Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity
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I certainly don't blame Jim Davis for "selling out". He made a marketable character, and I don't blame him for trying to make his money because of it. I don't have a ton of artistic talent but if I created a lovable comic character and someone offered me a dumptruck full of money to sell toys and t-shirts and cartoons, I'm pretty sure I would take it, and I might even take it even if I felt like it diminished my vision of the comic. I would like to think I have integrity, and I think I do to some extent (there are certain types of companies I will not work for e.g. casinos), but Waterson is on another level.
And I have to say, it has made Calvin and Hobbes age a lot better for me. Garfield is almost more of a "brand" than a comic at this point, and it has made it such that I find the character and even the comics kind of (for want of a better word) "cheap" or "tacky". The same can be said for Dilbert (Scott Adams himself not withstanding...I used to genuinely like the comics).
C&H, on the other hand, reads about as well now as it did when I was a kid. The jokes still work, the art is appealing, and since there hasn't been this mass-marketing push for it, it has retained a purity unlike anything else.
I don't have the integrity or will power that Bill Waterson has, and I probably never will, but it can be something I strive to have some day.
> If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them.
I'm kidding really. Bill Watterson doesn't owe us anything; if he was no longer enjoying creating the comics, why should we get to enjoy reading them? And we'd just have the same complaint if he quit after eleven years instead of ten, or worse, we'd be saying how the last couple of years it was clear his heart wasn't in it.
I guess as a kid I always thought it was the comic that "old people" liked, and never gave it much of a shot, but I kind of inadvertently found it recently and it actually pretty good.
Overall I lean toward appreciating things that end early more than things that end late.
Maybe Watterson could have squeezed another year or two out of himself, but it's by no means a given it wouldn't have meant unreasonable personal sacrifice.
But they both knew that the font was running low, if not completely dry; likely triggered by starting a joke and realizing they'd done it before years ago.
Both have "come back" here and there to dabble, as appropriate for someone who actually knows how to retire.
The Simpsons used to be my favorite show, but I feel like the quality dropped dramatically after season ~13 or so. Part of that is because I got older, I'll admit, but even rewatching the older seasons, I still find them funny while season 13 and onward I simply don't.
I would have so rather they ended the show twenty years ago and use whatever budget they spent making it on new cartoons.
Larson and Watterson were high intensity in a way classic cartoonists weren't. That's not bad, but most people are probably going to burn out or worse (e.g. ending up like Scott Adams).
But he’s also a good example of “growing with his audience” - the latter strips pleased his readers even if they didn’t gain many additional.
I do find that it’s sad that in an era of increasingly cheaper and cheaper printing that comics continue to shrink.
We have had threads on HN before about C&H where people identify a slight but noticeable change in the strip in the last years. Watterson was naturally growing more ornery as he moved towards dad age, and that more dismal view of the world did grind against the strip’s basis in the wonder and magic of childhood.
I think this implies that Calvin is not as unruly as it appears, and he was raised with good values, so he still obeys his parents most of the time because he knows they want the best for him.
If we still had Calvin and Hobbes nowadays, it wouldn't be as well received if it didn't change with the times. I can't picture them going to family theraphy, for example, although I haven't read all the strips.
And as such, Garfield has never had any sort of message or meaning. It's just a cartoon that kids and some adults like.
Waterson, on the other hand, very obviously enjoyed his work and pushing boundaries. C&H was chock full of his personal beliefs, messages, and morals. And he loved causing newspapers headaches. He did things like purposefully making odd shaped vertical comics just to force the comics page editors to deal with and think about how they'd lay out the page. All to try and break people out of commercial thought, to make people question "why is the layout like this".
The two are such polar opposites it's almost amazing they both ran comics in the same papers.
I wish we had more watersons running things in all forms of media.
The world needs Watersons now more than ever. And Calvins and Hobbeses.
More seriously, I should have capitalized the "M" to make clear that it was Men, as in Mankind, but this is the internet in 2026 and most people are only semi-literate. I'm not certain it would have helped.
Especially if someone wants to be offended. You just can't stop them if that was their goal going into it.
Using "man" to refer to all people stopped being popular last century.
