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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I think about Bill Waterson a lot.

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.

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Garfield was always about marketing. Davis was in it to sell merchandise. It was practically designed in a lab to be the ideal comic strip for moving product.

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.

> 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.

The world has no place for men like Waterson, and it is precisely when the world leaves no place for them that men like him are most necessary.

Only men?

Women who dress like Marlene Dietrich are also acceptable, but that's where I draw the line.

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.

There is a gender-indeterminate alternative: people.

Using "man" to refer to all people stopped being popular last century.

Popularity and correctness are unrelated concepts.

The word "Men" was gender neutral long before it became masculine, and Armstrong did not take "one giant leap for peoplekind".

My understanding is that Davis quit drawing the strip pretty early on and has other people drawing it ever since.

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.

Japan will certainly drive a property into the ground (Dragonball, Naruto) though at least they keep coming up with new/inventive stories to go along with it. I'd also say Japanese media isn't without it's tropes that it repeats ad nauseam if they are successful once.

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.

the publishers seem to have more interest in trying new writers and ideas and letting them sink or swim, basically. Like the same weekly magazine that publishers one piece might let your little idea get in there too, and if readers seem to like it they'll open up spots for you in the schedule, or it can die as a one shot or get cancelled after a few chapters.

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.

Hilariously, Dragonball is a rehashing of a far older folktale.

Which one?

‘journey to the west’ [https://collider.com/dragon-ball-journey-to-the-west/], about 400 years old.

Another Chinese classic is The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I think that might be one of the oldest character-rich media franchises of all times. Drawings of Cao Cao and other characters have been identifiable for hundreds of years. They are still making video games (Dynasty Warriors) and TV shows based on it.

Some viewers will remember growing up with the TV series Monkey, whose bizarre images and stories of Pigsy and the titular flying Monkey I shall never forget.

Monkey Magic theme song anyone? https://youtu.be/wddJnq-D3XM?si=J2xAgXoygreTD73w

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_(TV_series)

Rehashing and inspired by are different things.

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.

Judging from the initial portion of the anime Dragonball pivoted gradually from a loose adaptation of Journey to the West (with Goku as the protagonist among funny versions of traditional characters) to a more original and specific setting and plot (with Goku as the most important of many Saiyan and martial artists).

The very beginning was. Most japanese comics are designed to be serialized for a long time, and are built to change direction if needed: Getting serialized is difficult, and low enough reader scores get you kicked out of the magazines, so it's common for a story to be built to swerve. Early Dragon Ball is a light thing like Dr Slump but a little more some fighting, but anything related to the old folk tale was dead and gone by, say, the second time there's a martial arts tournament. Most of what most people think about regarding dragon ball is past the moment where we randomly learn, through the power of retconning, that our main character was an alien all along, and people of his race are invading earth. Not quite the kind of thing from Journey to the West

I hardly ever watch those anime which go on forever like Bleach.

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.

> crazy overpowered protagonist and his Level 9999 friends almost meet their match

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.

Nah, that one is too new. Turns out this guy's power is only useful at the very bottom of the most dangerous dungeon which has dense enough mana that he can summon people and items stronger than the surface world. It's marketed as a crazy revenge fantasy and it is that, but it would be unfair it to compare it to the really mean-spirited revenge stories that come out of Korean and China.

Heh I never expect to see Demon Girl Next Door in public let alone in HN of all places. Seems like I'll have to see that backstabbed whatever too eventhough I never touched any work of that genre.

I guess, but I’d just say it’s moved to other distribution models because who reads newspapers now? Mostly people who want to read Family Circus reruns (okay, that’s uncharitable).

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.

It’s healthy in that there is a lot of interesting stuff constantly going on, but the actual work conditions are incredibly unhealthy for a lot of those creators.

Despite the mediocrity of the Garfield comic strip, I think a lot of Garfield's enduring popularity among late Gen X / early Millennials can be attributed to the late 80s Garfield and Friends cartoon [1]. It was actually funny, largely due to the writing by Mark Evanier. He's also known for his snappy dialogue on Groo the Wanderer, among other comic books.

