An Interview with Bill Watterson (1987) | Hacker News Reader

An Interview with Bill Watterson (1987)

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151 pointsthunderbong86 comments

Side note, but every time I DON'T see a Hobbes plushy, a Calvin bauble head, the Calvin and Hobbes TV series, etc. I'm so thankful that Watterson grimly held onto the merchandising rights of his characters.

He maintained such a high standard for his comic right unto the end.

Not everything in this world needs to be commoditized to death. "But how will new generations learn about Calvin and Hobbes without Calvin and Hobbes: Gacha game for iOS?". They can experience it the same way that we all did - in syndicated comic form.

https://www.abebooks.com/9780740748479/Complete-Calvin-Hobbe...

The counterpoint is how many children would love their own stuffed Hobbes to be sitting next to them as their parents read a few comics to them.

You can merchandise things without going overboard and losing your soul.

You're definitely right that children would love that sort of thing.

My perspective, as a parent of a 2 and 4 year-old, is that it would just be another stuffed animal. Both of my kiddos have their own massive pile of stuffed toys that people have given to them over the years. Much of them are forgotten about, and new stuffies are replaced after a short amount of time when a new one comes along or when they get bored of it. I can't tell you how many character stuffies my kids have been excited about only to all but forget about two days later.

My kids would love it, sure, but for them it's just the security of a soft cozy friend that seems to be the most important thing. What it looks like/who it is seems to be secondary and entirely mood dependent. There's never been a moment where there's felt like a void because Hobbes isn't in bed with us, and he wouldn't be accomplishing anything that the rest of their stuffies aren't doing already, save for padding Watterson's retirement - which I think is part of his point.

But everyone's different, so YMMV.

Edit: I suppose if one of my kiddos asked for one and it was super important to them, it would be kind of fun for us to make one from scratch!

You can also make yourself a Hobbes costume and put that on when you read to your kid.

Exactly, doesn't always have to be garbage ordered from China through Amazon.

I swear there used to be Hobbes plushies in the 90’s. Did I imagine that? Did he change his mind and rescind rights later on?

Probably unapproved third-party merch, like those bumper stickers where Calvin is pissing on something. Watterson is famous for having always been anti-merchandising.

> children would love their own stuffed Hobbes

In lieu of Hobbes™, sellers offer many choices.

https://www.amazon.com/hobbes-stuffed-tiger/s?k=hobbes+stuff...

"unto the end" and "commoditized to death" made me briefly paranoid that Mr Watterson had died, but thankfully he is still quite alive:

"Watterson lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio as of January 2024"

Even better, last year he published "The Mysteries", which to my understanding is his first book since Calvin & Hobbes ended!

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mysteries/Bill-Wa...

Yeah, although honestly you're paying for the art created by John Kascht. The story is compelling but very, very short. I bought it in hardback right when it came out.

I think I read the story in about five minutes.

Same. "Fairly disappointed" would be an understatement.

I just panic googled him when i read that as well! Wording!

Geez, sorry about that! He's alive and well and apparently quite the avid cyclist so likely hale and hearty!

>They can experience it the same way that we all did - in syndicated comic form.

You can also buy the entire series in a single collection. I've got it, it's great, and my kids love reading it with me.

This was my first big purchase after I finished my Masters. Absolutely loved it. I would often pick a random volume out of the collection, open it to a random page and read. Delightful books, good memories.

I have immense respect for Watterson. He's the only artist I can think of to achieve that level of fame and success and not sell out. Selling out is barely even a concept any more because it's simply assumed, and Watterson is still out there in a cabin in the woods, communicating only by mail and refusing every corporate offer that comes his way.

I respect his decision, but for many people "selling out" is actually code for "financial security and stability for themselves and their families," which is not nothing and not necessarily worth scoffing at.

Watterson did get financial security and stability from the success of the comic, he wasn't distributing it for free. The point after that is where you find selling out, and that's where he drew a line.

For example i think Taylor Swift isnt a sell out, theres still more avenues to pursue merch and tour gear to achieve financial stability.

Fairly sure financial stability is not Taylor Swift's main concern...

Im being sarcastic :)

She's not a sell out because it was never about art in the first place.

>He's the only artist I can think of to achieve that level of fame and success and not sell out.

Gary Larson of The Far Side comes close but never touched the highs of Calvin and Hobbes

I remember Far Side calendars, I think that many people knew the comics more from the calendars than from print. I even once compiled a Nature's Way calendar, and thought about sending it off to Gary.

It was successful enough that social media is full of bot accounts claiming to be "the far side" posting stolen/ai comics that may or may not be actual TFS.

Thomas Pynchon has as well but I guess he’s not as famous. But certainly extremely successful.

I respect him because a theme of Gravity’s Rainbow is the observation that capitalism will absorb anything that is useful and you can’t fight it as the fight against it will be commodified and sold. That you can only fly under the radar and avoid it - to just not create a market potential.

He’s certainly lived by that.

