a popular Netflix show. Ah. It could be worse, I thought they were forcing interest in some new album from her.
  • recursiveturtle 4y ago
    If the reader here can find it, Linklater's SubUrbia captures this sentiment on film.
  • makeitdouble 4y ago
    We're on a forum that will celebrate independant companies getting bought by bigger entities. Going "major" is widely seen as positive. More generally artists will openly talk about trying to get financing, be more transparent about advertisement spots being open, or request sponsorship. Patreons and direct support also comes here. The "if you're not paying for it you're the product" quip at least cemented the idea that how money is made is something that can be discussed in the open, instead of just shunning "sell outs"
    • EnKopVand 4y ago
      I do think the “selling out” argument is still a thing in the modern world. Here in Denmark we’re going back and forth on how to regulate things like influencers, and I’m not sure there would be a push back against it if being forced to tell people that you’re advertising a company that pays you money to advertise them wasn’t still seen as negative. Even here on HN it’s not like the buy of Red Hat by IBM was revived with a lot of love. So I think user deng has a point about “selling out” still being a thing. That being said, I think there is a big difference between selling out and wanting to remain in control of your creation. I have no idea whether George Lucas likes what happens with Star Wars or not, and I hope I’m not going to start a debate over it either, but by selling it he lost the creative control in a way the Bill Watterson didn’t. My guess is that being “seen” as a “sell out” isn’t actually something that comes into play when people consider what to do with their creations very often. Because honestly, why would you ever care? So maybe there is less of it today, but to state that our public discourse has changed on the subject? I’m not convinced it has.
      • zamfi 4y ago
        > I’m not sure there would be a push back against it if being forced to tell people that you’re advertising a company that pays you money to advertise them wasn’t still seen as negative Hmm, is this really about “selling out” though? Or is it about trust, and the deception inherent in taking money to say something that people could reasonably believe are your own words?
      • mc32 4y ago
  • locallost 4y ago
    There definitely was a time, and I noticed I myself let go of it. Recently I watched an old clip of Bill Hicks where he calls out Leno for doing a commercial! I can't imagine anybody calling someone out over a commercial today and having an audience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8aj3BA3cGg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8aj3BA3cGg
  • bsenftner 4y ago
    For many of you, some older and some those who did not get into street music, the cultural event that ended the concept of "selling out" was hip hop artists declaring "selling out" to be white establishment propaganda, and "getting paid" is all that matters anymore. The 90's street music was all about "getting paid" and quite elaborate examinations of how the negative attitude toward "selling out" was the establishment suppressing the voices of the street.
  • coldtea 4y ago
    >It did? I completely missed that, but it's probably because I'm old... Yeah, it totally did. Ever since the 90s. The majority of the mainstream youth don't even understand the concept.
  • c3534l 4y ago
    I've not heard anyone seriously accuse someone of selling out in over a decade.
    • jasonladuke0311 4y ago
      It’s still prevalent in music, especially the hardcore and metal scenes. Changing your sound and/or finding commercial success are frequently met with accusations of “selling out” (see Turnstile or Deafheaven for examples).
  • yyyk 4y ago
    "Old days" is a very relative term here. This attitude was common for Watterson's generation (b. 1958), but for example Schulz (b. 1922) had zero problems with monetization.
    • JKCalhoun 4y ago
      That may be when Peanuts, IMHO, went downhill. "Oh, the dog sells? I'll do more of the dog." Sigh, so kawaii.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        It's hard to look at Peanuts with fresh eyes from such a distance of time. Halloween specials notwithstanding, I'm not sure I can say that I ever loved Peanuts--certainly not as an adult--but it was absolutely a cultural icon.
        • JKCalhoun 4y ago
          I think it was from reading the "Complete Peanuts" collections and seeing how brilliant the strip was in the earlier part of its run (certainly before I was old enough to either read or understand its depth as a child).
  • foobarbecue 4y ago
    Came here to say this. AFAIK "selling out" has just as negative a connotation as it ever did. Maybe he means commercialism is more prevalent, but that's not what he wrote. Nobody says "congratulations on being a sellout" unless they are being sarcastic.
  • tablespoon 4y ago
    > It did? I completely missed that, but it's probably because I'm old... IIRC, being a "social media influencer" is literally selling out, and it seems like it's what a lot of kids aspire to these days.
  • starkd 4y ago
    To see evidence that Bill Watterson made the right decision, all you have to do is look at what happened to the Simpsons' brand. Matt Groenig unleashed any and all restraint on product merchandising. It used to be a clever and insightful commentary on American society. Now it's just sad.
    • ConceptJunkie 4y ago
      Perhaps, but its the show itself that has declined, not driven by the merchandising. "The Simpsons" as a show used to be razor-sharp satire and commentary, and rather counter-cultural. Now it's everything it used to mock, and worst of all, dull as dirt. The effect of merchandizing at this point is pretty irrelevant.
    • lancesells 4y ago
      Same as what happened to David Bowie after he died. His estate seemed to let everything of his be merchandised after he passed. Monopoly version of David Bowie, lunchboxes, etc... oof.
      • onionisafruit 4y ago
        I thought you must be exaggerating about the David Bowie Monopoly game, but you were not. Who is buying that?
