Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return? (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return? (2014)

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101 pointsmooreds28 comments

No.

I loved Calvin and Hobbes when it first came out, and all through its initial run. When it came back after his time off, it had changed. The initial Calvin was just a random force in the universe, and he happened to irritate/puzzle/astound/infuriate his parents, his babysitter, Miss Wormwood (what a great name). He was just being himself, and largely having fun doing it, and if they didn't "get it", that was just something he didn't care about.

After the break, it was Calvin against the world, with him actively fighting the oppressors, which is good in one way, but he seemed unhappy a lot of the time; the fun really went out of the comic.

When Watterson ended it, I felt it was for the best.

There was a conspiracy theory that Bill Watterson wrote another comic under a fake name (it wasn't him):

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/04/13/conspiracy-the...

Kind of reminds me of the rumors in the 90s that John Irving was J. D. Salinger writing under a pseudonym.

Frazz Is a great strip and clearly influenced by Calvin and Hobbes though.

There's a "conspiracy theory" that Hobbes is Tyler Durden from Fight Club.

Is that from the "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?" school of celebrity perception?

Vice-versa, I believe: https://them0vieblog.com/2010/02/03/calvin-v-hobbes-an-inter...

There's a kinda related take from Robot Chicken where the whole "is Hobbes real or imaginary" question gets taken to its limit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeWf0o6uqKE

As someone who's enjoyed Calvin and Hobbes for decades, I get the joke, but it's also slightly horrifying.

Of my favorite comics, Calvin and Hobbes is the one I can no longer read. I don't know why. Being named Calvin growing up I had every anthology and print collection. I feel bad for my dad who had some first editions I absolutely trashed reading over and over.

You might also enjoy, Bloom County, Pearls Before Swine and Zits. I really enjoy those as well. Zits has a similar dynamic if Calvin was a moody teenager. Bloom County is chock full of 80's politics (Actually, Ivana and Donald a frequent characters), and Pearls Before Swine is just fun and witty.

A movie - Second Hand Lions, had the main character become a comic book writer. "Berkley Breathed" the cartoonist known from Bloom County did all of the comics in the movie and it's so heart warming. I recommend that as a great film to any family movie night.

I also love the Far Side, single pane comics are some of my favorite, and everyone should pick up a Far Side anthology if only to see a Bovine version of American Gothic

Some time after this article Watterson collaborated with Berke Breathed, briefly. Or maybe not.

https://www.cbr.com/calvin-and-hobbes-part-bloom-county-cont...

When he retired, he said it was because newspapers didn’t allow comics enough space anymore to create great art, and that the daily release schedule wreaked havoc on him.

But that was about five minutes before the web emerged and made it possible to be a cartoonist without either of those constraints. So I guess those reasons were excuses, and the true answer was just that he didn’t feel like making comics anymore. (Which is also understandable.)

He's comfortably well-off (as anyone who owns the rights to a relatively popular strip would be) and apparently doesn't desire fame or much beyond painting.

There's also the difficulty of finding a trusted partner to handle the "web side" of doing an intermittent comic - some of the horror stories around comic artists taken advantage of would chill your bones and I'm sure Bill knows them.

Gary Larson (Far Side) did eventually emerge from his retirement, having collected enough ideas in the meanwhile: https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff

He talked a lot about how he was constantly going to battle with the publishers, and how much it drained him. It really sounds like it completely burned him out. Calvin and Hobbes ended in a perfect way, and he's been living life on his own terms ever since. Good for him.

Good for him, I agree. It’s just sad that he predated the era when cartoonists no longer had to put up with publishers.

I doubt he’d want to put up with the garbage fire of technical platforms and the hellpit of online “community” management either.

Yeah, to be honest, trading nightmare publishers with nightmare online communities probably wouldn't be a great trade.

I think he likely could have had his pick of magazines to do a monthly strip for as well. He has afaict a particular attachment to newspapers as a medium and delivery vehicle.

Bill Waterson could choose to publish in any way way whatsoever he wants. The microsecond he chooses to make a new Calvin and Hobbes strip anywhere he will have tens of millions of readers.

If memory serves, he has an interview or a foreword to a book in which he mentions another reason: he didn't want Calvin and Hobbes to continue for years or decades after its natural life. He felt that he had seen this with other strips: they kept going long after they should have stopped, and the evidence was that they were consistently uninteresting. He didn't want Calvin and Hobbes to be like that.

Apropos (2014): https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/16

Pig: "What is vice?"

Goat: "Immorality. Wrongdoing."

Pig: "So Biden is the president of immorality and wrongdoing?"

Goat: "Let's start over."

Pig (alarmed): "That man should not get near the White House."

Ironic foreshadowing, your sure sign of quality comix.

For me, Calvin and Hobbes was usually good and occasionally great. The comic I miss the most though is Gary Larson's Far Side.

Calvin had the life lessons. Far Side was about absurdity. Loved em both!

For me it’s exactly the other way around.

You may be happy to know, then, that Gary Larson is making new Far Side comics.

https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff

Great story, even if 2014, was not aware of it. Funny 3 strips.

Do people just harvest links from other threads for internet points? What is the point of that?

You're downvoted, but yea - this post is #2 on my feed while the other Calvin and Hobbes was #1.

I think it's more that a story on topic X triggers associations to X-related things and then people post more of them.

We downweight such follow-up or copycat submissions for reasons explained here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

There are numerous motivations for posting.

In this case, there's a theme and a fairly strong resonance with many HN readers (myself included) who remember C&H from its original run.

Other times, there may be interesting related / associated content posted or linked. I'll occasionally submit links that have been made in comments, or that I've used in comments myself. The recent-related material may trigger stronger associations and response from the submission queue, which is pretty brutal (and often less introspective than might be hoped) to begin with.

HN karma has relatively little significance. There are hugely interesting people who participate little in the site. Others (myself included) who comment and submit a lot and are probably overrated by the points system. Good quality measures are hard to come by --- quality assessment is one of the Hard Problems.

(I've designed a few rating/moderation systems, and critiqued a number as well. There are many pitfalls to be found.)

Giving some benefit of the doubt is encouraged here.

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