Pynchon is great, but avoiding the creation of commercializable art is a different tactic that never has an inflection point-there's no moment of "If I sign this paper and give my creations to vultures, I will become rich on the spot."

Whenever the topic of copyright comes up on HN, the prevailing view in comments section is that copyrights should be relatively short and cultural artifacts should be available to everyone to use as they please.

So I find it interesting ("interesting") how people seem to universally appreciate that Calvin & Hobbes are protected from any 3rd-party use, meanwhile they universally revile Disney for not allowing people to do what they want with (and to) Mickey Mouse.

Well, life is incredibly nuanced, there's no black and whites and we often have to deal with double-edged swords. :)

To me, there's a bit of a difference between the two. In one instance, you've got a single corporation owning all the rights to a property and getting all of the cash from the sale of goods related to that property. This is a single party who gets to decide what to do with the IP, and often times this can irk fans and rub them the wrong way.

In another instance, you've got C&H released from copyright. Nobody owns the rights, so anybody can do anything with it - assholes can make cheap merchandise for the sake of fast cash the way Disney might with its own IP, but now that there are plenty of other vendors making like-products, we have choices and don't have to buy from one person. The alternatives available are also likely to be made by actual fans with a passion for the project. Broadly speaking, fans can't get irked the way they do when Disney makes a change, because whatever is out there by a third-party is just their creative take on it, not the single rights holder going, "This is the way the IP's universe is now, and what has been canon for thirty years is no longer so, please keep giving us cash".

You're right - one decision impacts another in a less than ideal way. But there's a balance and we have to find the right balance. :)

Watterson's motivation seems to be to preserve the integrity of his art.

Disney's motivation seems to be to preserve their profit margins on hyper commercializing the creations of others.

Watterson is motivated by integrity, I have no doubt of that.

But Disney is also motivated --at least partly-- by integrity. Yes, they want to control profits, clearly. But I have no doubts they want to preserve the integrity of their character also.

> the creations of others

Others? Even after Walt's death, Mickey Mouse has been overseen by a continuous line of people who care about the character's integrity.

Corporations aren't people

Many things are not other things.

In this case, Disney Inc is staffed by people who care deeply about the Disney legacy. You’ll be hard pressed to find a single employee who was not awe-struck walking the halls on the first day.

How do you know that? This is a rhetorical question, meaning to elicit introspection and a rare act of thought, prior to speech.

My point is that stewardship of corporate IP bestowed by the long-dead founder is different than ownership of art you yourself (an individual) created.

A living artist exercising creative control is different from an immortal corporation repeatedly lobbying governments to extend copyright beyond an artist's lifetime.

It's disingenuous to suggest people are mainly interested in Watterson's ability to control the profits of C&H during his lifetime. No, it's because we cherish C&H's purity and are protective of it. I claim it's a purely emotional thing.

No claims were made about the interests of "people".

We don’t revile Disney for not letting us make Mickey Mouse slash fiction.

We revile them because in order to protect a 90 year old mouse cartoon they’ve made it so no English teacher below high school can teach any literature that is younger than 100 years old, because it’s too expensive to reprint it.

That is an excellent distinction, thank you.

Mickey Mouse (and Calvin and Hobbes) would still be protected by trademark if copyrights were much shorter.

A couple of points:

1. If copyright lasted 40 years, then C&H would still be under copyright, and the first 46 years of Mickey would be not; The first C&H strip is closer to today than it is to the first Mickey cartoon.

2. There is a difference between picking the rules and picking the preferred behavior under existing rules; if someone thought copyright should only last 20 years, then one reasonably believe both that C&H ought not be under copyright and respect Watterson's anti-merchandising point of view. Plenty of people who say that "Every billionaire is a policy failure" may also laud the donations of particularly philanthropic billionaires.

As one of those people I guess I can just say: I'd prefer that people respect Watterson's opinion about merch and knock-offs but that I'd also prefer the government not enforce that beyond 14 or so years.

I recently got that boxed set for my son’s birthday. I think I’ve spent more time reading it than he has, though I’m sure he’ll get into it eventually.

Also available online - first strip https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1985/11/18

or if you go to https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes they cycle through them daily, as I do.

>I'm so thankful that Watterson grimly held onto the merchandising rights of his characters.

I'm always kind of bummed about it, instead of quality official merchandise there are a bunch of peeing calvin stickers on lifted pickup trucks.

But these are a channel of national discourse!

https://theonion.com/peeing-calvin-decals-now-recognized-as-...

I want a sticker of Calvin peeing on a pickup truck

Those stickers would exist regardless. They are a wild meme from the preinternet.

If he had licensed the rights to a company making official merch, they'd have went after the companies making the shitty knockoff stuff.

Depends on the company, but even Disney has their merch knocked off in large amounts.

I do wonder what will happen when it enters public domain. Will it have been too long, so nobody will bother creating merchandise and derivative works? Or will there be an explosion of Calvin and Hobbes material? I can’t think of a comparable test case.

