[HN Gopher] Bill Watterson's refusal to license Calvin and Hobbe...
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Bill Watterson's refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)
Author : herbertl
Score : 394 points
Date : 2022-07-16 08:23 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thelegalartist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thelegalartist.com)
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I always enjoyed this _The Onion_ blurb:
| https://www.theonion.com/peeing-calvin-decals-now-
| recognized...
| [deleted]
| pizzathyme wrote:
| 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.
| mchusma wrote:
| 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-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.
| deng wrote:
| > 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...
| I-M-S wrote:
| 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
| yyyk wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| That may be when Peanuts, IMHO, went downhill. "Oh, the dog
| sells? I'll do more of the dog."
|
| Sigh, so kawaii.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| chubot wrote:
| _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/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 wrote:
| Google sold out when they bought DoubleClick. (Bought out?)
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| You don't need to go as far forward as the 90s and grunge.
| Rush was skewering musical sellouts at the beginning of the
| 80s:
|
| "For the words of the PROFITS were written on the studio
| walls. Echoes with the sound of salesmen, of SALESMEN (sung
| with the highest levels of disdain)"
| dasil003 wrote:
| Zappa released "We're Only in It for the Money" in 1968.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It did in the sense that kids these days don't worry about
| selling out. It's a generational change.
| simonh wrote:
| 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
| f17 wrote:
| You could be right, insofar as in the 1990s, "selling out"
| was a discrete event and there was no denying that one had
| given creative control up. In the 2020s, the PR departments
| are so good at making their efforts look like things that
| happened organically that the difference between genuine
| success and packaging has blurred.
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's actually a good point, I'm not sure how much broad
| influence that had but it's definitely an element.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _I suspect the difference is that in the past the only
| way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation._
|
| I'm not so sure. Even if you "hustled" with a small
| business, or sold stuff yourself for the money, you were
| considered a sell-out. Musicians weren't supposed to peddle
| t-shirts, for example.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There was a vibrant community of independent publishers,
| volunteer organizations and other entities that were
| considered authentic. Working with them was not "selling
| out".
|
| The way I remember, it was more about resisting the
| establishment than being against commercialization. The
| ideal was keeping organizations small enough that everyone
| would be doing "real" work. Dedicated managers and
| administrators were inherently suspicious. Any organization
| large enough to employ middle managers (managers and
| administrators working primarily with other managers and
| administrators) was part of the establishment. If you
| worked with them, you were selling yourself out.
| simonh wrote:
| >There was a vibrant community of independent
| publishers,....
|
| Of course, that's always existed. By 'commercial' I meant
| mass market. It's always been possible to break through,
| in IT Apple and Microsoft both started out with two
| techies hacking stuff together. Richard Branson started
| out trying to grow Christmas trees. Those are all a very
| few extreme outliers compared to the tens of thousands
| that would only ever have a chance of making it big by
| reaching the mass market.
| jltsiren wrote:
| You were not supposed to try to break through, because
| that meant becoming part of the establishment. Doing cool
| things was what mattered. Success was tolerated when it
| arose organically, but it was not a positive thing in
| itself. People who were deliberately trying to be
| successful were branded mediocre and boring, because only
| mediocre and boring people wanted to be part of the
| establishment.
| simonh wrote:
| Realistically, that was only ever an extreme view held by
| a small minority even in the alternative lifestyle and
| arts communities.
| jltsiren wrote:
| I remember it more as the dominant left-wing ideology
| among university students, creative people and various
| subcultures. Extremists obviously had more extreme views,
| but some mild anarchism was mainstream.
|
| Back then, people still believed in a better future, and
| the struggle for money was not as central as it is today.
| There was this belief that if everyone contributed
| something valuable and focused on things that were
| inherently important, there would be enough for everyone
| in the future.
|
| People today are more militant and more focused on money,
| because they have lost hope.
| ghaff wrote:
| Whether or not the odds are actually all that better
| today, you have a whole culture of
| TikTok/YouTube/Instagram/etc. would-be influencers who at
| least _think_ they have a real shot and, of course, that
| ends up pervading a lot of the medium.
| willcipriano wrote:
| The corporations won the culture war. I never realized it but
| looking at the cultural wasteland that we have now, they won.
| mbg721 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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.
| watwut wrote:
| They however care a lot about "shilling" as in trying to
| promote yourself on discussion forums.
| nickelpro wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Consider me from a different universe.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| deng wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| usrusr wrote:
| Your cafe/album part makes it sound like a clear binary,
| but it was an enormous gradient spanning the entirety of
| pop culture and just about everybody seemed to rely on it
| for orientation. From the most pretentius "we would
| never" that was all top obviously more about getting an
| offer than about the claimed selling out, all the way to
| stadium rockers struggling to retain whatever the term
| "authenticity" meant to them or their audience.
|
| The 90ies started with R.E.M. freshly signed on Warner
| instead of I.R.S. and ended with an absurd DAG of labels
| and sublabels and sub-sub-sub-labels (again, with the
| whole range from true grassroots independence to being
| part of one of the global media giants ten indirections
| deep), shortly before that entire monstrosity was put
| down by the onslaught of Napster, iTMS and so on.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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?_
|
| The younger generation follows and idolizes social media
| stars and "influencers" that sell out 24/7, in the
| cheapest, corniest (late night tv informercial style) ways
| possible...