The word "Men" was gender neutral long before it became masculine, and Armstrong did not take "one giant leap for peoplekind".
Something I think a lot of people don't realize is that Japan has a much healthier media ecosystem in many respects. Like we just don't get new comic strips here and haven't in decades whereas in Japan they get new 4-koma like Bocci the Rock and The Demon Girl Next Door all the time and these get anime and video games and merchandise and make tons of money.
Our media industry has to realize that it doesn't just have a cyclical problem but that it is stuck recycling the same old properties over and over again as it shrinks. It's got to give a chance to some new blood.
But comparatively the US and most of the rest of the world is in a media dark age. The US seems to only manage to invent a new good property every decade or so. Everything else is rehashing existing ideas.
I really would like to know what Japan does differently to nurture new properties. It clearly works. It seems South Korea and China are also doing pretty well in that aspect.
Lots of new interesting stuff comes out and dies or doesn't survive, but it means they do have some constant incubation. The American version of this for comics is basically letting new writers try their hand at a big existing property to see if they're any good, but that means the new ideas are "fun spin on batman" or etc. (And of course the indie scene exists in both to different extents, but the publishers for non DC/Marvel stuff in the US are anemic.)
I hear scholastic is genuinely good, but they have a very specific audience ofc.
Monkey Magic theme song anyone? https://youtu.be/wddJnq-D3XM?si=J2xAgXoygreTD73w
There are certain elements of Journey to the West found in DB but not even Goku is similar to Wukong. Yes, monkey-like features, extending stick, perhaps a couple of early characters but everything else is not even close. So I don't think it's fair to say that is a rehash.
When I go out as
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116484198935085911
I find 20% or so people in the general population in my town recognize who I am right away because they watched either Naruto or Demon Slayer and those are both in my queue so I can understand better what they know about me.
... but it is hard because there is Slayers and Futari Wa Precure and many many anime that have a few 12 epsiode seasons in my queue. And a lot of that is in the "so bad it's good category". One of my guilty pleasures is
https://w1.backstabbedinabackwaterdungeon.xyz/chapters/1/
which gets really good over time because the crazy overpowered protagonist and his Level 9999 friends almost meet their match and I never would have discovered the light novel and manga if I hadn't been willing to watch a truly atrocious J.C. Staff anime. Only in Japan can some ordinary person write a web novel, get a contract for a light novel, get a manga made, then get an anime, video games, etc. The "media mix" strategy lets their industry market test content with low risk and the anime doesn't even have to be profitable on its own if it convinces 10,000 or so obsessive fans to shell out $150 to buy all the books of the light novel and another $150 to buy the books of the manga.
The cost structure of the US media industry is a lot worse and divides between super-expensive prestige content and a tier of slop. It's all a gatekeeping-industrial complex and no wonder people are pissed about DEI, "woke" and all that because it's a zero sum game. The industry would love to get another J. K. Rowlings and we've probably had 10 of them who never got greenlit because of low risk tolerance.
Is this the origin of that trope? I've seen a couple of anime/manga that use the same story as a jump off point. Character that doesn't know their own strength kicked out of the party for being "weak" only for us to later find out they are one of the strongest/most powerful individuals in the world.
I can’t speak to other countries, but we have a very healthy ecosystem in webcomics. I back several on Patron, buy the compilations of others on Kickstarter, and otherwise grab new issues at my local comic book store or library.
And then in the late 00s, Garfield got an indie-cred boost from Garfield Minus Garfield [2], the surreal and often humorously bleak webcomic.
Not to go into an hour long Lasagna Cat speech here, but maybe Jim Davis isn't entirely sincere here?
To me it looks like he made the strip at first to laugh at himself (Jon) and his own cynical tendencies (Garfield). The "I thought becoming a cartoonist was a good way to make money" is an obvious joke at his own expense - it's a terrible way to make money, even with full Snoopy-level merchandising.
It's also notable that he's been very positive to people doing weird things like Garfield minus Garfield. He's not at all possessive to his creation. He accepted ages ago that as the comic became a phenomenon, it wasn't wholly his anymore.
If you think that's dark you should see all the Zalgo Garfield comics Davis did...
Those were a fan parody, and were nothing to do with Jim Davis.
