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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...

It so easy to see that Bill Watterson drew those 'Libby' panels. Once you're told anyway. Especially 2nd one!
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.
That was a great read. I really liked the second comic.
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.
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.
That's amazing, thank you for posting it!
Beautiful. Thank you very much.
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.

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.
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.
> 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...

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.
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

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-...

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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...

He did give permission for someone on Tumblr to make a C & H/Dune mashup.

Calvin & Muad'Dib:

https://calvinanddune.tumblr.com/

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.

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.
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.
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.

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.)

> 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.

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...

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?
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.
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...
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.

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.

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.

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

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.
> 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.

I am saddened that now success === money is so very pervasive.
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.
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?
The author should be writing for The Economist. "I’ve always been a little skeptical of letting creators have so much control".. so who exactly should have control? Executives?

"The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation." <- No, people just acquiesced to the belief that worth comes from being valued in its market.

This article's sentiment is how we ended up with Super Heroes The Tenth Comeback.

While true he didn't license a lot of things, my brother got permission to reprint a Calvin and Hobbs cartoon in his yearbook. It didn't cost very much either. (My brother's school yearbook gave each student a little space, instead of just a senior quote)

Those Calvins wizzing on a chevy logo you see on truck, not authorized. There were some college t-shirts in the 90s that were bootlegged as well.

I love this comic from him: https://i.imgur.com/CFq57ny.jpg
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.
Reminds me of the note Watterson sent Breathed: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/c7viyp/another...
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...

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!!!