  • chubot 4y ago
    In the old days, there was this idea of “selling out” and we as a culture decided that it was bad. Monetizing a thing immediately called into question its integrity, and more importantly, the integrity of the artist. But then an interesting thing began happening in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation. Chuck Klosterman's recent book "The Nineties" talks about this a lot! And honestly it's spot on. I had forgotten about this, and not realized how much it disappeared as a cultural concept. https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/0735217955 https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073... We all used the phrase "selling out" frequently (on the east coast of the US), but I remember one high school friend who invoked it constantly. Calling people "sell outs" (i.e. lacking in authenticity) was a common insult. Grunge bands and in particular Kurt Cobain had almost a pathological obsession with "selling out", to the point where it had some part in his death. Even popularity was seen as a sign of selling out -- it was better to be true to your indie roots. There are some interesting quotes in the book from Cobain and contemporaries, and the author talks about influential movies at the time that dealt with the concept. I was never a Calvin and Hobbes fan, but it's definitely interesting and notable that the creator avoided "selling out". While I think we were too obsessed with it back then, I think a concept that probably needs more respect today. You could even talk coherently about Google "selling out", although that concept may now be foreign to many people. There was a notion of authenticity and that you cared about the mission, i.e. organizing the world's information. But that is long gone :-( In retrospect the obsession with "selling out" in the 90's was a reaction to capitalist values affecting more and more parts of life. Though, being a teenager, I didn't realize that, and I just said what my friends said! It was a way to keep your peers in check. But it's sad that people don't even notice it anymore. They would wonder why you did NOT "sell out".
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      Google sold out when they bought DoubleClick. (Bought out?)
      • jleyank 4y ago
        Google came pre-sold out, given that the existed to sell ads.
  • dkarl 4y ago
    "Selling out" still has negative connotations, but "hustle" became a positive word that we use for a lot of behavior that previously would have been labeled "selling out." Basically a bunch of upper-middle-class people adopted the concept of "hustle" from its poor urban context, where it acknowledged that the drive to do anything to scrape by was hard to reconcile with strict ethical standards. You don't question someone's ethics when they're trying to make sure their siblings have something to eat for dinner that night. Upper-middle-class people recognized that feeling -- hey, that's the desperation I feel when I realize that if I don't take this adtech job, I might not be able to maintain the same lifestyle as my friends that I met in the dorm at my highly selective university. If I don't found a startup and get monstrously rich, other people will never think of me the way I think of myself, and that would suck. How convenient that there's a word for when your desperate circumstances excuse you from the ethical standards that we apply to normal people! No matter how privileged you are, when you do ethically questionable things, just call them "hustle" and everyone will know that it isn't because of entitled self-indulgence, but because of your plucky determination to survive everything the world throws at you.
    • hattmall 4y ago
      It used to be that people lived life for the acts of life and a material things generally had a negative connotation. Now for a tremendous amount of people life is almost exclusively about material wealth and even many life experiences have a material quality because if you don't post pictures at certain landmarks did you really even go.
      • majormajor 4y ago
        Rich and powerful people have had gaudy things for centuries. Life was about power and material wealth was included in that. How much of the negative connotations sometimes associated with that have been akin to propaganda to keep the rest of the people in line.
    • hitekker 4y ago
      Solid comment. The word "hustle" conceals face-saving under the lip-service of survival. A careerist use it to cover up their wrongdoing. Like you said, they also believe in "hustle" because they're desperate; they've confused their face with their character. They believe "I needed to cheat and steal to get ahead because if I didn't, I won't be who I need to be, who I am." The belief in hustle masks and resolves an identity crisis, easily & selfishly. When people can justify complex, bad behavior with simple, bad beliefs, bad behavior spreads like a fire. In the article, Bill Watterson calls out justifying as the first step for regulating bad beliefs: > The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?”
  • calvinmorrison 4y ago
    Well, it's also happened to the music market. Songs are worthless so you play a show and then hit the merch tent to sell LPs, hoodies, VIP passes etc. How many full time cartoonists are employed by papers vs 100 years ago?
  • clsec 4y ago
    That's exactly what happened to San Francisco's culture. It started the during the first tech boom when all the artists started leaving for the East Bay and PDX.
  • karaterobot 4y ago
    It did. Partly this was a change in economics: it got harder to make a good living as an artist in a digital, networked environment, where your art wasn't worth as much. So, artists started doing a lot more commercials, selling their art or their image to advertisers, and later using their access to fans to sell their own consumer products directly to them. Once the cultural taboo was banished, it disappeared quickly. The idea that outside money pollutes art is not a concept most people under 20 would find intuitive or familiar, and relatively few under 30 either. Now, whether this is good or bad, I can't say. It certainly feels like there is less art produced today that will stand the test of time. But there are a lot of reasons that might be true other than just this one, and in any case as a man in my 40s, I'm generally out of touch with culture, and not a suitable judge. Nor are teenagers the authorities in this matter, though for other reasons. It's something historians of the future will have to sort out.
  • I-M-S 4y ago
    There's an episode of "Decoder ring", an excellent podcast devoted to decoding cultural mysteries, on this subject: https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2021/08/selling-out https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2021/08/selling-out
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    "Selling out" is basing your morality on someone's well deserved accomplishment and whether they should be rewarded for that or not. That seems complete opposite of how I see morality ought to be. Seems incredibly contemptious and anything but moral.
  • maxutility 4y ago
    There was a really interesting NYTimes piece [0] about Gen X comedy icon Janeane Garafolo earlier this week that touched on similar themes of “not selling out.” I have often wondered over the years what happened to her. It turns out that she really walked the walk of not selling out and the obscurity that comes with avoiding publicity and promotion. Personally my feelings on the subject are conflicted. I think that some degree of promotion is important so that others can discover great art and contributions, and so that artists and creators can make a comfortable living off of their work, but that “selling out” becomes bad when the pursuit of commerce overtakes and reduces the art. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/movies/janeane-garofalo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/movies/janeane-garofalo.h...
• boomboomsubban 4y ago
  I feel like I've seen the Calvin pissing meme openly sold in chain stores multiple times. Is he unwilling to be litigious? What about his publisher?