So yeah, even imsorryjon-level Garfield isn't offensive to Davis at all
It's clear to me that he never loved his characters or were so defensive over his art as Watterson was - at least not in Garfield. But he also seems to have respected that his audience was more invested in his characters than he was, which was probably why he kept making it (and kept the right to the comic strip itself when selling everything to Viacom a few years ago).
7th life is dark. 5th life is a close second.
People would say that the cat who hates Mondays and loves lasagna isn't very funny, so he responds with "uhh, it wasn't ever meant to be that funny anyway!!!".
Regardless, I do really respect how cool he's been with stuff like Garfield Minus Garfield.
In his defense, this was also partially because they kept shrinking the space he had so he was trying to work with what he had while also forcing their hands into giving him more room to work with.
That said, I would be surprised if he's not at least a multi-millionaire.
> Watterson insisted that if he wasn’t going to settle the question of Hobbes, then he definitely wouldn’t let some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes “into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic”.
Some things really are better when you need to use your imagination.
Apparently Davis had been struggling with a previous comic strip and when an editor told him that his characters just weren't what people wanted to see, he rethought his entire strategy and decided to emulate the success of Snoopi:
- Cute character, but instead of going for dog lovers, there was a hole in the market for cat lovers
- Few, related jokes that can recur all the time (Love lasagna, hates mondays)
- No word plays - should be easy to translate
- No political jokes
- No deep jokes - should be accessible
- Lots of merchandise
I think it is super interesting that he set out from the start to build a "sell out"-brand and after reading this, I kinda respect the whole thing a lot more.
Setting out to do something commercial (and succeeding), is different from setting out to do something firmly non-commercial and then commercialising it. The second one will almost always involve compromise that was never intended, which often undermines the original, non-commercial version.
I find both doing it for money, and doing it for personal or benevolent reasons to be good. What I find despicable is claiming you're doing something for selfless reasons, but actually doing it for profit. That's what dishonest and shows ill will towards other human beings.
(Doesn't have to be strictly about money either. The amount of voices you could hear saying they won't be writing blog articles or OSS because it'll become training data for LLMs, and that this thus deprives the world of their pro bono work, clearly shows there's plenty of such dishonest attitudes in OSS circles too.)
> would like to think I have integrity, and I think I do to some extent (there are certain types of companies I will not work for e.g. casinos)
What if a casino offered you a dumptruck full of money?
I say this because I did turn down a very lucrative job opportunity at an online casino recently. It wasn’t as much money as Bill Waterson almost certainly turned down, but it would be a very significant bump in my salary.
Three Northeast Ohio creators, working in different areas of the comics world, yet it's easy to imagine a shared universe where Calvin and Hobbes, Funky Winkerbean, and American Splendor all occupy the same map and interact.
They also had in common that the work itself was the product. The strips and stories came first; merchandising, branding, and other empires were either absent or beside the point.
That's probably a coincidence. Or it says something about what 1970s acid rain did to the water in Lake Erie. But Northeast Ohio did seem to have produced an unusual number of artists who were more interested in the work than in building a franchise.
BW got thrown under the buss for taking a stance, his stance. He is a nonconformist and really, he puts in his comics a one of a kind mixture of childish silliness, questions, statements, and philosophical topics.
There is no politics other than being a nonconformist who gets bullied today now, which not even ironically proves his point as well reinforces it.
It is like he is simply protecting the purity of his characters, not the other way around. He appears to be a medium, not so much an artist.
He is a treasure, and a singularity. I ordered all of his comics back then and to this day hold them dearly and the books are treated with so much decency, they appear as never opened. I for example never fold the book cover, nothing. It is a weird thing of mine, but it is out of respect for an author with whom I have a conversation.
A worthy cause, I hope.
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/09/27
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F4...
This is why I love this community.
Interest in Calvin & Hobbes has fallen off a cliff. I don't see any references to it in public anymore, and it used to be everywhere.
Kids today probably don't even know about it.
My son enjoys reading the collection I had when I was young.
Roald Dahl, too, and the Uncle series. These old books have more of an edge to them that our kids seem to light up at, and I've had a hard time finding modern equivalents. Most of the modern kids books seem too saccharine/sterile by comparison. Maybe it's just survivorship bias, these are just the old books that people bothered to keep reading.
