Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The second most magnificent thing is Calvin and Hobbes was never licensed.
The third most magnificent thing is it stopped whilst it was awesome instead of being wrung out for every penny.
There's no films, no sequels. You can't buy a licensed tshirt with Calvin and Hobbes on it. There's no licensed merchandise. No one has made it into a live action movie. Calvin and Hobbes are not available this month on MacDonalds cups if you buy a second whopper burger. You can't buy plush toys of Hobbes. There isn't a Christmas special TV show. Giant balloon figures of Calvin and Hobbes do not appear in city parades.
Imagine if Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit had been kept so pristine.
Hate to say it, but give 50 years, I wouldn't be surprised if Calvin and Hobbes turns into what you described.
Also, for what it's worth, it's hard to imagine a better executor than Christopher Tolkien. He basically spent his entire life serving his father's artistic interests.
I find it unlikely I would have heard about them, my local library was full of books from the 50's I had never heard of and was reluctant to read. Seeing the Hobbit cartoon gave me an interest in it that I followed up on in middle school.
On that note, the only way most children will hear of Calvin and Hobbes is if their parents were big fans or through the many unlicensed products available. Maybe that's fine, but people seem strangely proud that's the case.
>(Calvin and Hobbes) borrows several elements and themes from three major influences: Walt Kelly's Pogo, George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts.
Pogo ran until ten years before Calvin and Hobbes started, and had several animated adaptations, including one in 1980.
Krazy Kat had ~100 cartoons made between 1916 and 1965.
And Peanuts has been marketed to death.
I wouldn't be surprised if he read more early 20th century comics without adaptations, but that likely happened after he already had a deep interest in the medium. People that get really into comics can independently discover Calvin and Hobbes, but they're going to be a minority
Being one of the best-known genre-work of all genres means the vast majority of people have still not read it.
Estimates worldwide sales were around 50m by 2003, and 150m by 2007.
Figuring out where they were at before the movies is hard, but the US 2001 edition of LOTR alone sold ~2m copies between 2001 and 2003, so it's pretty clear sales in 2001-2003 were far higher than the average for the preceding years of sale.
do we have stats for sales in the 1980s etc. ? I would expect the 2m was replacement, new generation of readers sales because before extra market opened up by movies (which obviously must have happened) all the people who would buy that book, which was also probably a lot, had already bought one.
Not really. The earliest cumulative estimate I've found was the 50m number for 2003.
There are some earlier numbers:
First edition of the Fellowship of the Ring was printed in 1500 copies in the US, 3000 in the UK. Return of the King up to 5,000 in the UK and 7,000 in the US.
It's worth noting that those were good sales number for fantasy hardbacks, and still are. The vast majority of authors can only dream of selling even a few thousands hardbacks for genre fiction.
In the 1960's Ace published an unlicensed paperback copy of LOTR due to an issue with the US copyright that reportedly sold a combined 150k. Ballantine's subsequent authorised paperback supposedly sold at least 100k. Those numbers were astounding for fantasy, and still are.
Someone from Houghton Mifflin said the 2001 edition was their second book ever to sell over a million, with the 1977 edition of The Silmarillion the only other one in decades of publishing. It's pretty reasonable to assume there must have been quite a few million copies of LOTR out for there to be enough of a market for The Silmarillion to sell over a million in a US edition.
So by fantasy standards it certainly was one of the biggest successes ever already at that point.
I really want to know what the worldwide sales were for the last few years before the movie marketing started and from they were launched and until 2003, though. It's clear the movies effect were massive, but it'd be interesting to see just how massive.
Wow. Very strange that The Silmarillion outsold any of the Lord of the Rings books.
LOTR is the gold standard of Fantasy, and if you got anywhere near that, it was always recommended. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, so well after the novels were published, and they were still ubiquitous.
Which of course does not negate the introduction that the animated series or movies had on their continued popularity. Each experience can be different. All roads can lead to Rome.
I would say that there's a reason LOTR remains huge, while C&H is mostly nostalgia by an aging fan base. LOTR reinvents, C&H is locked in a decision point in time.
I guess in like 65 years it'll enter the public domain and we'll see if dome enterprising publisher decides its worth repeating.
That alone guarantees it’s immortality.