| lapinot wrote:
| Yeah.. hem tiktok youtube facebook hem instagram snapchat
| twitch.. This whole thing being discussed in the thread
| is not some abstract destiny, it's just that the social
| media lobby, ie the mass advertisement and marketing
| lobby is crushing everything on it's path since 20 years
| because they are now tech giants and have data crunching
| tech. It's not "the spirit of the time" or some other
| naturalization or whatever, there are active forces
| behind this (and i absolutely don't mean this in the
| "evil hidden goverment" way, these forces are fuzzy are
| multiple, but still, it's a school of thought that
| recognizes itself).
| ghaff wrote:
| It's complicated but it feels like there is a huge aspect
| of personal branding/influencer/side hustle/etc. culture
| that's about making money any way you can and that to
| disdain it is to be "privileged."
| hans1729 wrote:
| [citation needed]
| avgcorrection wrote:
| 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.
| ekianjo wrote:
| 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.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| 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?
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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"
| Folcon wrote:
| I personally think "selling out" is a bit more subtle than
| that, in my mind it's not about just making money, a tech
| company can sell out if it takes money from an entity and
| breaks promises that it made to it's early / current users,
| be they written or less spelled out.
|
| Maybe your initial userbase was a bunch of hard core privacy
| people and post funding you start selling user data, or
| performing other actions which makes your original users or
| the people that supported you go, "wait, that's not the
| company I championed to success"
|
| It's not exactly cut and dried when put like that, but there
| are a few companies that come to mind that effectively "sold
| out".
| EnKopVand wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| Charles Schulz commercialized Charlie Brown. He's the
| opposite of Bill Watterson but at the same time he wasn't
| Mickey Mouse.
|
| The whole concept of selling out is both particular to a
| person or in group and also cultural. A related concept is
| 'poser' or 'poseur'. I think it's more about fans thinking
| they're losing their importance vis a vis the performer or
| artist. The artist is no longer "exclusive" to them, so to
| speak as well as no longer an idealized representation of
| them, the fans.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I feel like Watterson's stance about licensing was in no
| small part a direct response to the way Schulz never met
| a deal he didn't like. At the time Calvin & Hobbes was
| becoming successful, there was Peanuts stuff everywhere.
| Snoopy was in commercials selling _life insurance_ , and
| it really did feel like this was taking something
| important out of a small-scale, moody strip about
| disillusionment and failure.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Didn't Schultz also criticize other illustrators
| (including Watterson) for taking sabbaticals as he
| thought it was unprofessional?
| egypturnash wrote:
| I don't remember that but I don't feel like it's
| something out of character for Ol' Sparky. Been a heck of
| a long time since I last read his bio.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I feel like Watterson's stance about licensing was in
| no small part a direct response to the way Schulz never
| met a deal he didn't like.
|
| Was it his choice? I swear one of the introductions in
| _The Complete Peanuts_ talks about how Charles Schulz
| spent much of his life trying to buy back the copyright
| to his strip.
| egypturnash wrote:
| It has been a long time since I last read any bio
| material on Schultz so that could certainly be the case!
| In which case Watterson's lack of licensing becomes more
| of a triumph of the artist's wishes that's similar to the
| way Eastman and Laird learnt from the way Marvel fucked
| over Jack Kirby, and made sure they retained ownership of
| the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
|
| (Which let them do things like "buy Heavy Metal and run
| it at a loss for a while" and "start a publishing company
| that became infamous for handing out huge advances to
| their comics buddies that let them spend a couple years
| on passion projects instead of turning the Superhero
| Crank for Marvel/DC", both of which I feel are perfectly
| delightful ways to deal with making the kind of money
| they made off the Turtles. The history of Tundra Press is
| a hell of a ride, if you can find it.)
| jfax wrote:
| Well, both Charles Schulz and Watterson placed immense
| value in craftsmanship, in that they both valued that
| their work was untampered by anyone else. Schulz
| maintained that the strip was unaffected by licensing.
|
| https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/selling-newspaper-
| comic-...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Of the various things you may condemn Walt Disney for, he
| placed an immense value in craftsmanship as well.
| mc32 wrote:
| That's true no doubt. I think when most people criticize
| Walt it's about his empire building. Obviously he also
| had an iron grip on his IP but leveraged that to amplify
| his empire and to expand into all sorts of other areas.
| Whereas Bill wanted to limit exposure. So the focus of
| their visions were markedly different.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Yes, I was commenting on the distinction the above poster
| was trying to Walt Disney and Charles Schultz (of
| Peanuts) to move Schultz closer to Watterson.
| zamfi wrote:
| > 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?
| ghaff wrote:
| More generally, there is certainly a subgroup that mostly
| celebrates monetization as opposed to just doing something
| because you like to, you're good at it, and don't really try
| to make any money off it.
| bawolff wrote:
| People think selling out is bad when you're a punk rock band.
|
| I dont think anyone really ever thought selling your company,
| particularly a speculative tech start up type company, is the
| same type of bad.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, art and enterprise are different.
|
| And no one begrudges the punk band for selling t-shirts,
| albums. It's when they sell soft drinks....
| greedo wrote:
| Yeah, the day I see RATM endorsing American Express I'll
| know things are wonky...
