Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016)

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.

In the good old days, in many ways. Kudos to Bill Watterson.

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"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8aj3BA3cGg

Yeah, it totally did. Ever since the 90s. The majority of the mainstream youth don't even understand the concept.

Nobody says "congratulations on being a sellout" unless they are being sarcastic.

IIRC, being a "social media influencer" is literally selling out, and it seems like it's what a lot of kids aspire to these days.

Chuck Klosterman's recent book "The Nineties" talks about this a lot! And honestly it's spot on. I had forgotten about this, and not realized how much it disappeared as a cultural concept.

https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073...

We all used the phrase "selling out" frequently (on the east coast of the US), but I remember one high school friend who invoked it constantly. Calling people "sell outs" (i.e. lacking in authenticity) was a common insult.

Grunge bands and in particular Kurt Cobain had almost a pathological obsession with "selling out", to the point where it had some part in his death. Even popularity was seen as a sign of selling out -- it was better to be true to your indie roots.

There are some interesting quotes in the book from Cobain and contemporaries, and the author talks about influential movies at the time that dealt with the concept.

I was never a Calvin and Hobbes fan, but it's definitely interesting and notable that the creator avoided "selling out".

While I think we were too obsessed with it back then, I think a concept that probably needs more respect today. You could even talk coherently about Google "selling out", although that concept may now be foreign to many people. There was a notion of authenticity and that you cared about the mission, i.e. organizing the world's information. But that is long gone :-(

In retrospect the obsession with "selling out" in the 90's was a reaction to capitalist values affecting more and more parts of life. Though, being a teenager, I didn't realize that, and I just said what my friends said!

It was a way to keep your peers in check. But it's sad that people don't even notice it anymore. They would wonder why you did NOT "sell out".

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.

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.

Personally my feelings on the subject are conflicted. I think that some degree of promotion is important so that others can discover great art and contributions, and so that artists and creators can make a comfortable living off of their work, but that “selling out” becomes bad when the pursuit of commerce overtakes and reduces the art.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/movies/janeane-garofalo.h...

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.

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.

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?

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

And an excellent illustration of the perils of “selling out” rights to depict a fictional character.

loss of creative control can be fan fiction/comic too?

That's one of the returns I was thinking of earlier (see my top level comment in thread), though I couldn't think of the strip. It was of course PBS.

Neither kids nor adults read the newspaper with their breakfast much anymore...

That said, my kid came across my old C&H books and loves to read them. She also reads Fox Trot, Garfield, and Peanuts, but not nearly as much as C&H.

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 :)

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 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.

The internet is tricky for these things though, if you search "calvin and hobbes mug" you'll definitely find a lot of them to buy, same as with Mafalda, so not sure how to validate this feeling.

Edit: Wikipedia corroborates my feeling that Mafalda hasn't had many adaptations also because of the author didn't want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafalda#Adaptations

I'm pretty sure Rage Against the Machine tracks have been used for tv commercials without anyone blinking.

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.

That point is specifically adressed in the article

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Walker and Watterson also had very different approaches to dealing with the public at the three-day festival. Walker agreed to numerous requests to do autographed sketches and pose for photos, while Watterson declined to give autographs and requested no photos and no taping of his remarks."

http://timhulsizer.com/cwords/cdiffer.html

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.

Watterson seems close to enlightened in the Buddhistic or Daoistic traditions.

"Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough." Dao De Jing - Chapter 46