You don’t get to rewrite books because they make you feel uncomfortable. Don’t read them. Even Disney has had the common sense to not alter the problematic parts of its films, they just issue a warning at the beginning that it doesn’t represent their current values.
True, Disney don't merely alter them..... they bury them!
Hopefully they didn't take out the Oompa Loompa's judgemental songs, the kids find those hilarious. The humor's the sugar that makes the moral tale about how to be and not to be in the world go down - don't be a glutton, don't be greedy, try to be humble, kind, and empathetic like Charlie. It's not actually about superficial traits.
It makes the accidental discovery of C&H all the more special. I remember the day a school friend showed me a C&H book he got from his dad. It was never in the newspapers where I grew up, so I would never have discovered it otherwise.
Not everything in this world needs to obtain global reach and fame.
For over a year now, any time it's my time to do bedtime, we have to read C&H and cannot read anything else. We've been cruising through it from start to finish and are, within the next week or so, going to reach the end.
Both kiddos, especially my oldest, have been demanding that we start it over. I'll probably table it for a couple of years and then come back to it when they're just a bit older, but yeah... kids definitely know about it and really do appreciate/enjoy it.
Edit: To say nothing of the idea that, eventually, everything fades into obscurity. I feel like what you're lamenting is something that actually jives with Watterson philosophically.
I am not sure that is the most important thing, or even that important at all. The characters matter a LOT to people of a certain age, and his decisions helped maintain that.
There will still be people that find Calvin for the first time, and they will get the same privilege. I'm glad he did it his way and I think most of his new fans will as well.
A quote that stood out: "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."
This quote more than ever seems like taking the road less travelled by in this day and age
Watterson appears to have genuine integrity and I applaud him. There is a point where you have enough money, and the ones who deserve the most scorn are those who cheat to get even more when they have orders of magnitude more than that. But don't forget that a lot of people really do have to choose between integrity and dinner, and I don't judge their decision.
> There is a point where you have enough money
You forego the option of choosing when you end up chasing a goal or living a standard of living which requires you to continuously choose money every time. It takes a lot of thinking to come to what "enough" means. For some, enough is a few hundred thousand dollars max. For some, even a billion is not enough. You can definitely appreciate the former when they reach that goal and stay there, but it becomes difficult to appreciate the latter (and they are the focus of most of the criticism here), because you do need to sacrifice more than a bit of integrity in that case.
They haven’t brought up bridges and weight limits yet so I can only assume they still believe that.
And really, it's something that shouldn't stop with childhood beliefs. There are a lot problems we have as adults because of stories we have been told and stories we tell ourselves that are not true.
Yeah, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy were all a sort of mini rite-of-passage when I was a kid, with everyone figuring it out at different times. Made us feel a little more grown up, especially among other kids who hadn't figured it out yet. And for some reason I don't remember us spoiling it for them - instead we were in on the secret to make the holiday more fun.
One of my favorites!
https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/u3dqja/how...
Past:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116184 Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016) 464 points July 16, 2022 311 comments
More on Calvin and Hobbes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/6pig9h/hon...
If Watterson deviated and sold the merchandise he would have lacked integrity, sure. But someone like Davis is acting according to their ideals and intentions and so on; there is a lot of integrity present in the matter.
People use it to mean “they did something I disagree with” which doesn’t inherently overlap with integrity concerns.
I suppose you could argue that art isn’t meant to be commercialized in such a way, and so Davis lacked integrity to the discipline and trade. Some comic artists might say his approach takes away from comic artistry and lacks integrity in that manner. I’m not sure if that’s true or reasonable to say at all. Someone can make a comic for any reason they want as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t know what Davis is like personally, but from the outside and looking only at Garfield, it doesn’t appear that he lacked integrity.
The Muppets taught me that nothing in life should be beyond ridicule, and that I should be the first one to laugh at myself, and to never be afraid to do stupid things. Also that a touch of surrealism is key to a healthy life.
Calvin gave me a sense of belonging, and made me realise I was not as weird as I originally thought. If people enough like it to the point newspapers publish the strips, I would not be alone. The final strip really hit me hard. I miss those two.