  • adastra22 4y ago
    Why would the publisher spend money fighting it? It’s not like they have merchandise sales to protect.
  • phnofive 4y ago
    It is a mark of integrity in the same vein of refusing to license his artwork; he is aware of these rip-offs and considers them part of his legacy.
  • kevingadd 4y ago
    This approach is more common these days, though probably for different reasons. A massive subset of modern anime and video game franchises from overseas implicitly or explicitly allow fan works as long as basic rules are met - people can create and share fan comics, games, etc, and even sell art books or prints. The people in charge of the franchises recognize that letting fans riff on the work will make them enjoy it more even if doing that means giving up control. Touhou Project is famous for having barely any controls at all so there is a massive amount of high quality fan work available in multiple languages.
  • ekianjo 4y ago
    > Is he unwilling to be litigious? That point is specifically adressed in the article
    • boomboomsubban 4y ago
      Kind of. Making a quip that he should do something still makes his position somewhat unclear.
      • pksebben 4y ago
• dry_soup 4y ago
  > Whatever decisions Lucas and Rowling and Martin made regarding the integrity of their work, they were tempered by the need to ensure their properties were also profitable. Conventional wisdom says that’s how you build brand recognition. But Watterson stands apart from his fellow creators because he rejected that wisdom. Which ironically has led to the exact thing Watterson didn’t want… the creation of a brand identity. This is a misunderstanding of what Watterson was (is!) trying to achieve. He wants Calvin and Hobbes to exist on its own terms. You can call that a "brand identity" if you like, but it is certainly very deliberate on Watterson's part. What he is really trying to avoid is taking away the experience of reading the comic strip by having to make elements of it too concrete: What Calvin's or Hobbes' voices sound like, making the fuzzy line between Calvin's imagination of Hobbes and the real world too clear, etc. This isn't speculation, you can read this in the 10th anniversary Calvin and Hobbes book, which has a lot of great commentary. As for how he was able to financially justify this, you can read about it in his commencement speech at his alma mater of Kenyon College, which I highly recommend reading in its entirety [1]. > Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them. It's funny to me that all these years later, Watterson is still seen as some mysterious recluse with obscure motivations, when it couldn't be more clear: Watterson does not want to compromise his artistic vision, and he does not need more money than he already has in order to live a life he is content with. So there is no reason for him to milk Calvin and Hobbes for all it's worth. [1] https://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html https://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html
  • whiplash451 4y ago
    Absolutely. I always felt that Tintin’s movies were such a terrible idea.
• shmde 4y ago
  I have read his comics since my childhood and I have no idea why I always assumed throughout my 25 year existence that Mr. Bill Watterson was history. I found out "NOW" that he is well alive and kicking and lives in solitude, away from public eye. It feels so weird thinking a man is dead for your whole childhood years only to be alive this whole time, I feel like crying right now.
  • camoufleur 4y ago
    I was quite surprised to learn he began Calvin and Hobbes at only age 27 and quit by 37
• deleted 4y ago
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• arunprakash01 4y ago
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  Two observations: Bill Watterson did return to public cartooning, if briefly, in 2014. There's a reference here:[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55321/first-new-bill-watterson-cartoon-almost-20-years https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55321/first-new-bill-wat... Berkeley Breathed's "Bloom County" shares a similar cultural and temporal space (1980--1989 initial run) with "Calvin and Hobbes", and I was going to comment that for the most part Breathed's also avoided commercialisation. Only to learn that there's an animated series planned to appear on Fox: https://collider.com/bloom-county-animated-series-berkeley-breathed-fox/ https://collider.com/bloom-county-animated-series-berkeley-b... In the current world of Web2.0 / Web3 hype and catastrophe, much of the Waterson ethic resonates fairly strongly with me. The 1980s and early 1990s were something of a spiritual child / echo of the 1960s, within the digital realm, and there was a promise of possibilities which ... have to a large extent failed to materialise. The cesspits of Facebook and Twitter are the Altemont to Usenet and the WELL's Woodstock. Reality, bad trips, and Hells Angels have intruded. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Stealth footnote edit: thaumaturgy's commented with the strip in question, Pearls Before Swine, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116647
  • agumonkey 4y ago
    I also feel very strongly about the failure of the digital era. Understanding that society moves in weird curves and is rarely self aware enough to do good things in one shot. Maybe it will have to crash and rebuild using some valuable bits and a better insight (or hindsight).
  • daniel-cussen 4y ago
    No, but there's always someone listening in from the outside. Woodstock wasn't pure, like...some people were just there to sell bad weed. There is no purity. This is purity, like a gold coin is .999 pure, that's what you get, this. Hacker News was created with the intent of avoiding the Neverending September that happened when Usenet was opened up in ¿1993 was it? So that led to a series of attempts to cling to a more beautiful time, until Reddit, and in response to Reddit getting massified, this pretty small forum that lost a lot of its inertia it had seven years ago, and it's cool, it's a joint that's out of the way and few know about but it's a cool place. I'm rate-limited on here, which I embrace as a way of spending less time saying my words. I say a lot of things that make people's head hurt. Like there's stuff I only tell friends if there is aspirin on hand. And the other thing is it has to be subsidized in some way. So this forum is subsidized by Y Combinator Management LLC (I think that's what it's called) and even though it is very synergistic, like...it's not as synergistic now. Well I don't know. I didn't do winter during Covid, until now which I regret, winter sucks. But there has to be a winter for there to be a spring...I'm losing conviction in what I just wrote as I continue writing. Like why lose when you can win and win forever?