And then in the late 00s, Garfield got an indie-cred boost from Garfield Minus Garfield [2], the surreal and often humorously bleak webcomic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_and_Friends

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garfield_Minus_Garfield

Groo was always a favorite of mine as a child. The amazing art of Sergio Aragones and the sarcasm and double speak that pervade the comic always connected better with me. That came across in the Aragones panels in Mad much of the time as well.

Same! They actually still put out new issues, in the form of a new 4-issue mini series roughly once per year. It's the only comic book I regularly read as an adult. Pretty amazing that Sergio is still doing this at age 88!

That's what Jim Davis tells everyone. He always cheerfully said he decided to become a cartoonist in order to make money. When asked about anything related to Garfield, he basically always denies having any artistic ambitions. That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield's entire life with Jon was just the hallucinations of him slowly starving to death alone, for instance? Oh, he saw a market survey suggesting the thing people feared most was loneliness, and thought it'd make for a good Halloween strip.

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.

> That surprisingly dark comic which suggested Garfield

If you think that's dark you should see all the Zalgo Garfield comics Davis did...

> Zalgo Garfield

Those were a fan parody, and were nothing to do with Jim Davis.

Jim Davis did however write the script for that story in "Garfield: his 9 lives" (1984) where Garfield suddenly goes feral and is implied to kill his elderly owner.

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).

Available for borrowing at https://archive.org/details/garfieldhis9live00davi

7th life is dark. 5th life is a close second.

Whoosh.

I always kind of thought that the "it was meant to be marketable, not funny" thing was a cope, in the same way that Tommy Wiseau says that The Room was always meant to be a comedy.

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.

> 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".

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.

I think it was on the front page here a few weeks ago about the creation of garfield.

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.

You respect someone who plans to be a sell-out more than someone who sells out later for whatever other reason?

Not the commenter, but yeah, I think I do.

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 think building a business is hard, and people that succeed at it (in a generally non-harmful way) are impressive. Setting out to build a business and succeeding, as opposed to stumbling into it unawares, is indeed more impressive to me, I think.

Well, at least he sold something. Only halfway joking. Because probably worse than knowing you put slop out is putting thing out nobody likes.

Maybe not for what-ever-reason, but I do respect someone who can read the market and build what the market needs, more than someone who stumbles into it. It also means that he stuck with his guns. He didn't "sell out", he decided to just "sell".

Note that you're asking whether it's more impressive that someone managed to analyze and intentionally create an appealing, cross-cultural, and marketable product, rather than creating something appealing completely by accident. Of course the former is far more impressive than the latter, assuming it really was intention as laid out by the OP. It requires intelligence and understanding of the world.

Obviously. You're not a "sell-out" if you are honest up front about your work being commercial.

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.)

There's this quote from the 2010 interview with Waterson:

> 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.

But don't we all feel sure he could have rolled along for three or two or one more year? Surely it's not like his creativity ran out suddenly on Jan 1 1996 and he had no more comic strips in him. And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline, so... couldn't we have got one more year of cartoons?

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.

Doing a daily anything is hard. Garry Trudeau sort of did a good compromise by pivoting to just a Sunday entry--that is still pretty solid. But my general observation is that it's really hard to keep things flowing day-in and day-out as a cartoonist/columnist/etc.

I didn't read the comics when they were new, but I started reading the daily rerun comics of Doonesbury, and I hadn't realized how funny they actually are.

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.

The old ones vs the current ones really do hit different.

I have similar feelings about TV shows. There are shows that I wish hadn’t ended after a couple of seasons, but there are also a ton of shows that dragged on for 6, 8, 15 seasons when it clearly would have been better to end them years earlier.

Overall I lean toward appreciating things that end early more than things that end late.

One of my favourite comic artists, Mads Eriksen [1][2] basically "disappeared" in 2008-2009 and didn't start regularly publishing comics again for more than a decade (at a much slower pace) because of the pressure and burnout.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mads_Eriksen_(cartoonist)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M_(comic_strip)

Watterson and Larson (both who retired at or near the "top" of their game) could easily have gone on for a year or two more - or three, or five, or twenty.

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.

I respect it honestly.

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.

Berke Breathed should have taken their example more seriously.