I can't imagine getting Garfield or Snoopy on my skin. CnH was massively important to me growing up. It had so much meaning.
I also remember Watterson writing, in the CnH retrospective anthology (on the topic of Moe, the school bully), that he didn't identify with people who were nostalgic for childhood because he remembered it being a very difficult time. Poignant and true.
Edit: Btw, CnH lovers: See new book The Mysteries
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mysteries/Bill-Wa...
What struck me the most is the magical balance between humor, philosophical tale, and ode to childhood. I have two kids and it helped me numerous time approaching their silliness in a more constructive and patient way.
Not to spoil a beautiful joke by explaining it, but all of the strips are based on this. Two characters see things differently. Sometimes it’s because Calvin is in the grip of his (psychosis|childhood) and sometimes it’s a totally ex machina Watterson idea that they’re exploring, but there’s always two worlds colliding hilariously.
I have no idea if a truly competent director could catch lightning in a bottle. The movie Fight Club has been correctly compared to Calvin and Hobbes. There’s no way for stuffed toys to capture this at all. Good for Watterson for allowing his genius not to be trampled.
Bit of a tangent, but I recently watched Fight Club with my son. He was surprised he liked it because he'd gotten the impression it was a dog whistle for manosphere spazzes. I was like "exactly, Matrix is actually good too...".
Everyone thinks this until they see the movie or read the book.
I don’t really understood why manosphere thinks these films as some tough guy films or something. Then again, I think I do.
Is it Zen where they do this with mandalas? The monks spend forever building intricate sand paintings and then wipe/blow them away in an instant. Love it.
I wish I could explain why, but this is the C+H comic I think of the most: https://i0.wp.com/www.thedockchurch.org/blog/wp-content/uplo...
It's also why despite using AI for work and for occasional brainstorming, it never, ever will find it's way into my actual artistic processes and works. The friction of creating is the point of creating, and where AI removes that friction, it renders the product pointless. An AI image feels empty precisely because there were, by definition, no long nights spent with it, no difficult to solve problems, no taste to reckon with: it was simply made with precision and perfection by a machine being told what to make. An achievement certainly, but not a human one.
Did anyone ever try and recover the painting/palimpsest?
Or would he have hated it? He certainly wouldn't have wanted to build a website for it.
While webcomics are thriving, they don't quite have the same cultural impact that every kid growing up had for a few decades where the newspaper would be out on the kitchen table and the kids would nosedive for the comics. When I think about it, it was a brilliant move for newspapers. As I got older and closer to being an adult, I started reading the rest of the paper.
There were several excellent comics, but only C&H has stood the test of time and I am so proud that my 8 year old daughter recently pulled down the books are started getting lost in them. Sometimes the restrictions and limitations produce creativity in their own right, and I often wonder if something like C&H could even make it in today's cultural environment (both from a political point of view and in the modern social media landscape).
He published a book not too long ago.
While that means it's pretty isolating to find favorite media (hard to talk about something like "Solo Leveling" with anyone that's not into that sort of thing). What it also has meant is an explosion of new media to tickle almost anyone's tastes. It's as if everything has become "underground music".
(which won a well-deserved Hugo if memory serves)
I've been on something of a webcomic kick for a while now, and while I'd love to shill for _Girl Genius_ https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20021104 (oops, guess I just did), the artist whom I find most striking and who best epitomizes the evolution of webcomics (Kaja and Phil Foglio have their origin firmly planted in traditional print work) is "Tailsteak":
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6852154.Mason_Tailstea...
who has gone from: 1/0 https://www.undefined.net/1/0/?strip=1
to Leftover Soup: https://www.leftoversoup.com/first.php
and is now working on: https://forwardcomic.com/firstpage.html
where each is published once a week or so, with a story plotted out to run for 1,000 strips --- ~two decades each --- curiousity over what other such stories are out there has me searching/reading a lot, and a "Webcomics" browser bookmarks/favorites folder which is beginning to scroll....
I guess if I had to sell the idea... in its own words: it's as far removed from the average sitcom as possible. It's not at all like anything else you have ever read. (https://www.undefined.net/1/0/?strip=961)
Originally, the frame at the xkcd link changed once per 30 minutes, now if you click the comic you can read it as an archive.
