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.)