| tzs wrote:
| I'm not sure if I've heard RATM but looking at the lyrics
| to a few of their songs there seems to be a lot of anger
| or rage in their music.
|
| If that's right, you could actually do a pretty funny
| American Express commercial with them.
|
| It could show a montage of them dealing with shoddy
| consumer goods failing shortly after their warranties
| expire, which keeps pissing them off and keeps them in a
| constant state of rage which is reflected in their
| songwriting.
|
| Then someone points out to them that they paid for all
| those things with their American Express card, and
| American Express provides extended warranties
| automatically.
|
| They lose their anger over poor consumer products, and
| with that their songwriting too loses its anger.
|
| Cut to them releasing a new album, and it is all slow
| acoustic ballads about true love and togetherness.
| pksebben wrote:
| > there seems to be a lot of anger or rage in their music
|
| this... this is sarcasm, or irony, right?
|
| The 'R' literally stands for rage.
|
| Against the machine. to wit, the _capitalist_ machine.
|
| So, to put the finishing sauce on your story, 'Rage
| against the machine' with the rage taken out, would be
| just the Machine, exemplified by Amex.
|
| I just wasn't sure if you knew quite how appropriate that
| scenario fits the schema.
| lolive wrote:
| Always thought it was rage against the coffee machine.
| You changed my whole perspective. Thanks!
| LBJsPNS wrote:
| "Fuck you I won't leave home without it!"
| Retric wrote:
| Unfortunately selling out a brand generally means the
| quality tanks because it's easy way to boost margins.
|
| Food gets a few more preservatives and slightly worse
| ingredients until over time it tastes like cardboard. Video
| games become ever more blatant cash grabs. Clothing becomes
| more fragile, with cheaper materials and worse
| craftsmanship.
|
| Trying to appeal to the widest possible audience means
| removing that which makes art interesting, but maximizing
| short term profit means taking the same shortcuts as
| everyone else in the industry.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| from a Tool song (won't write the name):
|
| And in between Sips of coke He told me that He thought We
| were sellin' out Layin' down, Suckin' up To the man Well
| now I've got some A-dvice for you, little buddy Before you
| point the finger You should know that I'm the man And if
| I'm the man Then you're the man, and He's the man as well
| so you can Point that fuckin' finger up your ass.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| 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.
| locallost wrote:
| 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
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| "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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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.
| nabla9 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Can't tell truth and lies at the same time.
|
| Or can you? I haven't actually given the idea serious
| thought.
| starkd wrote:
| 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.
| lancesells wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I thought you must be exaggerating about the David Bowie
| Monopoly game, but you were not. Who is buying that?
| clsec wrote:
| 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.
| c3534l wrote:
| I've not heard anyone seriously accuse someone of selling out
| in over a decade.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| 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).
| maxutility wrote:
| 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.h...
| dkarl wrote:
| "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.
| hitekker wrote:
| 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?"
| hattmall wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| batshibstein wrote:
| This is because in the last couple of decades "selling out"
| has become not only acceptable, not only a desirable
| outcome but in fact the ultimate end goal. Probably one of
| the key defining factors between Boomer/Gen X and
| Millennial/Gen Y/Z/etc. or however they are labeled.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If you saw Calvin in a Cola commercial, you wouldn't feel
| that lessens the artistic value of Calvin and Hobbes?
| jsymolon wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Still laughing about the irony of Melanie's "Look What
| They've Done to My Song" becoming "Look What They've Done
| to Oatmeal".
|
| Can't un-hear.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| 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.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| I think it's ok to cash out once your career is over.
| It's bad to do while creating, because the money people
| will inevitably influence your works. But, if you're not
| creating anymore, then there's no great harm in it.
| nkrisc wrote:
| In the case of Calvin and Hobbes, I think a lot of the
| meaning would be lost if you saw Calvin selling sugary
| cereal on TV.
|
| The philosophy of the strip is fundamentally incompatible
| with commercialization.
| greedo wrote:
| I do see a lot of car decals with Calvin pissing on
| [insert name of hated automaker]. Now obviously these are
| unlicensed, but a lot of people obviously have no problem
| with it.
| blululu wrote:
| Bill Watterson once remarked: "I figure that, long after
| the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to
| immortality."
| nkrisc wrote:
| And you can probably find unlicensed porn of every IP out
| there, but I wouldn't draw any conclusions from that.
| planetafro wrote:
| It may depend on the type of work but there is something
| to be said about the longevity of the art and legacy.
|
| Calvin and Hobbes was a massive part of my youth. It fed
| that creative and mischievous part of me that "regular"
| life just wasn't satisfying. I was smitten and still am.
|
| Fast forward to my daughter's birth... At around 4 years
| old, I bought her the giant anthology of strips which
| includes everything Calvin and Hobbes ever printed. Like
| me, it shaped her in undefinable ways. It drove her
| drawing and reading off the charts. She very much grew as
| a person because of Bill's work and my influence in
| reading to her often. She took over very quickly! She
| latched on and studied those books with a fervor that
| I've not seen repeated in her yet.
|
| Do you think the result would have been the same if there
| were T-shirts, TV shows, video games, and the like
| plastered all over? You can only shield a child from the
| world so much. They absorb everything.
|
| Anyway, I think Bill absolutely made a most excellent
| decision. Not only for himself, but for us.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > Anyway, I think Bill absolutely made a most excellent
| decision. Not only for himself, but for us.
