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Bill Watterson's Speech – Kenyon College, 1990
- mattm 14y agoIt's a shame that Bill Watterson just simply disappeared.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoThere's a Kickstarter-funded documentary coming out called Stripped about comic strips, which has an audio interview with him. I'm amazed and cannot fathom how they got that, as he's notoriously reclusive, supposedly even more so after he stopped writing Calvin and Hobbes.
- zachrose 14y agoNothing close to, say, J.D. Salinger though.
- thinker 14y agoDo you know when it's coming out? It looks like it was funded back in Sept 2011 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smallfish/stripped-the-comics-documentary http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smallfish/stripped-the-c...
- Wingman4l7 14y agoThere is a second Kickstarter to help cover the cost of purchasing the rights to additional footage ("Charles Schulz' TV specials, interview clips from Carson, 1930's newsreels and more"). It sounds like it's going to be very professionally done. Estimated delivery date is Dec 2013: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sequential/stripped-the-final-push http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sequential/stripped-the-...
- soperj 14y agoNot really. It's kind of the opposite really, because you know that he's out enjoying himself, rather than pandering to the masses. He's done his service to humanity, now let him be free.
- mattm 14y agoYes I know he's just doing whatever makes him happy but I sometimes feel sad that if the internet had come out just 10 years earlier, he may have gone the self-published route which didn't really exist at that time for him. Instead of just being limited to 10 years of his creative expression, he may have had the opportunity to pursue it on his own for as long as he wished. Although articles about him are very tough to find, I read one interview where supposedly he does paintings and when they are done, he burns them. I guess my comment would better be rephrased as "It's a shame that by working in a system that is solely focused on profit, it caused him much more stress and discomfort than he was prepared to take on and, as a result, felt the only sensible path for him was to disappear."
- intended 14y agoSomeone tracked him down after a while and he finally did an interview. IIRC when asked about how he felt about C&H he said "That was the work of a younger man." I suspect his take on using the self publish route would be.. interesting.
- mattm 14y agoJust came across this interview - http://www.cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2010/02/bill_watterson_creator_of_belo.html http://www.cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2010/02/bill_watte... where he said "I've never regretted stopping when I did." However, I seem to remember from his 10th anniversary book, that the main reason for stopping was all the conflict and grief from dealing with the syndicate, not the content of the work. He had even taken a sabbatical at one point near the end of the strip because the stress had been too much. I guess I just like thinking about alternate realities. Even in a world where he self-published and had full control, it's still possible he may have discontinued the comic after 10 years. Maybe the time was just right no matter what.
- noonespecial 14y agoThe opposite, I assume, would be Jim Davis-hood. He said what he needed to say, and no more. Magnificent. (I'm actually expecting a disappearance of _why-like proportions from Randall Munroe in the not-to-distant future as well.)
- thebooktocome 14y agoI'd not be surprised if it coincided with his wife's eventual death or decline from cancer.
- unalone 14y agoYou're reading too much into his retirement. He gives a perfectly good explanation why he quit within the speech: Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realization when my break finally came. Like many people, I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught. I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business. It never occurred to me that a comic strip I created would be at the mercy of a bloodsucking corporate parasite called a syndicate, and that I'd be faced with countless ethical decisions masquerading as simple business decisions. To make a business decision, you don't need much philosophy; all you need is greed, and maybe a little knowledge of how the game works. As my comic strip became popular, the pressure to capitalize on that popularity increased to the point where I was spending almost as much time screaming at executives as drawing. Cartoon merchandising is a $12 billion dollar a year industry and the syndicate understandably wanted a piece of that pie. But the more I though about what they wanted to do with my creation, the more inconsistent it seemed with the reasons I draw cartoons. Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards. The so-called "opportunity" I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need. What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts. On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we've been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience. It's strange to hear an argument for not selling out in an age where plenty of artists, even some of the most talented ones, have shrugged and accepted that being a sell-out is the quickest way to go about making money for doing what you love. I wonder if Watterson was simply old-fashioned, or if he noticed something that nowadays we're less capable of noticing.
- ArkyBeagle 14y agoIt is a shame, but it is also wonderful.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoIt tickles me to know that there's some dorm room ceiling at Kenyon with a copy of of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam", done by Watterson, hiding under a few coats of paint -- unless of course that dorm has since been torn down (even if it was brand new when he was a student, it'd be ~35 years old now; he attended 1976 - 1980).
- mbreese 14y agoIt's probably more common than you think. When I was in college (actually, just down the road from Kenyon at Denison - they were our big rival), I had a friend paint a large part of the "Creation of Adam" on her ceiling... in Tide. So, by day, it looked normal. However, by blacklight, you could see it in all its glory. I still don't know how she got the shading right.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoWorking on that under blacklight would have been interesting. That's going to really freak someone out someday, if it never got painted over...
- marblar 14y agoThe dorm probably hasn't been torn down. Kenyon gets rather attached to its buildings.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoNow, to send out a mass email to every student asking them to chip some paint off their ceiling and check... =D
- precisioncoder 14y agoBill Watterson is one of my heroes. From what I've read of him he had an extraordinary strength of will. His comics were a major influence on me growing up and the more I learn about him the more I admire him.
- jdrobins2000 14y agoThe world could use a little more Bill Watterson. There is a man who values what is truly valuable, and refuses to sacrifice it for the sake of greed or ego. To me, that is the epitome of virtue.
