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.
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.
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:
No, it's a GIF. This is explained in the FAQ I linked, but the file suffix (which probably made you think it's a JPG) doesn't matter. If you check the magic number, it's a GIF.
I changed the file suffix to "trick" some apps/extensions into treating it as an image instead of a movie.
> 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...
"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.
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?”
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Schulz did protect his legacy, as can be demonstrated by what has been done with his creations since he passed away. For example, the Peanuts movie from a few years ago was wonderful, and every bit as much in the spirit of what Sparky did when he was working on those things directly. Yes, Peanuts was heavily merchandized, but I still feel that the property has its dignity.
Unlike what happened with Dr. Seuss. Of course, no one can totally control what happens with his or her creations after he or she passes away. Look at how the vultures descended the moment Christopher Tolkien passed away.
> 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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
Yup classic song ... I have no doubt that this was based on a real interaction. In the 90's it was de rigueur to accuse people of selling out, especially bands!
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps, but its the show itself that has declined, not driven by the merchandising. "The Simpsons" as a show used to be razor-sharp satire and commentary, and rather counter-cultural. Now it's everything it used to mock, and worst of all, dull as dirt.
The effect of merchandizing at this point is pretty irrelevant.
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.
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".
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)"
Oh sure, I think it's cyclical ... Those sentiments were around in the 60's and earlier, probably millenia earlier. When I grew up in the 90's I assumed "selling out" was just "a fact", but it turned out to be more of a temporary meme. Maybe it was a reaction to the materialistic 80's.
But it's almost guaranteed to come back in some form. A good word I learned from Graeber and Wengrow's "Dawn of Humanity" is "schismogenesis": the tendency of humans to define themselves by difference from their neighbors. It explains a lot about the left/right divide, why the most vicious wars are fought between neighbors like Iran/Iraq, etc.
So eventually there will be some youth culture that defines itself against "hustle" culture, etc.
I was about to recommend the same book. Also, recommend Klosterman's interview with Tyler Cowen [1] if you want to get a sense of what the book feels like.
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.
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)
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.
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.
The parent comment I responded to referenced this, but inaccurately portrayed it as an issue of amateurism rather than that being the cover story for blatant racism
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That is still a crap shoot. I hope his legacy is well-protected, but you could still end up with a Dr. Seuss situation. Or Tolkien for that matter. I get it that Christopher hated the movies, but they were done with great respect and love. The moment he passed away, however, Amazon descended and began their... what I can only describe as rapine.
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.
Sure, but what if there were Calvin and Hobbes plushies, or something similar. Setting aside, of course, all the reasons Watterson gave for not wanting to do that sort of thing. There's licensing and there's licensing.
You can buy an Opus doll, but he's not flogging soft drinks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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?
>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...
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).
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."
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.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
>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...
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
Okay but I also question the real motive behind posting something like “this is what I believe and I’m not interested in debating it”. Why post something like that in a space that is meant for debate and discussion?
This space is not merely for debate, and discussion can include simply sharing your opinions.
I understand where gp is coming from. I no longer engage in argument on the internet. Over a very long period of time I've found it to be a waste of energy.
> I personally believe, though, that we don't live by money (or prestige) alone.
Yep, and like I said, that means you're bias towards those with the privilege of having jobs/lives that allow them to work on side hobbies without compensation. They exist, but they are much fewer. Self-promotion is the price of more art.
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.
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.
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.
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…”
Fairly easy for Bill or the Dwarf Fortress brothers to have that stance after they've already gotten "lots of approval from others", i.e. their work has found plenty of fans. If their work didn't have anyone enjoy it, well first of all we wouldn't know who they were to use them as examples, and also I bet they'd be struggling with their 'no blatant self-promotion' stance, or probably wouldn't even keep it.
If my work already had the reach of either of those people I'd probably wouldn't bother with self-promotion either (because I dislike doing it, ideally I'd just like to throw stuff over the wall and whoever likes it will easily find it, but I know it doesn't work like that anymore).
I got lucky with one of my video games, Proximity, that I barely self-promoted but others liked it enough to promote it for me (front page of Newgrounds.com way back, got stolen and added to a ton of Flash game sites without my involvement back in the day, which was the norm for Flash games back then).
I failed to nurture that, and now probably very few, if any, people are playing the game, despite it being a game that was played millions of times as a Flash game 12 years ago, and the sequel being one of the first eight games demoed on Xbox Live Indie Games platform and got played a bunch of times there too.
It possibly could have been almost the next Tetris in the hands of someone better at self-promotion than I am, but it didn't, and it's now pretty much forgotten, and most likely will shortly after I'm dead. And I've been kind of stuck with trying to determine what the next version should be like, what direction to take it, and finding the time and energy to work on it. I very well could die before a new version even gets released. Really doesn't help that all platforms it was released on are no longer around (Flash, Xbox 360, and iOS but ancient, would take too much work to update it).
How do you determine when self-promotion is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for physical gain? My wife sincerely wants to be able to quit her day job and make her living writing books, and has spent twenty years not even being able to finish a book, and only this past couple of years figured out what works for her to start getting these things made.
She also wanted to make it as good as she could, so she's dropped probably over a thousand dollars on various things including editing and proofreading, so it would be nice if at the very least she makes that money she invested into the book back, which she wouldn't have been able to do with zero self-promotion (that's not how Amazon works, she would have sold very few books, there's too much other crap out there).
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.
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.
Current technology reinforces and incentivizes this model. You, your friends, and the people whose thoughts
you find interesting are placed in the same feed, on an equivalent level, with global brands that have astronomical marketing budgets. The individual must evolve toward a brand in order to remain relevant in the feed.
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:
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.
> 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
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.
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?
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. https://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_...
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
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).
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.
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.
But what's the point of just keeping the brand alive if it loses what made it so special in the first place?
If I look at modern Star Trek for example then its lost most things that made earlier Star Trek so special. I'm not even saying it's bad per se, just that there is no real value in having it be "Star Trek" other than commercial reasons.
> 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.
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.”
"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.
I truly fell in love with Tintin watching the Nelvana cartoon as a kid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin_(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Totally agreed. These are the counterexamples. I loved C&H and am glad that I don't have to deal with either of them trying to sell me toothpaste or car insurance. Super glad.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Sherlock Holmes stories are interesting. The last ones were published in 1929 IIRC. So there are still some under copyright, and so Doyle's literary estate is still claiming some rights.
Mid 20th Century, the term was 28 years with a 28 year extension.
Let's see, 56 years ago is 1966, so a whole lotta goodies would be public domain under that regime.
Now it's life of author plus 70 years. So a 22 year old writes a book, lives to 92, then another 70 years. So it's in copyright for 140 years. That seems like a long time.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.""
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.
>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.
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."
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?
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.
[0]: https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/02
EDIT: Nevermind, found it! https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t...