|
| Especially for us. It has remained special all these
| years later as it hasn't been supersaturated or made
| overrated by virtue of being commoditized.
|
| I'm guessing whoever inherits his estate sells the
| license and rights for untold millions. You can only hope
| a billionaire super fan buys it and buries it.
|
| At some point in the future it will all be public domain
| anyways. So enjoy it while you can.
| drdec wrote:
| > I'm guessing whoever inherits his estate sells the
| license and rights for untold millions.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if he sets up a trust to control
| the rights to prevent that from happening.
| szeil wrote:
| mcv wrote:
| I've seen people with interesting and valuable YouTube
| channels suddenly pimp Raid Shadow Legends, which
| definitely cheapened their channel to me and made me lose
| some respect. I do understand it, but I'm not happy about
| it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, when a woodworking channel spends half a video
| "testing" some new product on their table saw, I begin to
| feel like I am being sold a bill of goods.
| tzs wrote:
| How to you distinguish that from someone trying out a
| product to review it?
| ghaff wrote:
| It's one of those grey areas that comes down to the
| integrity of the channel owner. There are probably people
| who never find anything wrong with stuff they're sent to
| review and there are people who give honest reviews.
| Conflicts of interest are everywhere but it doesn't mean
| that a potential conflict of interest automatically
| translates into bias.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It's a tough line to walk. For something like
| woodworking, I suppose I'm not looking for "a new
| product"?
|
| Perhaps there should be separate channels in such a case:
| the wood-worker-reviewing-stuff channel and the making-
| things-from-wood channel.
| hourago wrote:
| T-shirts of Ernesto "Che" Guevara are the top example of
| this. It's too take an ideal, whatever you agree with it or
| not, and to convert it into a product for profit.
|
| It's to commercialise ideals, memories and anything that
| makes people human. It reduces the idea's value and by
| extension our own humanity.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| some people just care about their work more than money.
|
| Now imagine that the whole star wars franchising made more
| money by selling merchandise than everything else combined.
|
| That's why new movies and shows are being produced ever
| more often: to sell toys and merch.
|
| And that's also why the quality and the creativity went
| down compared to the original movies.
|
| There's a price to pay when you start thinking your
| business is not the art itself anymore, but selling or
| licensing it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Ha ha, characters appearing for a few seconds in a
| background shot just to get their cameo before the
| inevitable Kenner/Hasbroken figure release.
| em-bee wrote:
| we just had this topic:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32110420
|
| making money as an athlete used to disqualify you from the
| olympics
| melling wrote:
| This had nothing to do with selling out. Olympic athletes
| were supposed to be amateurs and not professionals.
|
| If you were paid to be an athlete then you had a
| competitive advantage, or so was the thinking.
| usrusr wrote:
| The amateur/pro separation is spelled out most clearly in
| the early history of cycling, and it has very little to
| do with the punk rock idea of selling out: gentlemen with
| a family name so big they likely had minor celebrity
| status even before sports showing off how far and fast
| they could go starting to hire a series of pacemakers to
| draft behind. Then one day, particularly strong
| pacemakers got sponsorship, starting in their own name,
| with their own relay of pacemakers, and they took the
| prestigious titles. Gentlemen were not amused and started
| their own racing series. Members only. (right before
| falling in love with the speed provided by the internal
| combustion engine)
| Lio wrote:
| In the UK we have the split between Rugby Union and Rugby
| League, now two distinct sports. The history of that
| split gets to the heart of British class distinction and
| is more interesting that you might at first think.
|
| There's a good description of it here[1] but the TL;DR
| is:
|
| In the South of England rugby was played by independently
| rich amateurs and in the North of England it was played
| by the working class men who needed to support themselves
| and their families and wanted it to become
| professionalised.
|
| The groups couldn't agree and so split. With the rules of
| Rugby League supposedly changed to make it more appealing
| to paying crowd.
|
| 1.
| https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/sport/2019/10/split-
| bet...
| coldtea wrote:
| That might have been the thinking, but it was also
| totally associated with selling out, and being an
| inferior athlete, morals wise.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Especially if you were Native American
| vajrabum wrote:
| Did you see they restored the 2 Olympic medals for the
| pentathlon and decathlon to Jim Thorpe just the other
| day. Long overdue.
| mcv wrote:
| While it certainly sounds more honest and less
| commercialised, it also means that high level sports is
| mostly a rich-people's game. Poor people often can't afford
| to say no to money.
| watwut wrote:
| At some point, they even found it dishonest to train for
| event specifically.
| recursiveturtle wrote:
| If the reader here can find it, Linklater's SubUrbia captures
| this sentiment on film.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Cutting the strip at the 10 years is a good idea to avoid the
| Zombie Simpson problem.
| https://deadhomersociety.wordpress.com/zombiesimpsons/
|
| (It's easier when it's just one man job, and you must not fire
| all the team.)
| detritus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why would the publisher spend money fighting it? It's not like
| they have merchandise sales to protect.
| phnofive wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Is he unwilling to be litigious?
|
| That point is specifically adressed in the article
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Kind of. Making a quip that he should do something still
| makes his position somewhat unclear.