It wasn't obscure to fantasy fans, but very few fantasy books break through and sell well. Most genre fiction outside of romance, thrillers/crime sell ridiculously low numbers.
In a 2003 interview, the project manager for Tolkien at Houghton Mifflin, who held the US rights, stated that they had at the time only had two million-copy bestsellers in the company's history: The Silmarillion in 1977, and LOTR in 2001 in the runup to the first movie.
By 2003 they'd sold 2 million copies of the one-volume trade paperback in the US.
Worldwide, combined sales went from 50 million copies in 2003, already massively boosted by the movies, to 150 million by 2007. In other words: Nearly half a century to get to 50 million, with a significant proportion of those 50 million in the last few years of that period, and then 100 million in the following 4 once the movies were well known.
The readers of "any must read fantasy bookshelf" are a small enough demographic that if they were the only ones who'd watch the movies, they'd have bombed spectacularly.
Those aren't the people that read fantasy in the first place. If they haven't "read the book even now", it's not like it matters that they seen the movies. For them it could be any other movie in their place, and they would be just as satisfied.
And the proportion of people who rarely read fantasy who went on to read LOTR multiplied it's total global sales several times over in a few short years after it'd been out for half a century because of those movies.
is that still the case?
It seems that almost all media nowadays is some fantasy / scifi subgenre. As is often remarked the nerds won. It seems unlikely that the conventional wisdom about what sells would not have been changed somewhat by this state of things.
Of the 20 best selling print books for adults so far in H1 2023 according to publishers weekly and Bookscan (so these are not total sales numbers, but they're pretty representative):
Romance: 11 out of 20. The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 8th 9th, 11th, 19th were all romance by Colleen Hoover alone (2nd and 3rd sold 885k and 882k each).
Non-fiction: 3 out of 20, including the 1st (prince Harry's biography; about 1.8m until end H1)
Non-genre fiction: 3 out of 20
Historical fiction: 1 out of 20
The first and only fantasy novel is the 11th: A Court of Thorns and Roses, which at 350k until end H1 is a breakaway success in fantasy.
Thrillers: 1
The number for e-books could very well shift that somewhat, but if you follow some writers on social media, you'll see romance readers churn through romance novels at an absolutely ridiculous rate.
The thing is the key demographics for fantasy and scifi don't read many books. As part of that demographics who does read, it's very noticeable how much of an outlier I am, and I still read a tiny fraction of what a relatively typical romance reader reads.
EDIT:
> As is often remarked the nerds won.
This is true, but not in books: Bertelsmann owns Penguin Random House and has a market cap of ~15bn Euro, and that also includes e.g. RTL and a bunch of non-publishing assets.
Electronic Arts has a market cap of $35bn. Activision has a market cap of $74bn.
"We" won through scifi and fantasy in other media far outdistancing books.
While anecdotal like I said, none of the “fantasy” stores around my city sell anything LOTR related while some of them have entire floors dedicated to Harry Potter merc.
But you’re absolutely right about what we call the 57’ generation. They all ate it right up. Everyone in my parents generation read it during their early university years, and I do mean everyone.
Anyway, I did read the trilogy and the Hobbit and held them in high regard. The movies (mainly the Return of the King) actually did _significantly_ "cheapen" the idea of the LOTR in my eyes at least because the "Return of the King" movie left out plot points that I felt were vital to the message of the books. Primarily that even after the "big bad" was defeated, people were still evil (see the Scouring of the Shire). Much like the real-world war that must have inspired Tolkien given his participation in it, it was a major victory to celebrate but nevertheless not the end of every struggle.
Tangentially I'd also say that even the original Harry Potter brand is cheaper than LOTR because although it's fun and palatable, it doesn't have as much to say about the real world or challenge us in how we live our lives.
A major theme throughout the book trilogy had been that everyone, even Gandalf, has a "shadow" that corrupts their good intentions, except for hobbits which made them ideal ring bearers since the Ring would twist ambition/pride/etc to its own ends. It's basically a morality play for the post-WW2 generation, where the demons are not just external monsters but internal temptations. The movie trilogy's ending was much "neater" and also much less true to life.
But on the other hand, the RPG "The One Ring" does right by the source material by making the shadow a mechanic in the game that mirrors the theme in the books.
