6 ms·

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 ma

by tombert 4mo ago

I think about Bill Waterson a lot. I certainly don't blame Jim Davis for "selling out". He made a marketable character, and I don't blame him for trying to make his money because of it. I don't have a ton of artistic talent but if I created a lovable comic character and someone offered me a dumptruck full of money to sell toys and t-shirts and cartoons, I'm pretty sure I would take it, and I might even take it even if I felt like it diminished my vision of the comic. I would like to think I have integrity, and I think I do to some extent (there are certain types of companies I will not work for e.g. casinos), but Waterson is on another level. And I have to say, it has made Calvin and Hobbes age a lot better for me. Garfield is almost more of a "brand" than a comic at this point, and it has made it such that I find the character and even the comics kind of (for want of a better word) "cheap" or "tacky". The same can be said for Dilbert (Scott Adams himself not withstanding...I used to genuinely like the comics). C&H, on the other hand, reads about as well now as it did when I was a kid. The jokes still work, the art is appealing, and since there hasn't been this mass-marketing push for it, it has retained a purity unlike anything else. I don't have the integrity or will power that Bill Waterson has, and I probably never will, but it can be something I strive to have some day.

kemayo 4mo ago
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.
- dmurray 4mo ago
  But don't we all feel sure he could have rolled along for three or two or one more year? Surely it's not like his creativity ran out suddenly on Jan 1 1996 and he had no more comic strips in him. And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline, so... couldn't we have got one more year of cartoons? I'm kidding really. Bill Watterson doesn't owe us anything; if he was no longer enjoying creating the comics, why should we get to enjoy reading them? And we'd just have the same complaint if he quit after eleven years instead of ten, or worse, we'd be saying how the last couple of years it was clear his heart wasn't in it.
  - ghaff 4mo ago
    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.
    - tombert 4mo ago
      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.
      - bombcar 4mo ago
        The old ones vs the current ones really do hit different.
  - CrazyStat 4mo ago
    I have similar feelings about TV shows. There are shows that I wish hadn’t ended after a couple of seasons, but there are also a ton of shows that dragged on for 6, 8, 15 seasons when it clearly would have been better to end them years earlier. Overall I lean toward appreciating things that end early more than things that end late.
  - vidarh 4mo ago
    One of my favourite comic artists, Mads Eriksen [1][2] basically "disappeared" in 2008-2009 and didn't start regularly publishing comics again for more than a decade (at a much slower pace) because of the pressure and burnout. Maybe Watterson could have squeezed another year or two out of himself, but it's by no means a given it wouldn't have meant unreasonable personal sacrifice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mads_Eriksen_(cartoonist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mads_Eriksen_(cartoonist) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(comic_strip) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(comic_strip)
  - 4mo ago
- jandrese 4mo ago
  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.
  - thatguy0900 4mo ago
    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
  - esikich 4mo ago
    I don't think I've seen a newspaper in anyone's house in like 15-20 years.
cogman10 4mo ago
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.
- rbanffy 4mo ago
  > I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media. The world needs Watersons now more than ever. And Calvins and Hobbeses.
  - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
    The world has no place for men like Waterson, and it is precisely when the world leaves no place for them that men like him are most necessary.
    - iamtedd 4mo ago
      Only men?
      - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
        Women who dress like Marlene Dietrich are also acceptable, but that's where I draw the line. More seriously, I should have capitalized the "M" to make clear that it was Men, as in Mankind, but this is the internet in 2026 and most people are only semi-literate. I'm not certain it would have helped. Especially if someone wants to be offended. You just can't stop them if that was their goal going into it.
blindriver 4mo ago
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.
- hackmack10 4mo ago
  Bill Watterson is worth a hundred million dollars. He’s not hurting for cash.
  - blindriver 4mo ago
    He didn't license his characters, he's not worth a hundred million dollars.
    - Benlovescnn 4mo ago
      The guy that never sold out won't have the island next to supreme sellouts, jared and ivanka.
    - alex0015 4mo ago
      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.
      - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
        Yes, but what fraction of that money ever reached him?
        tombert 4mo ago
        I think a hundred million is probably a bit optimistic. That said, I would be surprised if he's not at least a multi-millionaire.
selfmodruntime 4mo ago
Eh. There is one thing I don't agree with in the name of integrity: Waterson didn't allow sales of a stuffed pet tiger akin to Hobbes, which millions of children (me included) must've dreamt of. He could've made it affordable and so keep his integrity.
- tombert 4mo ago