| pksebben wrote:
| I believe that's part of the point. one doesn't get the
| sense from Watterson's work that clarity is high on his
| list - the lessons of Calvin and Hobbes are very
| interpretive, and a lot is left to the reader.
| moviewise wrote:
| 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-
| cap...
| sonofhans wrote:
| 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.
| moviewise wrote:
| >It's literally calling the man "selfish" for refusing to
| allow others to profit from his work.
|
| If the object was to prevent others ---- i.e. the syndicates
| who helped him develop the comic strip and helped to promote
| and distribute it ---- from profiting from his work, why
| wouldn't you call this selfish?
|
| Bill Watterson chose to syndicate "Calvin & Hobbes," that is,
| he chose to sell it, so he fully engaged in capitalism. He
| just didn't want to profit (or let others profit) from it in
| other ways, e.g. selling plushy toys etc. But he profited
| enough from newspaper syndication and book publishing to
| retire at 35.
| moviewise wrote:
| 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
| fourthark wrote:
| _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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Reminds me of the note Watterson sent Breathed:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/c7viyp/another...
| cturtle wrote:
| 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
| margoguryan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| He should and he apparently does.
| Linda703 wrote:
| cheschire wrote:
| 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.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 'Extracting value from the brand' is apparently the MBA term
| for this
| ken47 wrote:
| 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.
| franciscop wrote:
| 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
| philistine wrote:
| I only know Mafalda through its cartoon; it was broadcast on
| Canal Famille in Quebec in the 90s.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You probably knew this but those are 100% not licensed.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That has never stopped advertisement companies though.
|
| I'm pretty sure Rage Against the Machine tracks have been used
| for tv commercials without anyone blinking.
| [deleted]
| jdblair wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Rumor has it he slips signed copies into the shelves at
| Fireside Books in Chagrin Falls every so often.
| gedy wrote:
| He stopped that once he saw them being auctioned on eBay for
| high prices iirc.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Well at least we had nice things for a while.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| He did give permission for someone on Tumblr to make a C & H/Dune
| mashup.
|
| Calvin & Muad'Dib:
|
| https://calvinanddune.tumblr.com/
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| em-bee wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Ever since I had kids, I started identifying a lot more with
| Calvin's parents. Sometimes more than with Calvin.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| 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&...
|
| 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?
| glitcher wrote:
| Now I want to go back and read all my old Calvin and Hobbes
| books again!
|
| Speaking to the depth of the comic strip, one of my favorite
| themes was the philosophical discussions about the nature of
| reality and meaning of life while they were barreling down a
| huge hill in the sled or wagon :)
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I remember always skipping over those when I was 10 because I
| couldn't understand them. Now they're some of my favorite
| parts.
|
| Calvin and Hobbes is magic in how it seems to unlock new
| depth at every age.
| webkike wrote:
| 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.
| radley wrote:
| It's made clear both parents were naturally difficult too,
| which is part of the point. This panel probably had to be
| expressly stated since Mom doesn't encourage Calvin's (over)
| imagination like his father does.
| avalys wrote:
| 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?
| madcaptenor wrote:
| IIRC Watterson said that he had been planning to introduce
| more adult relationships to the strip, but he realized this
| would be difficult when Uncle Max couldn't address his
| brother (Calvin's father) by name.
| webkike wrote:
| Here's a panel that references it https://calvinandhobbes.f
| andom.com/wiki/Calvin%27s_mother?fi...
| creaghpatr wrote:
| Wow I never caught that!
| WalterBright wrote:
| That's a bit more than a mere hint!
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| I believe it's this one:
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/07/31
| civilized wrote:
| Even when I was a kid I thought the parents were cool. Other
| than perhaps Moe, Calvin is obviously the worst human being in
| the comic (although in a mostly funny and relatable way).
| d1l wrote:
| 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.
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| This very idea that you should be trying to determine if a
| creator is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for
| personal gain, assumes negative intentions.
|
| When you assume negative intentions, you accuse sincere people
| of a cynical desire for personal gain.
|
| The reality is, you can't tell what someone's motivations are,
| and believing you can sets you up for a world of intentionally
| hurting people who are just trying to live their life.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| It generally irks me when I hear about someone who tried to get
| famous in about 5 distinctly different categories before they
| actually became famous. It seems like that is just not looked
| down upon enough. I was reading about how Blippi was apparently
| a Jackass like videos where he shit on his naked friend in a
| Harlem Shake video. It really tells you what he's after and it
| informs you about his goals. And when Blippi came out with his
| own NFTs it made sense because you know what he's out for.
| cableshaft wrote:
| If you don't promote then your work is much less likely to be
| noticed by the people who would like or appreciate it, though.
| There's SOOO much crap being released now, you're really knee-
| capping your chances at success if you don't promote as much as
| possible (speaking as someone who has thrown away opportunities
| because I've been pretty terrible at self-promotion).
|
| I'm watching it right now with my wife. She's been relentlessly
| promoting her first book, and she's gone from someone no one
| knows about and 0 preorders, 0 followers to beating several
| established authors in her writing groups' in having more
| preorders for her first book than they've gotten for any book
| they've ever released. She's creating her own promo graphics,
| writing and engaging in Facebook group takeovers, and filming
| her own Instagram and Tik Tok videos. She's up to almost 1000
| followers in just a couple months. And this is for a pen name
| she doesn't want to share with friends or family, so not even
| getting any initial boost from them.
|
| Meanwhile I've been trying to make it as a board game designer
| for the past six years (as a side-thing), and haven't really
| gotten anywhere, since I've been mostly just networking with
| publishers and other designers and not the fans, and have
| hesitated to really put myself out there much (still get
| nervous talking to a publisher for the first time). I do have
| one signed game, but it's probably not coming out for a few
| years still.
| d1l wrote:
| You said it in your first paragraph. You've equated success
| with some kind of approval from others.
|
| I'm saying some people, like Bill or the dwarf fortress
| brothers, or countless others, have a different idea of
| success.