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Watterson was always going to have a special place in the cartoonist pantheon because of C&H, but by this decision, I feel he will be truly immortalized. Every single Calvin & Hobbes comic strip feels more special because that’s the only time I get to see it, and I get to see it in complete context. If it was plastered on mugs and tshirts, it would be completely decontextualized and feel a little cheaper.
  • dotancohen 4y ago
    What about those peeing stickers? I am fully aware that Waterston had nothing to do with them, but do you not feel that they diluted the brand?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      I always enjoyed this The Onion blurb: https://www.theonion.com/peeing-calvin-decals-now-recognized-as-vital-channel-of-1819565534 https://www.theonion.com/peeing-calvin-decals-now-recognized...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • pizzathyme 4y ago
    I feel the opposite. In 20 years people who are avid comic historians may remember him, like how a few people today may remember Fred Astaire (greatest dancer of black and white films). But in the grand scheme of things C&H is fading into nothingness. Few Gen Z or kids today have heard of it, and that percentage will grow each decade. Large brands like Potter, Garfield, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars will live on potentially forever as long as the brands and businesses are well managed. I respect his decision but it makes me sad. I loved C&H as a kids but as I type this in a store it is nowhere to be found. Immortality at the cost of creative compromise.
    • Beltalowda 4y ago
      But what's the point of just keeping the brand alive if it loses what made it so special in the first place? If I look at modern Star Trek for example then its lost most things that made earlier Star Trek so special. I'm not even saying it's bad per se, just that there is no real value in having it be "Star Trek" other than commercial reasons.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Reminds me of the note Watterson sent Breathed: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/c7viyp/another_reference_to_the_overmerchandising_of_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/c7viyp/another...
• Linda703 4y ago
  [dead]
• ken47 4y ago
  If you ever read these comics, I think you'd understand that it would be extremely odd to see these characters in an ad for e.g. coca cola or some such. Calvin and Hobbes have very well-defined characters that would seem very out of place in a profit-oriented environment.
  • spacemanmatt 4y ago
    I can't drive a mile without seeing a truck sporting a sticker of Calvin peeing on (competing brand truck logo) or praying to a cross. Or both.
    • beowulfey 4y ago
      You probably knew this but those are 100% not licensed.
      • spacemanmatt 4y ago
        Totally agreed. These are the counterexamples. I loved C&H and am glad that I don't have to deal with either of them trying to sell me toothpaste or car insurance. Super glad.
  • franciscop 4y ago
    I feel it could be the same for Mafalda, which I just realized I haven't seen outside of comics. Or maybe I'm too young? The internet is tricky for these things though, if you search "calvin and hobbes mug" you'll definitely find a lot of them to buy, same as with Mafalda, so not sure how to validate this feeling. Edit: Wikipedia corroborates my feeling that Mafalda hasn't had many adaptations also because of the author didn't want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafalda#Adaptations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafalda#Adaptations
    • philistine 4y ago
      I only know Mafalda through its cartoon; it was broadcast on Canal Famille in Québec in the 90s.
• em-bee 4y ago
  I’ve always been a little skeptical of letting creators have so much control, because that’s how you end up with things like the Star Wars Special Editions or Jo Rowling claiming she should’ve killed off Ron so Harry and Hermione could get together. If enough time passes, creators can lose touch with what makes their work so special in the first place. i don't follow this argument. the author claims that everyone should have a right to modify someones creations to their liking, but they criticize the original creators if they do that? that seems kind of hypocritical to me. i am all for shortening the copyright, but that won't protect us from any star wars special editions. we don't need a shortening of copyright to allow fan-fiction or even fan films. star trek is a good example of that. there are thousands of fan films out there. star trek creators have given explicit permission for these works, while other creators are much more restrictive, and it would be nice if what star trek fans are doing was actually explicitly allowed by copyright law. in other words, loosen the control a bit, without needing to abolish control completely.
• Trasmatta 4y ago
  It's amazing how you uncover just a bit more depth to Calvin and Hobbes every single time you read it. Reading it once again recently, I began to really see the subtle depth written into his parents. They're generally seen from Calvin's perspective: super old, crabby, out of touch. But then you realize that's just how a 6 year old sees them, and that there's a lot more to their characters. They're likely only in their early 30's, and are honestly doing their best job as parents. There are all sorts of little hints towards how much they love their son (even though he can drive them crazy), their fears, their hobbies and interests outside of parenting, their relationship, etc. It's really beautiful.
  • mcv 4y ago
    Ever since I had kids, I started identifying a lot more with Calvin's parents. Sometimes more than with Calvin.
    • Trasmatta 4y ago
      Reading strips like this as a kid, it was easy to look at them slightly negatively: https://i.imgur.com/zBko5hB_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium https://i.imgur.com/zBko5hB_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&... Now, though, I get it. Parenting is hard, and it's not only thing going on in their lives. And despite it all, they put up with Calvin's behavior, encourage his imagination, keep him fed and warm, and comfort him when it matters. What more could you ask for?
  • webkike 4y ago
    It’s hinted at throughout the series that Calvin’s mom was a much more difficult child than even Calvin was, and I always appreciated that touch.
    • avalys 4y ago
      Really? I think I've read all the C&H strips multiple times and never picked up on that. Notably, Calvin's parents are never given names, and the only relative ever featured as I recall was his uncle on his dad's side. Do you have a link to a strip where this is hinted at?
• beardyw 4y ago
  I am saddened that now success === money is so very pervasive.