  I mean, I think he was just afraid that the comic would become a merchandise machine instead of a comic, and I think he didn't want that.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  There's like 100 of them on Etsy right now.
- wrs 4mo ago
  As the article points out, the reason for that particular lack of merchandise is even deeper. > Watterson insisted that if he wasn’t going to settle the question of Hobbes, then he definitely wouldn’t let some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes “into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic”.
  - vasco 4mo ago
    Having a toy representation of the tiger doesn't mean anything about what the tiger is or represents. I'm with the downvoted OP, it's a holier than thou position and many people would've had even extra joy compared to just having the comic books. Plus, people make their own anyway.
    - steve_adams_86 4mo ago
      Someone making their own is exactly how it should be. This is perfectly aligned with the spirit of the character. A factory churning out clones of Hobbes, and Watterson essentially making a statement that Hobbes is in fact just a toy would go against that spirit. Some things really are better when you need to use your imagination.
wodenokoto 4mo ago
I think it was on the front page here a few weeks ago about the creation of garfield. Apparently Davis had been struggling with a previous comic strip and when an editor told him that his characters just weren't what people wanted to see, he rethought his entire strategy and decided to emulate the success of Snoopi: - Cute character, but instead of going for dog lovers, there was a hole in the market for cat lovers - Few, related jokes that can recur all the time (Love lasagna, hates mondays) - No word plays - should be easy to translate - No political jokes - No deep jokes - should be accessible - Lots of merchandise I think it is super interesting that he set out from the start to build a "sell out"-brand and after reading this, I kinda respect the whole thing a lot more.
- xandrius 4mo ago
  You respect someone who plans to be a sell-out more than someone who sells out later for whatever other reason?
  - dust-jacket 4mo ago
    Not the commenter, but yeah, I think I do. Setting out to do something commercial (and succeeding), is different from setting out to do something firmly non-commercial and then commercialising it. The second one will almost always involve compromise that was never intended, which often undermines the original, non-commercial version.
  - grdjjhgggg 4mo ago
    I think building a business is hard, and people that succeed at it (in a generally non-harmful way) are impressive. Setting out to build a business and succeeding, as opposed to stumbling into it unawares, is indeed more impressive to me, I think.
  - RealityVoid 4mo ago
    Well, at least he sold something. Only halfway joking. Because probably worse than knowing you put slop out is putting thing out nobody likes.
  - 4mo ago
imgabe 4mo ago
I think the newspapers and books alone still probably made Waterson a decent amount of money. More than enough to live comfortably forever. I remember Scott Adams (of Dilbert) once saying his syndication deal was something like $6 million per year, I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes was at least comparable and the books certainly sold well. Newspapers used to be absolute cash cows.
badpun 4mo ago
> but if I created a lovable comic character and someone offered me a dumptruck full of money > would like to think I have integrity, and I think I do to some extent (there are certain types of companies I will not work for e.g. casinos) What if a casino offered you a dumptruck full of money?
- tombert 4mo ago
  If I were offered a dump truck full of money from a casino in order to help the casino optimize their gambling, then I think I would have enough restraint to say no. I say this because I did turn down a very lucrative job opportunity at an online casino recently. It wasn’t as much money as Bill Waterson almost certainly turned down, but it would be a very significant bump in my salary.
mkovach 4mo ago
Whenever I read something about Bill Watterson, I end up thinking about how, during the '80s and early '90s, Watterson, Tom Batiuk, and Harvey Pekar were all producing some of their best work. Three Northeast Ohio creators, working in different areas of the comics world, yet it's easy to imagine a shared universe where Calvin and Hobbes, Funky Winkerbean, and American Splendor all occupy the same map and interact. They also had in common that the work itself was the product. The strips and stories came first; merchandising, branding, and other empires were either absent or beside the point. That's probably a coincidence. Or it says something about what 1970s acid rain did to the water in Lake Erie. But Northeast Ohio did seem to have produced an unusual number of artists who were more interested in the work than in building a franchise.
_the_inflator 4mo ago
I totally agree. BW got thrown under the buss for taking a stance, his stance. He is a nonconformist and really, he puts in his comics a one of a kind mixture of childish silliness, questions, statements, and philosophical topics. There is no politics other than being a nonconformist who gets bullied today now, which not even ironically proves his point as well reinforces it. It is like he is simply protecting the purity of his characters, not the other way around. He appears to be a medium, not so much an artist. He is a treasure, and a singularity. I ordered all of his comics back then and to this day hold them dearly and the books are treated with so much decency, they appear as never opened. I for example never fold the book cover, nothing. It is a weird thing of mine, but it is out of respect for an author with whom I have a conversation.