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| Or perhaps they just want people to enjoy the work. Success
| is an overloaded term.
|
| I would definitely prefer people producing things I'm
| interested in promote them than not.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| Yes, I also read "success" as in "getting your message
| heard". Art is a statement and is pointless in a vacuum.
| As Sufjan says, "What's the point of singing songs / If
| they'll never even hear you?" Or the old "if a tree
| falls..."
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| It's an interesting example as both of them have phenomenal
| approval from others and are widely respected, shared and
| enjoyed for decades and seen as successful along various
| lines of criteria. By tautokogical definition, we cannot
| share mutually recognizable examples of artists who _aren
| 't_ seen and shared :).
|
| They may have taken unique _path_ there, but I 'm not
| certain their motivations are as different. If an artist
| does not want their work to be shared and seen and enjoyed,
| I'm not even sure they're an "artist" , as opposed to
| someone who's spending their private time on a whimsy and
| hobby - They're just tinkering in a vacuum with audience of
| one. Art, to me, is created to have an impact, an
| impression, a point do view, or a message, or emotion - all
| of it predicated on a receiving audience.
|
| I think we'll quickly agree that _methods_ of achieving
| that sharing can be significantly different, and there
| certainly are other motivations such as money and fame etc,
| but this perspective of an artist as someone who doesn 't
| care is their art is seen strikes me as depressingly anti
| social.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > You've equated success with some kind of approval from
| others.
|
| Yes, this approval is called "money to survive." If you
| don't self-promote, you are not going to get enough income
| to support your side hobby, which means it has to remain a
| side-hobby powered by whatever extra time you have left
| after your real job. That might not be much, if any.
|
| Looking down on people for "shameless self promotion" means
| that you only want art from people privileged enough to
| have a job that can support it, or that are passionate
| enough to make significant sacrifices to their quality of
| life. We can deal with a little self-promotion so that they
| are compensated for their time and effort.
| d1l wrote:
| As I wrote already,
|
| >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.
|
| That said I'm not really interested in arguing with you.
| I'm already familiar with all the rationalizations and
| arguments. I choose to believe something different,
| that's all.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| I love coding. Wrote my first code when I was 8, so I've
| been doing it off and on for 35 years. It's my art. There's
| a chance I've managed to write code in more languages and
| on more platforms than any other HN'er.
|
| I also loathe self-promotion. Not because I'm some kind of
| purist, I just... suck at it. Hate it.
|
| So guess what? I'm miserable. Money has always been okay
| sometimes, hard a lot of others. I'm stuck on an endless
| treadmill right now with my resume hoping that if I just
| keep polishing this turd, somebody will see some value in
| it and that will help me feel like less of a failure in my
| 40s.
|
| This argument paints a too starkly black-and-white idea of
| success. We should not romanticize the starvation of the
| artist, and we should accept some of the facts on the
| ground, like, "success should include happiness" and "our
| society doesn't reward unrecognized artists".
|
| Much as I appreciate Watterson for never making Calvin and
| Hobbes into a product -- and I truly do -- I'm not so quick
| to judge anyone else as a sellout.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm pretty proud to say that many contributors to the D
| programming language have found it to be a path to a
| well-paying job. Many employers look to our contributors
| for people to hire. Anyone can contribute - all we care
| about is the quality of the code contributed.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Well, we live in a world where it isn't considered sociopathic
| to refer to and think of yourself as a "brand" somehow.
| d1l wrote:
| 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.
| wussboy wrote:
| Right now. It isn't consider sociopathic right now. But it is
| my sincere hope that it will soon be again.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| beardyw wrote:
| I am saddened that now success === money is so very pervasive.
| maverick74 wrote:
| 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!!!
| ur-whale wrote:
| > 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.
| abetusk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Obviously the people selling the "Calvin pissing on (WHATEVER
| THING)" stickers sold in truck stops and gas stations did not get
| the message.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| 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-...
| manytree wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| bokchoi wrote:
| The Lorax, The Cat in the Hat, and The Grinch movies also were
| completely warped by Hollywood.
| wdr1 wrote:
| 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_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 wrote:
| 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.
| gjs278 wrote:
| arijun wrote:
| 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.
| boogies wrote:
| I can because LibRedirect
| (https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect) automatically
| redirected it to https://libreddit.projectsegfau.lt/r/CalvinB
| ot/comments/bdxb...
| culi wrote:
| The redesigned reddit is unusable ~~on mobile~~. You need to
| change the "www" subdomain to "old" like this:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p.
| ..
| kzrdude wrote:
| There's not too many photos of Bill.
|
| Here's a few from 1980s
|
| https://goldfm.lk/life/other/3349/bill-watterson-creator-com...