• thaumaturgy 4y ago
  I haven't seen it mentioned yet, so in case you're a big Calvin and Hobbes fan and haven't heard about Watterson's brief return to the comics page as a guest artist for Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine, Stephan describes the whole thing in a really fun story here: https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-that-calvin-and-hobbes-creator-bill-watterson-would-return-to-the-comics-page-well-he-just-did/ https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t... It includes links to the strips. C&H remains one of very few influential and yet uncorrupted parts of my youth. I'm grateful to Mr. Watterson for never selling out. But it's bittersweet, because kids don't read newspaper funnies with their breakfast cereal anymore, and I fear that Calvin and Hobbes will disappear from the public consciousness long before Garfield does.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Thanks! That's one of the returns I was thinking of earlier (see my top level comment in thread), though I couldn't think of the strip. It was of course PBS.
  • gnicholas 4y ago
    > because kids don't read newspaper funnies with their breakfast cereal anymore Neither kids nor adults read the newspaper with their breakfast much anymore... That said, my kid came across my old C&H books and loves to read them. She also reads Fox Trot, Garfield, and Peanuts, but not nearly as much as C&H.
• endominus 4y ago
  For those who are interested and may not know; Bill Watterson also ghost-drew a few strips for the comic Pearls Before Swine (part of an arc beginning on the 2nd of June 2014[0] and continuing till the 8th). There are a couple of neat references to who it is behind the better art (anyone who's read Watterson's complaints on shrinking panel space in print media will be familiar with the guest character's comments) and I recall an old blog post by the artist of Pearls describing what it was like to work with Bill (terrifying; the thought of the postal worker just chucking these, the only comics anyone had gotten out of Watterson in years, onto his porch in the rain was horrible), but I can't find it. [0]: https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/02 https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/02 EDIT: Nevermind, found it! https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-that-calvin-and-hobbes-creator-bill-watterson-would-return-to-the-comics-page-well-he-just-did/ https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t...
  • Natsu 4y ago
    It's funny how it says there's "one picture in existence" but the site just shows "watterson.jpeg" and no actual photo, even in old archives.
    • jamiek88 4y ago
      https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/20/bill-watterson-1990-kenyon-speech/ https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/20/bill-watterson-199...
      • upwardbound 4y ago
        If anyone wants this, here's the highest-resolution version I could find of that photo of Watterson. https://image.cleveland.com/home/cleve-media/width2048/img/nationworld_impact/photo/calvin-fans-reason-to-smile-due-out-soon-film-and-a-rare-interview-357831e82e3960ed.jpg https://image.cleveland.com/home/cleve-media/width2048/img/n... He looks just like Calvin's dad for sure :)
        • 4y ago
• cheschire 4y ago
  The timing of this is a fun coincidence. My kids recently discovered my print copies of the strip collections. I didn’t want them to destroy them though so i looked on the kindle store for the whole set, but the experience is inconsistent and one isn’t even available anymore. Found them on archive.org though! And I was wondering to myself why those scans are allowed to live, and why there aren’t crystal clear comixology versions, etc. This article has given just a touch more insight just at the time I was looking for it.
• shellfishgene 4y ago
  Sometimes I hope he has been drawing more comics all this time, to be published some time in the future, all at once in a great book. Probably not, but who knows...
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    Last I heard he paints landscapes.
    • thechao 4y ago
      I've read this, too; I could only imagine the price he'd command on a painting. The man is a national treasure.
• deathgripsss 4y ago
  I've never read any Calvin and Hobbes, is there a resource to read the comics in the most sensible way or should I just try to read them in chronological order?
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    Buy an anthology book and just read it from the beginning. There’s no “bad season” and he stopped it well before it was showing signs of going off. For me it’s hard to give a critical review since reading the strip every day in the newspaper is both nostalgic and sentimental as my dad and I both loved it. And then it was gone and that was that.
    • JJMcJ 4y ago
      Similar to The Far Side. Also Peanuts. Charles Schultz died overnight just before the final Sunday strip. He'd been in failing health and had drawn the final strips a month or two before his death. Garry Trudeau, who does Doonesbury, has drawn some flak over the years because he doesn't throw himself into the full publicity grind.
  • psyc 4y ago
    Get an anthology. Someone got me one for Christmas in 9th grade. By the time I finished high school I owned all of them. I don't keep much physical stuff around, but I still have those.
  • keithnz 4y ago
    I like the books, but the strips are online anhttps://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2022/07/16 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2022/07/16
  • brk 4y ago
    IMO you can read them in pretty much any order and get 90% of it. Most of them were self-contained. In same cases there are occasional characters, like Susie, and Calvin's perspective of her changes over time, but you can read any strip with Susie in it and probably get the message even without knowing her history in the strip.
• margoguryan 4y ago
  I collect fake Calvin & Hobbes merchandise as a hobby and have enough peeing Calvin stickers to make a surrealistic flipbook of it if I hold my collection in my hand. Bill Watterson should enjoy these dimensions of kitsch, irony and cheap simulacra instead of fighting it; and even still, would we have pissing Calvin to begin with had he licensed it early on enough? Who invented pissing Calvin? I don't care about Bill Watterson. I care about pissing Calvin.
  • rideontime 4y ago
    He should and he apparently does.
• kzrdude 4y ago
  There's not too many photos of Bill. Here's a few from 1980s https://goldfm.lk/life/other/3349/bill-watterson-creator-comic-strip-calvin-hobbes-in-1980s https://goldfm.lk/life/other/3349/bill-watterson-creator-com... https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Bill_Watterson https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Bill_Watterson
• rm445 4y ago
  Got to respect Mr Watterson's stance, but I was a little bit gutted to learn he had turned down Pixar - surely a safe set of hands that could produce something incredible from his creation. Would he turn down Hayao Miyazaki as well?