So LOTR seems like an excellent example of licensing gone both right (The One Ring) and wrong (admittedly the movies weren't all bad, but most could probably agree the Hobbit movies did cheapen the source material).
I was maybe 12 when the first movie came out.
Millions read LOTR and Hobbit before the movies, and they had very active communities all the way to the 90s. Like millions have read HGTTG before the movie (who didn't even do that well) and millions continue to do so -- including millions worldwide who never heard the radio show ever.
((1) and already established in book form, its radio origins already relegated to fan trivia - it was years after reading the books that I realized that I had actually heard quite a bit of it in radio form before, enjoying it to the point of deliberately tuning in each week, without committing the name of the show to memory. Not the original radio show buy a german language production, would be interesting to see where on the spectrum between original show and "radiofication" of the books those episodes were, I don't think they made that show before the books became a radiant success)
Wikipedia claims the German audio version was based on first six episodes of the UK radios series, and I do remember noticing that some plot points differed somewhat from the books (and then when I finally listened to the original radio series, I somewhat recognised those differing plot points again).
Ok but whose loss is that? Tolkien did not write for people who were afraid of old books. If he had wanted to reach the largest audience possible whatever the means, he would have written differently. It happenede that a rather large audience did appreaciate his works in their original form, apparently also to the surprise of Tolkien himself.
The last couple of years of C&H featured increasing criticism of modern society (e.g. modern art, advertising) that seemed rather grumpy and “old man yells at cloud”. Sure, Watterson stopped before the strip could have gone in an overtly sociopolitical direction like some of its peers, but the strip was no longer quite as timeless and innocent as it had been.
The main characters are named after 17th century philosophers John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes, after all
R+B is a forgotten treasure.
Of course, if you were to put in enough effort to make a complete book (ie- 100+ page Sunday comic collections) that could stand among the rest in the original series probably best to adjust your art style, theme and content enough away from the original to make what you are doing essentially a spiritual successor - enabling you to comfortably share it with the outside world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_policy_debate_term...
Is there an actual article with more substance illustrating what you mean or what this section (#Kritik) was derived from? Also, I'm having a little bit of difficulty in parsing out your overall position with respect to what I've said (do feel I'm doing a bad job of it or what do you mean, exactly?)
I definitely was using that (critical theory) as more of an example and only briefly analogizing rather than me trying to seriously argue from that vantage point specifically.
Edit: are you saying "heard" as in you were there, or you know the details of the case through reading or maybe both? Whatever the case, is there an actual source available?
Everything you said in this thread reminded me of that experience. Good day to you.
Why don't we just normalize ex post facto law while we're at it?
I feel like we all might have gotten a bit lost in the plot here but I will leave you with this quote that I feel corroborates the encapsulation I have presented here:
> I tried to vibe with this POV. What's wrong with more content? But it really does cheapen the art/media you used to adore. Even if you try to ignore it, i.e. you don't have to watch / read all the Star Trek content that has been produced in the last 20 years, and after picard season 1 I completely checked out of all of it, but it just kind of makes everything you loved seem so empty. It was all about generating positive cash flows...the whole time.
And good night to you sir :)
> Why don't we just normalize ex post facto law while we're at it?
This really puzzled me...I re-read it half a dozen times. I know what ex post facto law is. The connection to an excessively long-running television series (e.g.) defeats me.
Finally, you claim that a quote from earlier in this thread corroborates/provides evidence that "enshittification is inevitable and ultimately good" (which I think is your thesis?). But the quote you provide proves the exact opposite - that "more content cheapens the art/media you used to adore".
In only a handful of paragraphs, you flip-flopped positions entirely.
In my view, your position is a tad elitist and I don't particularly care for the way it places you on an implicitly superior level of comprehension but also fundamental worth in the context of this discussion.
Arguably, I both in real-time and through the aformentioned repetition get to know the show and its constituent parts far better than you single-viewing "discerners" ever could. But yeah, you notice more even though you technically notice less.