- GHFigs 14y agoI am reminded of one of Taleb's aphorisms: "You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept", and of Glenn Gould's interview with himself: "G.G.: I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and for that of his public – and let me get on record right now the fact that I'm not at all happy with words like "public" and "artist"; I'm not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology – that he should be granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were, unconcerned with – or, better still, unaware of – the presumed demands of the marketplace – which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of "public" responsibility, and his "public" will relinquish its role of servile dependency. g.g.: And never the twain shall meet, I daresay! G.G.: No, they'll make contact, but on an altogether more meaningful level than that which relates any stage to its apron." -- http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/glenngould/028010-4020.07-e.html http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/glenngould/028010-4020.07...
- skore 14y ago> "You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept" Reminds my of my favorite saying of Thoreau: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." And Watterson was right in that precise sense. Had he sold out, there would have been no end to the things he didn't want to, but would have had to do.
- stkni 14y agoI wish that I'd heard that speech when I graduated. He nails a lot of things I've discovered to be true as I've come along the way. But even if I had of heard it, I probably would've shrugged it off and made the same mistakes that I made anyway :-)
- iagomr 14y agoFirst time I really read about the man behind the masterpiece of my youth, and it did not disappoint, by far. What a great human being.
- nollidge 14y agoIt's kind of rare for our heroes to refrain from disappointing us, isn't it?
- nathell 14y agoSo this is where the inspiration for http://xkcd.com/557/ http://xkcd.com/557/ came from.
- andrewb 14y agoI don't think he took inspiration from it. From speaking with friends we have all had the same dream for the first few years graduating University.
- dugmartin 14y agoI graduated 20 years ago and I still occasionally have that same dream.
- scott_s 14y agoSo much so that I'm shocked that nathell apparently doesn't have them. In the past six years, I've taught more classes than I've attended, and I still have them.
- Pxtl 14y agoGood news! There's a version for dead loved ones too.
- gertef 14y agoWhen does it stop? I am well into my second decade.
- signa11 14y agothis is just beautiful "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."
- easyfrag 14y agoI recall Watterson also battled with the newspaper industry over how his strips looked, especially with the use of colour in the Sunday strips. I believe he felt somewhat constrained by the format and you can see him stretching the format's boundaries in the Calvin & Hobbes strips, especially the Sunday ones. I used to wonder why he never moved to doing comic "books" where he had more room to breathe. I've since come to believe that creative work benefits from some kind of constraint - a boundary to push against.
- nollidge 14y agoNot color, but format. Some newspapers will format a comic with two rows of panels, whereas another newspaper will format it with three narrower rows, etc. So the syndicates wanted comics with panel divisions that allowed that reformatting, whereas Watterson wanted to simply have his block of space to do whatever he wanted with. He ended up winning that battle. But to hear him tell the tale (IIRC in the 10th anniversary collection), while it opened up creative possibilities, the toll it took on his psyche probably helped ensure the relative brevity of his career.
- po 14y agoFormat yes, but also with color. The color palette of the sunday comics was punchy and vibrant to attract attention. He very much desired to work in pastels and earth tones and it was a battle for him to get the look he wanted.
- nollidge 14y agoAh, yes, IIRC, most comics are drawn with simple outlines and then numbers are written over the blank spaces to indicate what colors they should be, a la paint-by-numbers. Whereas Watterson wanted license to color things himself using whatever media.
- MaxGabriel 14y agoIf I remember, another good example of this is that papers split on how much space was given, thus many Calvin and Hobbes comics have a "throwaway joke" at the top that the rest of the strip can be independent of. Example: http://calvinhobbesdaily.tumblr.com/image/48223268456 http://calvinhobbesdaily.tumblr.com/image/48223268456
- spodek 14y agoI would love to be a fly on the wall of a room with Bill Watterson, Banksy, and some beer. What other artists work with such passion, independence, and integrity? I'm sure there are others, but they come to mind.
- wging 14y agoIt's interesting that David Foster Wallace also spoke at Kenyon. http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace-kenyon.html http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallac...
- sramsay 14y ago"If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood." Someone please put this in the fortune file for all eternity. It describes my life as a scholar, and the life of every professor I've ever known.
- Pxtl 14y agoWatterson was born in the wrong decade. The internet era has created a lot of horrible things, but it has also created a massive culture of creator-owned creativity. The webcomic revolution has run a complete short-circuit around the heartless syndicates, establishing the relationship between the artist and the consumer as a direct one. However, because nobody pays for webcomics, by necessity the artists can't have Watterson's high minded attitude about merchandising. A web cartoonist that doesn't merchandise is one who doesn't eat. But on the other hand, the merch is entirely theirs to design - they have first and last say over what is sold with their brand on it.
- F_J_H 14y agoSo, somewhere out there exists a manager who was not able to harness and utilize Bill Watterson's creativity, and fired him instead. Don't be that guy....
- ctdonath 14y agoOn a related note, an anecdote which has long stuck with me: In the foreword to the Complete Calvin & Hobbes, Watterson noted his excitement at receiving the first copy, a box containing his life's work nicely arranged and packaged. Then horror hit him: that was it, his life's work, in just one small box.
- Zikes 14y agoAs a fan of his work I do hope he realized how much everyone loves his life's work, and that ultimately the reach of that work extends far beyond what was in that one small box.
- curiousabout 14y agoWonder if anyone has tried finding out where his room was and removing layers to reveal his painting?