Schultz, who is still fairly universally beloved (including by Watterson I think?) went on forever. So did Johnny Hart (BC). The trick is that they're not really trying to get a laugh out of you every day. They're a slightly surreal setting with warmth, and a few recurring gags.

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).

I take Schultz as the epitome of the “danger” of going forever - the early Peanuts is substantially different than the later ones.

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.

Another example of retiring at the top was Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary. A 20 year run of daily comics with about 16-17 years of that being a reasonably consistent storyline.

> And it's not like the quality of the strips had started a slow decline

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.

Also, culture changes, and treatening a little kid with psychological or physical harm isn't as funny as it was back then. You had to grow up in that era to appreciate it. Despite loving and being loved by their parents, Calvin is frequently terrified of them.

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.

Joke is on him. The comic section of the paper (if it even has one anymore) is filled with fossilized strips that weren't even fresh in the 80s. The comic cartel in the US basically killed off the medium.

Do any households with young children present even get the newspaper anymore? I would wager if I asked my nephews and nieces they would all say they've never actually read a newspaper comic strip. I don't think any amount of freshness would have saved that

I don't think I've seen a newspaper in anyone's house in like 15-20 years.

Whenever I read something about Bill Watterson, I end up thinking about how, during the '80s and early '90s, Watterson, Tom Batiuk, and Harvey Pekar were all producing some of their best work.

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.

I totally agree.

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.

I think the newspapers and books alone still probably made Waterson a decent amount of money. More than enough to live comfortably forever. I remember Scott Adams (of Dilbert) once saying his syndication deal was something like $6 million per year, I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes was at least comparable and the books certainly sold well. Newspapers used to be absolute cash cows.

> but if I created a lovable comic character and someone offered me a dumptruck full of money

> 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?

If I were offered a dump truck full of money from a casino in order to help the casino optimize their gambling, then I think I would have enough restraint to say no.

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.

If I were a trillionaire like Elon Musk, Bill Watterson would be one of those people I would anonymous gift enough money so that the rest of their lives would be comfortable. We need more people like him, and he should be rewarded for it.

Bill Watterson is worth a hundred million dollars. He’s not hurting for cash.

He didn't license his characters, he's not worth a hundred million dollars.

The guy that never sold out won't have the island next to supreme sellouts, jared and ivanka.

In 2023 his publisher said that his printed collections had sold 50 million copies worldwide, and that the strip had appeared in 2,400 newspapers. That's at least tens of millions of dollars over many years, and with little spending and risk-averse investments, it's not unreasonable to conclude $100M for the total net worth figure.

Yes, but what fraction of that money ever reached him?

I think a hundred million is probably a bit optimistic.

That said, I would be surprised if he's not at least a multi-millionaire.

Citation? I’m sure he’s fine but $100M?

Sure, he's sold 10s of millions of books plus all the syndication money. Sounds about right.

Bill Watterson is comfortable for life - even without merchandising he's easily a millionaire multiple times over.

Ah, I think it's safe to say you wouldn't. Nothing against you, but the personality required to acquire a trillion (!!!) dollars is incompatible with the kind of philanthropic thinking you clearly possess.

Most philanthropic spending is from rich people, believe it or not.

Eh. There is one thing I don't agree with in the name of integrity: Waterson didn't allow sales of a stuffed pet tiger akin to Hobbes, which millions of children (me included) must've dreamt of. He could've made it affordable and so keep his integrity.

I mean, I think he was just afraid that the comic would become a merchandise machine instead of a comic, and I think he didn't want that.

There's like 100 of them on Etsy right now.

As the article points out, the reason for that particular lack of merchandise is even deeper.

> 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”.

Having a toy representation of the tiger doesn't mean anything about what the tiger is or represents. I'm with the downvoted OP, it's a holier than thou position and many people would've had even extra joy compared to just having the comic books. Plus, people make their own anyway.

Someone making their own is exactly how it should be. This is perfectly aligned with the spirit of the character. A factory churning out clones of Hobbes, and Watterson essentially making a statement that Hobbes is in fact just a toy would go against that spirit.

Some things really are better when you need to use your imagination.

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