I'm inclined to suggest that you are literally the quantity over quality viewer (ie: non-discerning) and I am in fact the quality over quantity since I view less discrete works but notice and derive a more refined level of enjoyment and recognition of the subtleties present in any given artistic production (and the artistic part is not something I'm going to argue with you about; its intangible and as worthlesz or priceless as the viewer subjectively evaluates)
Edit: Also you stay away from my miniature son and never come back ;)
Parts of Discovery are good, more-so if you look at it from a 'home team' perspective where you'll take any win. OTOH It's only re-watchable to a certain point.
Lower Decks, I do like as far as escapism goes but frankly has a lot of 'Yeah this is licensed parody' moments.
Sometimes, things should end. Sometimes they end too soon (Farscape comes to mind [0], thankfully it did get a finale at least,) but when you keep adding on 'the additional adventures of' the risk of winding up in some form of everyplot, or just breaking canon, gets wayyyyy tooo damn high.
As a counterpoint to that, Picard Season 3 is incredibly watchable, (even RLM thought so,) I hope you try it if you haven't. It somehow does a pretty dang good job with things.
[0] - It really is a benchmark for a lot of sci-fi despite the fourth wall tapping.
As someone who really agrees with the previous poster, this may be the crucial point. I can "disbelieve" the stuff that I think is stupid cashgrab sequel crap, specially if it was not made by the original author.
Because think about it, if someone somewhere made a bad fanfic, would it ruin the previous media? Obviously not, right? So why is it different when it's a billion dollar media company that bought the right to slap the "official" name and logo on their fanfic*? If you don't like it, ignore it. If you like it, then great more media of the franchise you enjoy!
* Assuming the people writing it are fans and not 100% just there for the money.
It would seem that no matter how well they were technically perceived, it would slip through somehow and thus violate my condition that the actors are mostly having fun and voluntarily performing, particularly if its with a group of their actor friends that appear in each others' films. I don't worry about the money-grubbing so much cuz chances are the actors are in on it and to some degree inclined to do well and make it enjoyable for themselves and their audience.
Harmless doesn't even begin to cover that outside of complaints that its unfair socioeconomically to extend the cost of playing such that kids who were "lucky" to even be able to afford merely the game are being discriminated against economically or whatever either in isolation or with reference to their more fortunate peers. Im getting a bit sidetracked here so I won't be taking notes on this, unfortunately :( but I do think its pretty much analagous in my opinion.
Or the author goes off the deep end and starts getting better known for political rants. Subsequently it may be hard to enjoy their older works as you are looking for signs of what will develop…
Sorry but I doubt that. But even so, it still doesn't lend itself to your point. You're saying 1,000s are perfection but + one new strip would immediately or at least in some historically-tainting way destroy everything? Is everything really that fragile?
Edit: 2 0s
For comparison, there are about 900 Star Trek episodes (including the animated ones).
I don't find it hard to believe someone can know all of them, because I am one of those people for Star Trek, and comic strips are so much shorter. I couldn't populate a spreadsheet from scratch, but name an episode and reference the plot somehow, I'm fairly sure I'll remember it and be able to fill in some details without looking it up.
> Never missed one or went on vacation and the paper got thrown out (assuming that was the predominant medium)?
Also they're all available at https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/ - I read through the whole thing a few years ago.
Edit: I edited my response, thanks for correcting me on that point. There really was no excuse for me to not pull that up real fast
As for being displeased with continued low quality publishing, yes, that would be dismaying. If it continued on and was really good, obviously that wouldn’t be but Watterson’s point was that the odds of that working out well were low, even if he tried to retain creative control. I understand from your other posts that quality isn’t important to you once you’ve started following the characters; fans of C&H are not like you.
I realize this example is super contrived and I legitimately hope I'm not mischaracterizing your fundamental position but I don't know you've really given me a basis to understand how you or the typical fan would approach such a dilemma...and it seems relevant to the overall questions of at least authenticity, continuity, currency etc that are inherent to the broader discussion despite the fact its likely never gonna happen.
This is why Watterson's new book is at the front of every bookstore in the country, despite having nothing to do with C&H and being impossible to market. Despite the ongoing poison of franchises, people do still care about stories from authors they trust.
My issue was merely with the notion that something that was "finished" or ended previouslu could never be continued or elaborated on due to what I perceived as an obsession with the "sanctity" of a completed or discontinued creative work.
I don't know if this resonates at all but I feel the deep need to keep things open and I just can't thumb my nose when a series I enjoyed offers to continue that experience and pick back up where "we" last left off and that I so enjoyed prior.