That won't be for another 70+ years since Watterson is still alive and it was created after 1977. I can't imagine there'll be that much demand for C&H merch by then

Man was Calvin & Hobbes awesome. IMNSHO every comic strip currently in print still lives in its shadow. C&H had it all - good illustration, good writing, life insight. It was a real life line for weird kids.

I don't know. The farside is pretty good, as well as Pearls Before Swine. Oh, and Cyanide and Happiness.

None of them reach the meta level of social/theological commentary that C&H did, but they're still really, really good on their own, doing their own things.

Agree. But they're well in second and third compared to Calvin & Hobbes. :)

I also think Bloom County deserves to be on the list of all-time greats.

...theological?

Theological might not have been the best word but there's definitely a lot of spiritual insight offered up in C&H.

Sorry, I tend to put the concept of man's place in the universe into theology; that's the one layover from a very strict Catholic childhood. Lol.

Is there a better word for it?

I grew up on Calvin and Hobbes and reread the comics every 5-10 years or so.

It is sad that Watterson no longer makes these comics, but I've scratched my itch by reading "Phoebe and her Unicorn". You can read it free online I think, but my daughter and I read the paperbacks. It's not quite the same (the unicorn is real), but shares a lot in common. I just thought I'd add this for any fellow Calvin and Hobbes fans on here.

You'd be keen to know that, a year or two back, Watterson published his first piece of work since C&H ended. It's great - short, sweet, but great. :)

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mysteries/Bill-Wa...

There's also his 2014 cameo in Pearls before Swine:

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/04

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/05

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/06

And the story: https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t...

Ah yes, I forgot! Thanks for the reminder!

"I could do better if I had more space"

"Nah, the art form is dying"

Absolutely hilarious meta-commentary!

When Dana got the syndication deal for Phoebe, they sent her a copy of the complete C&H. She's never been sure if it was a threat or not but she's got the distinct impression that there is a spot left in the comics pages by the absence of C&H that the syndicate wanted her to be filling.

I didn't know about that. Sounds like a "please continue in this area" more than anything.

This is from an era when the entire country was reading the same comic strips every day, watching the same TV shows, getting the same news, etc. I don't think either the interviewer or Watterson had any idea that mainstream media would be so completely fragmented within a few decades.

Meanwhile, Berke Breathed is still available, still producing, still an amazing artist.

Even with a million Opus dolls, I don’t think any of it has chained him down or held him back.

To each their own, and I love BB just as much as I love BW (and Gary Larson).

No matter which decisions we make, we must live with them.

Let us see what levels of Trump antagonism he will rise to

I was gifted the entire collection a couple of years ago by my father, having grown up adoring Calvin and Hobbes, mostly thanks to him. I used to re-read the few books at the local library over and over again. The Christmas strips were my favourite, because I hadn't experienced snow at the time.

The entire collection opened a window into Watterson's evolution. He became a bit more cynical as time passed. I loved it.

Reading about his respect for his work, his refusal to sell out and his restraint made so much sense. You could feel it, the way these characters came to life. The essence ever intact.

Forever changed, forever grateful

I recently found my old copies of the Calvin & Hobbes collections (The Days are Just Packed, etc.). I read them when I was around 8, and I have a son due next year. Can't wait to pass it on.

His commencement speech at Kenyon in 1990 is also a brilliant read:

https://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html

Unfortunately Watterson's position doesn't really seem to have stopped the completely unauthorized "Calvin pissing on (whatever)" stickers sold at truck stops throughout the US and Canada.

I came back to revisit the article, but it's mysteriously disappeared.

Here's the Archive.org link for anyone who stumbles across it later: https://web.archive.org/web/20210918034921/http://timhulsize...

One of my son's best investments was his buying the Complete Calvin & Hobbes.

He also got the Complete Far Side and Bloom County as well. Both our teenagers have read them both.

It's funny hearing them know how Bill the Cat's brain was switched (?) into Donald Trumps brain. Ack-thpptt!

I only read them in the newspaper and in a couple of treasuries, but never completely, as our kids have.

What a remarkable blessing for them to be able to read those strips beginning-to-end.

    > Blocked because of application
    > Your computer has been blocked because of an application detected in your system. For more information, contact the system administrator.

No Tor browsers.

> detected in your system

How?

People get the Tor exit node list and block their IPs, I think.

I am grateful for cartoonists like Watterson and Schultz, especially after hearing about how nasty Hank Ketcham was (Dennis the Menace)

(1987)

Aw nuts, I was hoping this was another new release. Watterson has famously been living quietly out of the public eye for almost 30 years now, but recently released a new short book in collaboration with John Kascht called "The Mysteries". He did appear in an interview on that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHND7L1wUl0

> Christie: Do you see yourself doing this forever?

> Watterson: I'd like to, yeah, if the market will bear it.

It would be interesting to see the state of Calvin and Hobbes had Watterson decided to keep running the strip.

Where's this interview from? Who's the interviewer?

very insightful

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