|
| https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Bill_Watterson
| darepublic wrote:
| 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.
| dry_soup wrote:
| > 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
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Right. Watterson had no issue with making money; the strips ran
| in tons of papers and he signed off on lots of retail items:
| books, calendars, posters, etc.
|
| But none of the retail items took the characters out of the
| context of the comic. They all presented the full strips that
| Watterson drew.
|
| That was his ethic: the strip is the object, the whole piece of
| art. To him, selling a stuffed Hobbes would be like selling a
| commemorative plush "left eye of Mona Lisa."
| antisocial wrote:
| Logged in to post about this commencement speech.
|
| "We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We
| need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and
| expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop
| down in front of the television set and let its pandering
| idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is
| not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery-it recharges
| by running."
|
| It had a great impact on me and I never had a TV in the living
| room. I made my kid read this as well. This speech is aging
| well and is timeless in my opinion.
| [deleted]
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Absolutely. I always felt that Tintin's movies were such a
| terrible idea.
| philistine wrote:
| I truly fell in love with Tintin watching the Nelvana cartoon
| as a kid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tin
| tin_(TV_s.... It wasn't a bad idea, but it highlights the
| most important element of adapting Calvin & Hobbes: you must
| change the format.
|
| While Tintin stayed an adventure series that lasts for about
| 45 minutes per story, what do you do with Calvin & Hobbes? It
| can't be a 5 seconds long show! It's a big part of
| Watterson's refusal; he was adamant that Calvin was a strip,
| and only worked as a strip.
| shmde wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I was quite surprised to learn he began Calvin and Hobbes at
| only age 27 and quit by 37
| shellfishgene wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Last I heard he paints landscapes.
| thechao wrote:
| I've read this, too; I could only imagine the price he'd
| command on a painting. The man is a national treasure.
| [deleted]
| stiltzkin wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| 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-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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| arunprakash01 wrote:
| NKosmatos wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Just imagine what Disney or Amazon will be doing to this
| property in thirty years time.
| stargrazer wrote:
| So... what does Waterson do now with his life?
| rm445 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes
| layer8 wrote:
| Are you aware of how different Miyazaki's adaptations generally
| are from the original works?
| [deleted]
| em500 wrote:
| 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
| alsetmusic wrote:
| 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/St...
| js2 wrote:
| Working link
| https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/superheroes/images/6/65/St...
| endominus wrote:
| 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
|
| EDIT: Nevermind, found it!
| https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It so easy to see that Bill Watterson drew those 'Libby'
| panels. Once you're told anyway. Especially 2nd one!
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Another comic that I identified by style, is the 'Secondhand
| Lion' strips. They seem almost identical to Berkely
| Breathed's strips 'Bloom County'
| classichasclass wrote:
| That's because Breathed drew them for the film.
| guggalugalug wrote:
| Patsis's blog contains a post from 2014 and a post from 2018.
| Yet its "Pearls Books" page has been kept slightly more up to
| date. There is something comically sad about a recently active
| blog with only two posts over a 6+ year period. Bill Waterson
| and a canceled United flight were some of the most noteworthy
| things to have happened to him.
| dcminter wrote:
| That's amazing, thank you for posting it!
| Natsu wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| Looks like broken javascript. If you inspect "watterson.jpeg"
| and go up a few sibling elements, there's this:
| <div class="rawhtml"> <span class="resimg adv-photo-
| large" data-image="http://media.cleveland.com/ent_impact_home
| /photo/11001963-mmmain.jpg" data-position="article-
| main"></span> </div>
|
| http://media.cleveland.com/ent_impact_home/photo/11001963-mm.
| ..
| jamiek88 wrote:
| https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/20/bill-
| watterson-199...
| upwardbound wrote:
| 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/n...
|
| He looks just like Calvin's dad for sure :)
| jamiek88 wrote:
| That's what I thought as well, Calvin's dad as self
| portrait adds another lovely layer to it too!
| Sateeshm wrote:
| That was a great read. I really liked the second comic.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| There's definitely strong thematic overlap between the two. It
| delights me to know Watterson had some hand in PBS as I really
| love it too.
| tomcam wrote:
| Beautiful. Thank you very much.
| deathgripsss wrote:
| 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?
| psyc wrote:
| 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.
| brk wrote:
| 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.
| keithnz wrote:
| I like the books, but the strips are online
| anhttps://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2022/07/16
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Sjonny wrote:
| I love this comic from him: https://i.imgur.com/CFq57ny.jpg
| the_common_man wrote:
| This is not by him, this is zenpencils
| Sjonny wrote:
| you're right .. it's the quote, not the comic.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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-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-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
| easytiger wrote:
| > _In the current world of Web2.0 / Web3 hype and catastrophe,
| much of the Waterson ethic resonates fairly strongly with me._
|
| You get shanghaied into a way of thinking. I recently wrote a
| simple 1998 style (flask.py + mongodb) web thing for someone
| hosted on the other side of the Atlantic to me.
|
| A domain.com/search page with results below the search box
| loaded on a page refresh
|
| Even before adding pagination the clicking a search->query with
| 10k rows of results->return and render on a different page with
| a full page refresh was faster than any other site i had used
| recently doing a fraction of the information display. I was
| shocked that i was able to do all that in less than a second...