I get attached to the franchise/show/whatever and crew and its hard to accept the notion that at some point they go away with any finality or that they will necessarily remain frozen in time where nobody can move forward or I don't feel like we can grow and abstractly interact anymore.
This probably sounds really stupid and maudlin but there you have it. I'm sorry and I'm glad we could get to this point :)
I do care about quality and fortunately with the smaller typical season size nowadays (8-10 episodes) it seems like that flows pretty naturally. Having to write like 30 episodes per season is insane , I'm glad how its going now although it necessarily results in longer turnarounnd times. But its worth the wait :)
Across all Europe.
Song and magic have been associated for Millenia across Europe and the Mediterranean.
Are we talking about the same movies with the walt disney happy ending?
For example, compare the book and film versions of the scene in Return of the King when Eowyn confronts (and kills) the Witch-King. In the book it goes like this:
"Then out of the blackness in [Merry's] mind he thought that he heard Dernhelm speaking; yet now the voice seemed strange, recalling some other voice that he had known.
"'Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion! Leave the dead in peace!'
"A cold voice answered: 'Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.'
"A sword rang as it was drawn. 'Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may.'
"'Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!'
"Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. 'But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund's daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.'"
Now compare the movie version of this scene. Obviously there's no narration, but the dialogue is significantly compressed and loses all its flavor.
"I will kill you if you touch him!" "You fool! No man can kill me!" (Eowyn removes her helmet) "I am no man!"
I don't blame Peter Jackson for the change. His movies got a lot wrong when adapting the book, but this wasn't one of those things. The original dialogue, even if condensed, would not work very well for a movie. But even though the change was necessary, it still reduces the dialogue from something epic (in the literal sense of the word) and beautiful, into just a generic action hero moment. The book version is just so much better.
And this is not an isolated incident, either. Throughout the movie trilogy, scenes which were written with beautiful prose in the book have most of their beauty taken away due to the need to write dialogue in a way that works better in a movie. It's necessary, for sure! Even so, however, it means that I can't agree with the claim that the LOTR movies handle such things better than the book's prose does.
No Leonard Nimoy song about Bilbo Baggins? C'mon...
> “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
Someone else's definition of progress could include a heightened respect for comic strips as art, rather than base fodder for merchandise and commercial exploitation. Watterson's stance did help with that, at a time (late '80s) when it was still a very niche position in the US.
This is particularly true for comics, which have historically been seen as fodder for other industries in the US and need all the attention they can get as an art-form in their own right.
> In Congress’s first Copyright Act of 1790, as under the Statute of Anne, copyright persisted for 14 years, with the possibility of a 14-year renewal term.
> Under current law, copyright in a work created by an individual author lasts for the life of that author, plus an additional 70 years.
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-3-...
You can count on the estate to go for easy money grab every time
“Merry Christmas Charlie Brown” and “Great Pumpkin” are both pure, done by Schulz rather than handed off. It’s Schulz bringing his work to life how he wanted it done.
Did he have Guaraldi music in his head when he created the characters? Dunno. Do you think it really changed them for him? Dunno either, but seems unlikely.
I have the 4 volume C & H boxed set. I was there, mostly, reading it daily from the beginning to the end. I’m pretty sure I have the final strip saved from when it was published in a box somewhere. Mad respect for Watterson, his work, his vision.
That said, I’d be first in line for a Hobbes doll. I had a pirate Spaceman Spiff sticker on the back of my motorcycle helmet.
I don’t think an Opus the Penguin doll had any real impact on Breatheds work, but at the same time he stopped the licensing, so who knows.
The work stands on its own. I’ve never read LoTR. I don’t know if it’s impacted how people view the books. I do know that I’ve watched the trilogy at least once a year since its release.
Calvin is Calvin. Opus is Opus. Snoopy is Snoopy. And Waterson will do as he likes with his work. I just think his work is stronger than he, perhaps, thinks it is.
kids: Trick or treat!
kid 1: I got a popcorn ball!
kid 2: I got a fudge ball!
kid 3: I got a pack of gum!
Charlie Brown: I gotta rock!
<heavy metal ensues>
I'd say it very much does.