  • phinnaeus 4y ago
    Yes
  • em500 4y ago
    I'm glad he did. I hope you realize that not everybody loves Pixar or Miyazaki. (Or C&H for that matter.) Watterson seems close to enlightened in the Buddhistic or Daoistic traditions. "Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough." Dao De Jing - Chapter 46
  • layer8 4y ago
    Are you aware of how different Miyazaki’s adaptations generally are from the original works?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• cturtle 4y ago
  Just finished reading the daily Calvin and Hobbes comic before coming here. Here’s an RSS feed [0] if anyone is interested. [0]: https://www.comicsrss.com/rss/calvinandhobbes.rss https://www.comicsrss.com/rss/calvinandhobbes.rss
• Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Good, kind of admire the respect of the story, medium, and artwork. Upon seeing Disney licensed diapers at the store, it reminded one that often corporate studios eventually take a literal dump on characters to sell nostalgia. I doubt Stan Lee had envisioned this was to be the tragic fate of his work...
  • baq 4y ago
    ‘Extracting value from the brand’ is apparently the MBA term for this
• optimalsolver 4y ago
  He did give permission for someone on Tumblr to make a C & H/Dune mashup. Calvin & Muad'Dib: https://calvinanddune.tumblr.com/ https://calvinanddune.tumblr.com/
  • tptacek 4y ago
    Sort of. He got C&D'd for it, had his lawyers make a fair-use argument to the Calvin & Hobbes lawyers, and got his specific use cleared. He never talked to Watterson.
• ur-whale 4y ago
  > Which is what makes Watterson’s position so fundamentally at odds with what we consider normal behavior. So, selling out is "normal behavior" now ? What a deeply arrogant perspective from the article's author.
• michaelbuckbee 4y ago
  We're talking a lot about "selling out" but maybe not so much about the bigger issue of his work leaving his control and becoming a property that would be used all sorts of weird ways. If you want a cautionary tale, look at the Iron Giant. A thoughtful and interesting character whose whole arc is choosing peace is now shoved into things like Ready Player One [1] as a fighting weapon. It's hard not to think that Calvin wouldn't get reduced to some Dennis the Menace type character that misses the point were he to leave Watterson's control. 1 - https://www.inverse.com/article/42896-ready-player-one-iron-giant-antiwar https://www.inverse.com/article/42896-ready-player-one-iron-...
  • manytree 4y ago
    Thanks for this link. Had me remember that excellent movie. And an excellent illustration of the perils of “selling out” rights to depict a fictional character.
  • defaultcompany 4y ago
    Winnie the Pooh also comes to mind. There was one beautiful and very authentic animated movie followed by two or three terrible films that just felt like a horrible caricature of anything the original work was about.
    • szeil 4y ago
  • bokchoi 4y ago
    The Lorax, The Cat in the Hat, and The Grinch movies also were completely warped by Hollywood.
  • uwagar 4y ago
    guess by 2085 he (or his estate?) will lose creative control anyhow though? loss of creative control can be fan fiction/comic too?
• gus_massa 4y ago
  Cutting the strip at the 10 years is a good idea to avoid the Zombie Simpson problem. https://deadhomersociety.wordpress.com/zombiesimpsons/ https://deadhomersociety.wordpress.com/zombiesimpsons/ (It's easier when it's just one man job, and you must not fire all the team.)
  • detritus 4y ago
    If you're interested in checking this out, as I am, don't use the links in the 'table of contents' as they're all misdirected - use the splurge of links near the top of the document.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    I sort of have what I jokingly call the five season rule for TV series. Even if quality doesn't really trail off, I'm mostly done. I definitely lost interest in Doonesbury at one point even if Trudeau did evolve and age the characters. Dilbert? Pretty much forget about it even aside from Adams'... um interesting modern perspectives. I've been pointed to a few funny things now and then but it mostly still seems stuck in some 1990s PacBell time warp.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  I remember a skinhead moralizing to me about a Calvin and Hobbs pirate t-shirt I was wearing (sone local guy made it) back in the 1990’s. Was ironic to say the least.
• NKosmatos 4y ago
  Interesting to read about this and never knew about it since I’m a fan of Calvin and Hobbes. I can understand his motives and reasoning, but I’m sure after a few decades, when the copyright pass over to his heirs, we’re going to see more of Calvin and Hobbes.
  • Hayvok 4y ago
    Just imagine what Disney or Amazon will be doing to this property in thirty years time.
• moviewise 4y ago
  Another take: "Watterson, of course, is Calvin, at least partly, and the refusal to agree to what his bosses wanted in terms of licensing is a demonstration of the rebellious spirit that energizes the comic strip. But at the end of the day, it is juvenile, shortsighted, and damaging. This is why becoming an adult is hard to do. Watterson made a decision that was rooted in pettiness: "I worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to let other people run away with my creation once it became successful."" From: https://moviewise.substack.com/p/are-you-socially-mad-or-capably-glad https://moviewise.substack.com/p/are-you-socially-mad-or-cap...
  • moviewise 4y ago
    Related: Here is an article describing the speech Watterson gave railing against licensing. Note the different approaches of the two cartoonists on opposite sides, Bill Watterson vs 'Beetle Bailey'/'Hi and Lois' creator Mort Walker. "Walker and Watterson also had very different approaches to dealing with the public at the three-day festival. Walker agreed to numerous requests to do autographed sketches and pose for photos, while Watterson declined to give autographs and requested no photos and no taping of his remarks." http://timhulsizer.com/cwords/cdiffer.html http://timhulsizer.com/cwords/cdiffer.html
  • sonofhans 4y ago
    I appreciate that you’re just quoting someone else’s work here. But let me say that this is by miles the worst take I’ve read on Calvin & Hobbes, and one of the saddest and most dehumanizing things I’ve ever read about the intersection of art and commerce. They author fundamentally misunderstands art: “The value of artistic work is in reaching people.” They claim repeatedly that artists have an obligation to use commerce to spread their work far and wide: “Can you not see that in denying the syndicates profits that countless others were harmed?” It is a long elucidation of exactly what Watterson has spent his life trying to avoid. It’s literally calling the man “selfish” for refusing to allow others to profit from his work. It’s kneeling at the altar of capitalism and kissing the ring of commercial exploitation, and prizing both those things above simple human creativity, and the ability of artists to curate their own works.