| because my brain had been conditioned by the modern web
|
| I had become used to news website which take 15 seconds to
| fully render the content using 25MB of data or react apps or
| wordpress sites with dozens of fade in animations and the like.
|
| I am fully blackpilled on the present state of the web. Outside
| HN it is basically unusable
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| The problem is advertising.
|
| The reason we have come to this is because there is real FOMO
| in Megacorp marketing departments across the globe.
|
| The way to solve it is to bring forward evidence that despite
| the info graphics and impression statistics and dashboards,
| targeted advertising by tracking users does not bring in more
| sales than say showing your ad on a relevant content page.
|
| Showing me ads for bicycle helmets because from my profile
| you know I bought one on another site is idiotic. However,
| showing me an ad for fishing rods when I'm looking for
| fishing supplies stores would probably be a good idea.
|
| If you can prove that than all of ad words and facebook non-
| sense and user tracking is busy work with no value added.
|
| Then maybe we could go back to a saner web.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Bloom County was revived in 2015 - when I saw Breathed speak at
| the National Book Festival the next year he indicated Trump's
| resurgence was "not unrelated"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm aware of that.
|
| I was speaking more to the aversion to commercialising the
| comic or its characters.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's less that Woodstock was _pure_ and more that it was
| _idealistic_ , and ... mostly, the idealism held / didn't
| break.
|
| Altamont wasn't necessarily bad. But reality intruded to an
| extent it hadn't at the earlier festival.
|
| The idealism of the 1960s stumbled heavily when it hit the
| Real World. Communes often proved to be unsustainable,
| tremendously unequal, and microcosms of the outer world of
| The Man that they were intended as an antidote / counterpoint
| to. Collective and cooperative organisations folded. Or
| evolved --- Whole Foods didn't simply out-compete many local
| and regional "natural food stores", but often bought them
| out.
|
| It's not possible to simply wish (or mission-statement) away
| human behaviour and it's darker nature. I'm not sure if Mark
| Zuckerberg really believed that most people are good and
| privacy was obsolete, though those are principles he said and
| promoted aggressively ... which haven't worked out so well.
|
| Part of me regrets tremendously that the idealism didn't
| deliver. Another part recognises _that the idealist model of
| reality was fundamentally flawed_. The questions of _how_ and
| _why_ it was flawed, if there 's some way to redeem or
| resurrect parts, or if there are alternative ways to deliver
| on some of those principles or goals ... I'm not sure of.
|
| Looking at the present state of things, its systems and
| organisations and institutions, I'm strongly disinclined to
| participate at all. Watterson's very few public comments
| don't seem to indicate he feels this way, and I don't want to
| put words in his mouth. The commentary on selling out ...
| suggests at least some alignment with this philosophy.
|
| Among the things I've focused on over the past decade or so
| has been trying to _understand_ media, its interactions with
| society (there 's a bidirectional feedback), and both its
| capabilties and limitations. If I'd known then (in the late
| 1980s / early 1990s) what I know now ... I don't know how my
| activities would have differed, though I suspect my outlook
| would have been vastly less idealistic.[1] As I've come to
| hold that view myself it seems also to have become far more
| prominent generally, I don't know if I've led or followed
| that path to any particular extent.
|
| Understanding who was promoting what visions of the future of
| technology, and what their own motiviations, beliefs, and
| priors were, has also been illuminating.
|
| HN has been extraordinarily durable for an online forum, even
| by historical standards. Usenet's heyday was about a decade
| (mid-1980s -- mid-1990s), Slashdot only about 5 years (1999--
| 2004). Reddit and Facebook both grew far too large for
| meaningful discussion (as well as suffering numerous other
| failings[2]). A large part of HN's success has been in
| remaining reasonably small, and it is of course dilligently
| moderated. Despite that, there are topics HN really can't
| discuss, and I'm often frustrated by the shallowness with
| which meatier topics and articles are addressed. But
| _relative to other general online fora_ it really does excel.
| Applying my lens, perhaps it has the right ballance of ideal
| vs. pragmatism.
|
| PSA: Don't take the brown acid.
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. The "light reading list" I've occasionally linked in
| earlier HN comments gives a pretty good grounding in my
| thinking / reading. It's incomplete and probably always will
| be, but should give good initial vectoring and velocity. http
| s://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
|
| 2. I don't, and never have, participated in Facebook, so
| can't comment on its dynamics. I was an active participant on
| the conceptually similar platform Google+ where a "salon-
| style" form of discussion emerged around a few dilligent
| hosts. I've discussed Reddit's issues numerous times at my
| now all-but-entirely-defunct subreddit, with several of those
| addressed / linked here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius
| /comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...
| bedhead wrote:
| I say this to people frequently: don't confuse the way
| things are vs the way you wish things were. It seems to be
| the source of so much poor decision-making and misery.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure I'm following.
|
| There's the is-ought fallacy.
|
| There's also wishful thinking: believing that what you
| want / would prefer is what should be, or that a
| realistic but unpleasant appraisal is wrong or false
| because it is painful to consider. (Truth and reality
| don't much care about your preferences.)
|
| Or are you referring to something else?
| mbg721 wrote:
| Breathed was always hyper-conscious of selling out in the
| comics industry and elsewhere; his approach was just to create
| Bill the Cat as an anti-Garfield. It was only later that irony
| became the only thing that sells.
| [deleted]
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