I stayed after the end of the lecture hoping that he would give me one of his drawings. He politely declined. As I recall, he said he had to be very careful about how his work was distributed. I don't know if this was b/c of his contract with the syndicate, or b/c he was already thinking about the legacy of the strip.
> Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. > You'll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you're doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you'll hear about them.
> To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble. > Reading those turgid philosophers here in these remote stone buildings may not get you a job, but if those books have forced you to ask yourself questions about what makes life truthful, purposeful, meaningful, and redeeming, you have the Swiss Army Knife of mental tools, and it's going to come in handy all the time.
Mr. Bill Watterson ... thank you!
Oh, that sounds bad.
> It says something about the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes — not to mention Watterson’s pulling power as a cartoonist — that after all the outrage and arguments, only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened to remove it from their pages. And only seven followed through.
What. This directly contradicts the first statement, does it not?
It does not.
The former was threats in the before times, the latter was the lackluster result after the dust had settled.
Yes it is.
If you are running a paper and are already under stress and trying to streamline operations and now some cartoonist demands you use a format that requires significant extra work, you'd probably complain too, even threaten to drop that content. Threats are free, and they might work, especially if a lot of papers made similar complaints and threats.
But, when it came right down to the actual decision, knowing how many readers really love that particular artwork, and would even cancel their subscriptions if it were absent from your paper, and the math told you those losses would exceed the costs you were trying to avoid, so you'd find the papers collectively lost the conflict, and you'd keep it, do the extra work, and keep the subscribers.
Thinking about it for a minute, it seems unsurprising the difference between the initial cost-free bluster vs the final whimper of a handful of costly cancellations would be quite stark?
My comment was about the contrast between "widespread" and the actual number that threatened, which was immediately stated to be 15/1800. The actual number that canceled was even smaller, but the characterization of one one-hundred-twentieth as "widespread" was interesting.
He'd eschew printing norms for the Sunday format and more or less force papers to either print it how he wanted or not get it at all.
The response was that the papers would just cancel the whole strip rather than give in to his artistic demands.
Watterson had (still has) a great deal of Personal Integrity.
I dig Personal Integrity. People like him, are kind of mythic heroes, to me.
Also, now that I've read this, I'm kinda sad about the bootleg peeing Calvin truck decal.
I figure that, long after the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to immortality.
(from the Mentalfloss article linked a few comments down)
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-...
Bill Watterson's dedication to not commercialize it preserves the charm about 'simple life, simple joys' of our childhood. He could have raked in the money, but his integrity is admirable. It isn't easy to be in his position & make such difficult choices to preserve the ethos of his art.
He mailed back a picture of the box on fire.
IMO Calvin and Hobbes will always be special because of Watterson's integrity. It says everything it needed to say, and those comics will almost always be relevant.
It wasn't so bad that I couldn't wait to stop watching it but... it wasn't good enough that I couldn't help but finish it. I still want to finish it...
... and, of course, all of the various collections of the comics in print form, up to and including the full box set, that everyone can check out from libraries or purchase and keep in perpetuity. Ya know, the actual thing, the meat of it, the heart, the soul - not tangential merchandise.
>Some artistic vision.
Talk about completely missing the point.
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53216/mental-floss-exclu...
I’m 44 and I have this dream every few months about high school and university. Something deep inside.
But yeah, it's admirable. Especially given how the average comic strip runs for decades on end with less and less humour or charm until its eventual cancelation.
Look at what happened to Frida Kalho. Her face has sadly become a synonymous for cheap stuff sold anywhere.
All this means is: Calvin and Hobbes will die out, as hardly anyone in the new generation (kids born in 2000s) know about this comic.
I can understand the art vs commercialism debate, but this is going too far in the other direction.
And before people start lecturing me: Yes I know some corproations are evil. Tintin's new owners didnt allow the original country Belgium to host a Tintin event because they wanted more money.