• d1l 4y ago
  There are plenty of people out there who share Bill Watterson's beliefs about art or their creations. You just don't hear about it because obviously they aren't interested in shilling. I do, however, wish that blatant self-promotion was more frowned-upon by our culture. It's hard to tell when the creator is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for personal gain. I personally believe, though, that we don't live by money (or prestige) alone. I take comfort from the fact that for thousands of years others have shared this belief.
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    Well, we live in a world where it isn’t considered sociopathic to refer to and think of yourself as a “brand” somehow.
    • wussboy 4y ago
      Right now. It isn't consider sociopathic right now. But it is my sincere hope that it will soon be again.
    • d1l 4y ago
      I think it's easy to overestimate how many people approve of this attitude, because the ones who do are also extremely loud and present in mass media.
    • batman-farts 4y ago
      Current technology reinforces and incentivizes this model. You, your friends, and the people whose thoughts you find interesting are placed in the same feed, on an equivalent level, with global brands that have astronomical marketing budgets. The individual must evolve toward a brand in order to remain relevant in the feed.
      • nemo44x 4y ago
        I think categorizing users for marketing purposes is different than someone proclaiming they’re a brand.
  • 4y ago
• darepublic 4y ago
  There was the somewhat ubiquitous car sticker of Calvin grinning mischievously and peeing on the ground. Used to see that a lot as a child.
• jdblair 4y ago
  Sometime in the 80s while the strip was still running (and I was probably 10 or 11), I attended a talk by Bill Watterson at the Akron Art Museum. He looked astonishingly like Calvin's dad! Over the course of about an hour he drew all the different characters he had tried before Calvin and Hobbes. One was a hedgehog that looked like a short Hobbes. What struck me the most was that he had tried over and over before he hit on Calvin and Hobbes. At the end, I walked up and introduced myself and asked if I could have one of the drawings. The answer was no. He was already very careful. I lived in Hudson, Ohio and he donated a signed book to the library auction at least once. I'm pretty sure I once saw him sitting in the lawn at Western Reserve Academy drawing.
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    Rumor has it he slips signed copies into the shelves at Fireside Books in Chagrin Falls every so often.
    • gedy 4y ago
      He stopped that once he saw them being auctioned on eBay for high prices iirc.
      • selimthegrim 4y ago
        Well at least we had nice things for a while.
• maverick74 4y ago
  I love the strip. I love the artist decision and resistance to "the money". It's the artist I have more respect in the whole world because of this! It's still teaching us something!!!
• wdr1 4y ago
  I've been running a Calvin & Hobbes bot for ~20 years now. Back when Google Reader was a thing, the bot published an RSS feed which had greater than >1M subscribers. It's now a bot on Reddit (/u/CalvinBot) with >700k karma. During that time, I've tried to be very mindful of Watterson's copyright and make sure I don't violate it anyway. This had led to some interesting "bugs." Specifically amuniversal.com only publishes the comic strip as a GIF. But the official Reddit mobile app has a bug. It treats all GIFs as a video & disables other image features, like zooming. The nature of C&H is such that very often want to zoom to see all the wonderful details Mr. Watterson put into the strip. Because of that I routinely get complaints about it being in a GIF ("GIFs are for movies!" the whippersnappers say) and tell me to publish them as JPG or PNG. Now converting a GIF to JPG or PNG is trivial, but there's no way I can do so without violating his copyright. I'd have to host the converted image myself, which I don't have the right the do. So I won't do it. It's minor, but knowing Watterson felt so passionate about copyright, I think it's important to honor. But because the team at Reddit won't fix the bug, the complaints continue to come rolling in. Enough that I wrote a FAQ about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_posts_in_a_gif/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p... If any C&H fans knows anyone on the team at Reddit, I'd much appreciate it if you could ask them to fix it.
  • LeoPanthera 4y ago
    This is a very common bug. Lots of software think all gifs are animated - Telegram is a good example. We've all forgotten our history.
    • Fatnino 4y ago
      Gif is a text format https://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt https://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt ctrl+f "25."
  • gjs278 4y ago
  • arijun 4y ago
    I can’t read your link because Reddit thinks it’s “Unreviewed Content“, a fairly transparent play to get me to download the app or log in.
• Sjonny 4y ago
  I love this comic from him: https://i.imgur.com/CFq57ny.jpg https://i.imgur.com/CFq57ny.jpg
  • the_common_man 4y ago
    This is not by him, this is zenpencils
    • Sjonny 4y ago
      you're right .. it's the quote, not the comic.