by tombert 4mo ago

kemayo 4mo ago

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.

dmurray 4mo ago
But don't we all feel sure he could have rolled along for three or two or one more year? Surely it's not like his creativity ran out suddenly on Jan 1 1996 and he had no more comic strips in him. And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline, so... couldn't we have got one more year of cartoons? I'm kidding really. Bill Watterson doesn't owe us anything; if he was no longer enjoying creating the comics, why should we get to enjoy reading them? And we'd just have the same complaint if he quit after eleven years instead of ten, or worse, we'd be saying how the last couple of years it was clear his heart wasn't in it.
- ghaff 4mo ago
  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.
  - tombert 4mo ago
    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.
    - bombcar 4mo ago
      The old ones vs the current ones really do hit different.
- CrazyStat 4mo ago
  I have similar feelings about TV shows. There are shows that I wish hadn’t ended after a couple of seasons, but there are also a ton of shows that dragged on for 6, 8, 15 seasons when it clearly would have been better to end them years earlier. Overall I lean toward appreciating things that end early more than things that end late.
- vidarh 4mo ago
  One of my favourite comic artists, Mads Eriksen [1][2] basically "disappeared" in 2008-2009 and didn't start regularly publishing comics again for more than a decade (at a much slower pace) because of the pressure and burnout. Maybe Watterson could have squeezed another year or two out of himself, but it's by no means a given it wouldn't have meant unreasonable personal sacrifice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mads_Eriksen_(cartoonist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mads_Eriksen_(cartoonist) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(comic_strip) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(comic_strip)
- 4mo ago
jandrese 4mo ago
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.
- thatguy0900 4mo ago
  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
- esikich 4mo ago
  I don't think I've seen a newspaper in anyone's house in like 15-20 years.

cogman10 4mo ago

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.

rbanffy 4mo ago
> I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media. The world needs Watersons now more than ever. And Calvins and Hobbeses.
- mapontosevenths 4mo ago
  The world has no place for men like Waterson, and it is precisely when the world leaves no place for them that men like him are most necessary.
  - iamtedd 4mo ago
    Only men?
    - mapontosevenths 4mo ago
      Women who dress like Marlene Dietrich are also acceptable, but that's where I draw the line. More seriously, I should have capitalized the "M" to make clear that it was Men, as in Mankind, but this is the internet in 2026 and most people are only semi-literate. I'm not certain it would have helped. Especially if someone wants to be offended. You just can't stop them if that was their goal going into it.

blindriver 4mo ago

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.

hackmack10 4mo ago
Bill Watterson is worth a hundred million dollars. He’s not hurting for cash.
- blindriver 4mo ago
  He didn't license his characters, he's not worth a hundred million dollars.
  - Benlovescnn 4mo ago
    The guy that never sold out won't have the island next to supreme sellouts, jared and ivanka.
  - alex0015 4mo ago
    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.
    - TeMPOraL 4mo ago
      Yes, but what fraction of that money ever reached him?
      - tombert 4mo ago
        I think a hundred million is probably a bit optimistic. That said, I would be surprised if he's not at least a multi-millionaire.

selfmodruntime 4mo ago

Eh. There is one thing I don't agree with in the name of integrity: Waterson didn't allow sales of a stuffed pet tiger akin to Hobbes, which millions of children (me included) must've dreamt of. He could've made it affordable and so keep his integrity.