The focus on Snoopy itself is when the strip "jumped the shark" (here's a take, https://kotaku.com/how-snoopy-killed-peanuts-1724269473 ).
Of course Schulz dilluted it decades before the end of the strip, getting all too into repeatition and mass market concessions.
You want to feel like the subject is yours, and if it's too widespread, lots of people will learn about it, in an "inpure way" (scoff, learning about an amazing comic strip in a movie) and so it cheapens it. Only with this "hipster" view on things you could say that. I think it's impossible to cheapen something without changing it.
If the first edition was cool and the second edition changes the language for sensitivities for example, that can cheapen it, because it actually changed it. McDonald's offering a toy of a character from the first edition, changes nothing.
Only technically. In that the actual printed words wont change.
In how it's perceived in the culture, how it's read, how new readers relate to its characters, what it's seen as the start of, and so on, it does retroactively change the original.
Same how the horrendous 8th season of GoT tainted the previous seasons too. Now it's a journey to a pointless ending - and many people who haven't seen it are unwilling to get into it because they know that. Even someone rewatching the first season, now has a bad taste knowing the later plot of Danny for example, or how various things shown as prominent in the first seasons (the mysterious signs of the deathwalkers, or even the death walkers themselves) play no significant role, or are just skipped over later.
Your understanding of the events that occurred are recontextualised and your feelings are forever changed.
Perhaps we as an audience enjoyed the conceit that Schulz was writing those comics because he loved the characters and that alone.
I'm not a huge objector to the continued outchurn of the Star Wars or Star Trek or MCU franchises, for example, because there's an academic sense in which the existence of bad stuff doesn't negate the existence of good stuff.
BUT...
I think restraint and scarcity can make things more special. Food is more enjoyable when we are hungry, absence makes the heart grow fonder, etc..
Narratively, it's good to leave some questions unanswered. A successful franchise leaves the fans wanting more, but actually giving them more can leave us over-satiated and uninterested.
There's no more magic or mystery left when every character has had their own mini-series to fully flesh-out every aspect of their arc.
I recently discovered "Phoebe and her Unicorn" is pretty amazing as well and although a different comic, has a lot in common and there are many strips to read.
It kind of was until fairly recently with the Jackson films. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s we basically just had the books. Yes, there were animated versions of The Hobbit and LOTR in the late 1970s, but they were fairly obscure and before VCRs became common in the 1980s, it was difficult to even see them.
In the end, it is creator's choice and no choice is better/worse.
Until he dies, then all bets are off.
The mainstream has a very short memory.
Hopefully, by the time there are new copyright owners (after Watterson) and want to do all of the above, it wont be a possibility anymore, because the Gen Alphas wouldn't know or care what Calvin and Hobbes was, and wont be able to follow such "heavy literature" anyway.
>Imagine if Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit had been kept so pristine.
If only...
What I really notice is that Calvin roams freely outside, and is her age. I don't really feel comfortable letting my own kid do that :-\.
I dunno if it's that pristine, it ended up with decals of Calvin peeing on various logos for reasons that remain inscrutable to me to this day.
I did enjoy reading them as a kid and I had all the collections. It was very sad when the comic ended at nearly the same time as the Far Side comics.
Reminds me of R.E.M. (one of my favorite bands) who also decided in 2011 to call it a day and split amicably, thus escaping the fate of all other rock bands who either implode because their members can't stand each other anymore or go on until they, well, drop dead.
I think my childhood would’ve been enhanced by having one, but I agree on your other points. Perhaps the answer is that licensing in moderation can be done thoughtfully? It doesn’t have to be a Garfield-esque free for all.
The older I get, the more I tend to see literal meaning instead of metaphor. This is pretty good advice for a mother dealing with PPD/derealization/cabin fever.
"Oh, thou great tiger! What would thy happiness be, had thee not those for whom though roars!"
-- Thus Spake Calvin
No majority consensus to act can explain a great deal.
At least, mine don't.
Le Meow. Le Sigh.
Fuck him I’m bitter. He didn’t have to be a hypocrite. Now it’s my biggest takeaway from his career.
“Dad, why did Bill Watterson lie to me all those years?”
“Son, it builds character to learn that some of your heroes are actually really shitty human beings.”
Your world is nothing more than your perception(s).