• stiltzkin 4y ago
  > I’ve always been a little skeptical of letting creators have so much control, because that’s how you end up with things like the Star Wars Special Editions or Jo Rowling claiming she should’ve killed off Ron so Harry and Hermione could get together. If enough time passes, creators can lose touch with what makes their work so special in the first place. That’s why I support a “death of the author” approach over the long haul - maybe the author’s intent isn’t as important as we assume. Once the work is out there, it belongs to the people, regardless of what copyright law says. I’ve even advocated for shortening copyright terms to a flat 75 years in order to limit that control. There must be a balance, creators with control know how the lore and the story must follow. See now Disney's Star Wars has gone different route not for the love of the lore and just for the good ESG score of Disney company.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    Lucas didn't really do a whole lot for Star Wars after the original trilogy. And while most agree that the prequel trilogy was mostly pretty bad (though I'd argue that the original Phantom Menace played a big role in tainting the following two installments), a lot of what's followed has been at least middling and some quite good.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mchusma 4y ago
  I was confused about the comment on Sherlock Holmes, apparently you do not need a license fee anymore (but this is as of 2014) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sherlock-holmes-now-officially-copyright-and-open-business-180951794/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sherlock-holmes-no... The length of copyright is insane. I think the US founding fathers had it right. 14 years plus the ability to extend another 14 years. I'd be fine with another extension or 2, with each extension getting more expensive. (Like $1k for first extension, $10k for 2nd, and $100k for 3rd). Heck I'd actually be ok with it keeping going so a 4th extension costs $1M, 5th costs $10m, and so on so you could have people with 100 year long copyright if they were willing to pay for it.
  • JJMcJ 4y ago
    Sherlock Holmes stories are interesting. The last ones were published in 1929 IIRC. So there are still some under copyright, and so Doyle's literary estate is still claiming some rights. Mid 20th Century, the term was 28 years with a 28 year extension. Let's see, 56 years ago is 1966, so a whole lotta goodies would be public domain under that regime. Now it's life of author plus 70 years. So a 22 year old writes a book, lives to 92, then another 70 years. So it's in copyright for 140 years. That seems like a long time.
• fourthark 4y ago
  But Watterson stands apart from his fellow creators because he rejected that wisdom. Which ironically has led to the exact thing Watterson didn’t want… the creation of a brand identity. The desperate American search for irony where there is none.
  • xsmasher 4y ago
    I see what Bill is doin; He's going after the anti-marketing dollar, the righteous-indignation dollar. That's a big dollar!
• abetusk 4y ago
  This, to me, is another tragedy of the overly long copyright term. The author even somewhat acknowledges this ("I’ve even advocated for ... copyright terms to ... 75 years in order to limit that control"). I do respect Watterson for his stance but at the same time, I look at the effect of his stance and it's made Calvin and Hobbes inaccessible to a new generation so much so that I would guess that anyone under 30 thinks that Calvin and Hobbes has something to do with redneck culture or "southern pride" because of all the bootleg "Calvin pissing" stickers. Ironically, Watterson even acknowledges this ("long after the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to immortality.") but still won't even consider letting up control. The author talks about Sherlock Holmes without acknowledging that one of the big successes of Sherlock Holmes is almost surely that it's in the public domain, which allows endless reboots from the same source material. We see Austen's work re-invigorated because it's in the public domain and I imagine we'll soon see more Howard and Lovecraft's work re-imagined because of it. There is a sprawling culture of re-interpretations from the Potterverse, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc., we just call them "fan-fic" without any real legal way for all those artists to keep producing content under that umbrella. I would like to see an article that frames this stance not as some show of integrity but touches on the the deeper discussion of the social contract an artist has with the society they live in. The government puts the weight behind the artist to allow them to have a monopoly for a period of time with the understanding that, eventually, the artist has a duty to put their work in the public domain for everyone to use. By creating that term to be more than a century, this creates a void for media that that's older than 20 years but still not in the public domain, as it's not relevant enough to keep producing but not free enough for other people to experiment with and re-invigorate.
  • tptacek 4y ago
    In exactly what way has Calvin & Hobbes been made inaccessible to new generations? By not allowing some horrible movie to be made of it? My young niece had no trouble inhaling all of the Calvin & Hobbes books; neither did my kids, 10-12 years ago. If you want to advocate for shorter copyright terms, raising the salience of Calvin & Hobbes seems like the worst possible way to do it; this is one place where copyright is doing exactly what reasonable people want it to.
• alsetmusic 4y ago
  Watterson's integrity is one of the reasons that I have a Stupendous Man tattoo on my forearm. It's the pose from the back of Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat[0], only I asked the artist to draw the costume as it appears in Calvin's imagination. It's one of the few things about which I absolutely know my feelings will never change. I always feel happy when I look at it. [0] https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/superheroes/images/6/65/StupendousMan.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/250?cb=20140709175123 https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/superheroes/images/6/65/St...
  • js2 4y ago
    Working link https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/superheroes/images/6/65/StupendousMan.jpg https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/superheroes/images/6/65/St...
• stargrazer 4y ago
  So... what does Waterson do now with his life?
• sammalloy 4y ago
  > But someone that disciplined and resolute in his convictions can probably teach us all something about integrity. That’s how you build a lasting brand. That’s how you build meaning. I grew up with C&H and their initial fan base. The author of this piece doesn’t get it. Watterson didn’t build a lasting brand nor did he build meaning. The strip had those things already without the added commercialism. Watterson is a purist whose work doesn’t need to build anything to market it. If you’re trying to build a brand and add meaning, you’ve already failed.
• walrus01 4y ago
  Obviously the people selling the "Calvin pissing on (WHATEVER THING)" stickers sold in truck stops and gas stations did not get the message.
• uptheroots 4y ago
  Always loved Calvin and Hobbes.Love it even more because of this.
• acomjean 4y ago
  While true he didn't license a lot of things, my brother got permission to reprint a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon in his yearbook. It didn't cost very much either. (My brother's school yearbook gave each student a little space, instead of just a senior quote) Those Calvins wizzing on a chevy logo you see on truck, not authorized. There were some college t-shirts in the 90s that were bootlegged as well.
• iamsaitam 4y ago
  The author should be writing for The Economist. "I’ve always been a little skeptical of letting creators have so much control".. so who exactly should have control? Executives? "The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation." <- No, people just acquiesced to the belief that worth comes from being valued in its market. This article's sentiment is how we ended up with Super Heroes The Tenth Comeback.