tombert 4mo ago
I mean, I think he was just afraid that the comic would become a merchandise machine instead of a comic, and I think he didn't want that.
fragmede 4mo ago
There's like 100 of them on Etsy right now.
wrs 4mo ago
As the article points out, the reason for that particular lack of merchandise is even deeper. > Watterson insisted that if he wasn’t going to settle the question of Hobbes, then he definitely wouldn’t let some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes “into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic”.
- vasco 4mo ago
  Having a toy representation of the tiger doesn't mean anything about what the tiger is or represents. I'm with the downvoted OP, it's a holier than thou position and many people would've had even extra joy compared to just having the comic books. Plus, people make their own anyway.
  - steve_adams_86 4mo ago
    Someone making their own is exactly how it should be. This is perfectly aligned with the spirit of the character. A factory churning out clones of Hobbes, and Watterson essentially making a statement that Hobbes is in fact just a toy would go against that spirit. Some things really are better when you need to use your imagination.

wodenokoto 4mo ago

I think it was on the front page here a few weeks ago about the creation of garfield. Apparently Davis had been struggling with a previous comic strip and when an editor told him that his characters just weren't what people wanted to see, he rethought his entire strategy and decided to emulate the success of Snoopi: - Cute character, but instead of going for dog lovers, there was a hole in the market for cat lovers - Few, related jokes that can recur all the time (Love lasagna, hates mondays) - No word plays - should be easy to translate - No political jokes - No deep jokes - should be accessible - Lots of merchandise I think it is super interesting that he set out from the start to build a "sell out"-brand and after reading this, I kinda respect the whole thing a lot more.

xandrius 4mo ago
You respect someone who plans to be a sell-out more than someone who sells out later for whatever other reason?
- dust-jacket 4mo ago
  Not the commenter, but yeah, I think I do. Setting out to do something commercial (and succeeding), is different from setting out to do something firmly non-commercial and then commercialising it. The second one will almost always involve compromise that was never intended, which often undermines the original, non-commercial version.
- grdjjhgggg 4mo ago
  I think building a business is hard, and people that succeed at it (in a generally non-harmful way) are impressive. Setting out to build a business and succeeding, as opposed to stumbling into it unawares, is indeed more impressive to me, I think.
- RealityVoid 4mo ago
  Well, at least he sold something. Only halfway joking. Because probably worse than knowing you put slop out is putting thing out nobody likes.
- 4mo ago

imgabe 4mo ago

I think the newspapers and books alone still probably made Waterson a decent amount of money. More than enough to live comfortably forever. I remember Scott Adams (of Dilbert) once saying his syndication deal was something like $6 million per year, I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes was at least comparable and the books certainly sold well. Newspapers used to be absolute cash cows.

badpun 4mo ago

> but if I created a lovable comic character and someone offered me a dumptruck full of money > would like to think I have integrity, and I think I do to some extent (there are certain types of companies I will not work for e.g. casinos) What if a casino offered you a dumptruck full of money?

tombert 4mo ago
If I were offered a dump truck full of money from a casino in order to help the casino optimize their gambling, then I think I would have enough restraint to say no. I say this because I did turn down a very lucrative job opportunity at an online casino recently. It wasn’t as much money as Bill Waterson almost certainly turned down, but it would be a very significant bump in my salary.

mkovach 4mo ago

Whenever I read something about Bill Watterson, I end up thinking about how, during the '80s and early '90s, Watterson, Tom Batiuk, and Harvey Pekar were all producing some of their best work. Three Northeast Ohio creators, working in different areas of the comics world, yet it's easy to imagine a shared universe where Calvin and Hobbes, Funky Winkerbean, and American Splendor all occupy the same map and interact. They also had in common that the work itself was the product. The strips and stories came first; merchandising, branding, and other empires were either absent or beside the point. That's probably a coincidence. Or it says something about what 1970s acid rain did to the water in Lake Erie. But Northeast Ohio did seem to have produced an unusual number of artists who were more interested in the work than in building a franchise.

_the_inflator 4mo ago

I totally agree. BW got thrown under the buss for taking a stance, his stance. He is a nonconformist and really, he puts in his comics a one of a kind mixture of childish silliness, questions, statements, and philosophical topics. There is no politics other than being a nonconformist who gets bullied today now, which not even ironically proves his point as well reinforces it. It is like he is simply protecting the purity of his characters, not the other way around. He appears to be a medium, not so much an artist. He is a treasure, and a singularity. I ordered all of his comics back then and to this day hold them dearly and the books are treated with so much decency, they appear as never opened. I for example never fold the book cover, nothing. It is a weird thing of mine, but it is out of respect for an author with whom I have a conversation.