Corporate greed can totally kill art; but this is the other extreme, and will also lead to a slow death by people just forgetting about it
I ask because I humbly think the closest we have in the last 30 years to Watterson is Shen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_(cartoonist) . So much of what he did mirrors Watterson. More specifically, so much of his evolution mirrors Watterson. He clearly had a style that was working, but he evolved and it worked (not everyone evolves and it works, Matthew Inman comes to mind--still does great stuff, his new style just doesn't resonate with me personally, could just be me). I mean, it's not a one-for-one comparison, Shen has a plushie, for example (not much else). But there's a spirit there that I feel resonates with people deeply.
He recently left Webtoon and his 3x-a-week Blue Chair. I wrote him an email that he responded to, which is how I know if someone has a good response here, I can probably get it to him. I mention in my email Smol Web (aka Small Web, other names as well, heavily mentioned here on Hacker News) and he said "I like the principles in it." But I get the impression he still feels he must pay fealty to the social media gods (relevant The Oatmeal https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people ) and everything else is secondary. the tricky part is creating something that will pay the bills. If anyone wants to lend him a hand in that, let me know and I'll pass it on. Like, how /does/ do Small Web and make money?
Here's nearly all of my email to him, if you are curious. One of the things I hated was that during Shen's tenure at Webtoon they got more and more hostile to users browsing without using their app. I don't know if it figured into his leaving, or even if it was 100% his decision, but I do rant a bit about it. I also mention "We Go Forward." That is referenced in the Wikipedia article. Sadly, can't link to it without linking to a social media site.
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Anyway, Webtoon's loss. They went public, they thought that meant they should act like Big Tech and force people into apps. Presumably to harvest all that data, make all their users the product, and sell that data to data brokers. They then wipe their hands of what happenns [sic] as that data is sold to surveillance states or worse. Of course, it's all predicated on the fact they can act as monopolies, following the Peter Thiel handbook. But assuming they could even become the next Meta or Alphabet going the way they did, regardless that the very ickiness of it should repulse one, is just hubris. Maybe they thought the app numbers, and the app data it would mean, would be enough to merger into a Meta or Alphabet. But you can't get there by simply forcing users bluntly and harshly. Forcing users is a late-stage Meta or Alphabet move, and it never starts blunt or harsh.
I see nothing wrong with them going public, per se, provided they can convince the shareholders to not be short-sighted. But I don't think they could, thus, it probably was wrong to do a traditional IPO. Shareholders want "growth" at all costs. So they will hinge on app downloads and engagement numbers with every earnings report. And so the stock price will hinge on those numbers, to the point where unless the stock price is unrelated to decision making--e.g. a non-voting arrangement for retail buyers like Zuck got--stupid decisions will be made. If not by the original company, by the "activist investment company" that buys all the shares and makes the same stupid decisions. Assuming the activist investor doesn't just turn it private again and vampires the equity.
Yes, they right now should have an app. But a simple browser wrapper app for those younger people who think everything should be an app. The core product should support browser viewing first. At least at first. Then assuming there's enough moat (which there definitely isn't yet) it's a question of morals, do you stay on that path, or do start to force people to the app little by little? Hobbling this or that. You don't go to "can't view this webcomic except in the app" right away. That's definitely a much later Darth Vader move which, again, no one should do (but if you're Zuck, you will do anyway).
I'll be glad to see you go somewhere new. Have your own site! Use federated social media! Realize there are fans who remember We Go Forward when it came out! You know, over twenty years ago, I spent two weeks on a web comic [removed, just in case it goes afoul of this Guideline "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity." This comment is about Shen after all]. I should have Gone Forward. I gave up. It had such charm in retrospect. Good for you! Keep at it! Web comics are genius, you never have to worry about handling large data or keeping systems secure. You just make a cool .png and throw it on a smol site. (Look up smol web as a concept, Smol Ghost would approve.)
"Don't stop" is what someone wrote to me once, and it meant a lot. The beauty of what you do is you /can/ Go Forward and not have to leave others behind. I think it's time for a reboot of that original comic. Like how they made a Diablo II remake with better graphics and toggles to go between old and new. You could start out new version of Go Forward with fancy graphics, then show a settings screen, toggle to old. Toggle back to new (people will get what's going on). Go all the way to the end and switch back to old. Then do some speed-runner type thing involving jumping on hidden objects and make the parents' house show up on the same screen and they can cheer him on to the end.
Don't stop, awbvious