Bill Watterson #1: Merchandising Push

I found Matthew Morgan’s long post on Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes, refreshing – it provided a new perspective.

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The post starts with Watterson in his college dorm (hostel) “thinking that his dorm room needs an amateur rendition of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”!

“What the work will lack in “colour sense and technical flourish” it’ll make up for with comedy — specifically “the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakeable odour of old beer cans and older laundry”.”

Like all college kids, it’s only when he’s half done that he remembered he should have asked for permission! He goes to ask the housing director. Who immediately guesses the kid’s probably already done it. So the director agrees, on the condition the ceiling be restored to its original condition before the term ends. Watterson agrees, completes his “work”, and then wipes it clean.

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Calvin and Hobbes was always a one-man operation:

“I write every word, draw every line, color every Sunday strip, and paint every book illustration myself.”

For Watterson, every detail in every panel of every comic strip matters. The smallest details matter, they are what make a strip truly great. Conversely:

“If all the cartoonist does is “illustrate a joke”, the cartoonist “is going to lose”.”

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Creativity v/s commerce, the long-running feud Watterson engaged in:

“Here, commerce is represented by Universal Press Syndicate, which Watterson refers to as “the syndicate”, like an organisation of villains in a comic book. (Once, he even publicly called them “a bloodsucking corporate parasite”.)”

 

To be fair, the syndicate was the middleman between the comic artists and the publishing outlets. Without them, few cartoonists stood a realistic chance of getting published or making a liveable income.

“Except that Watterson sees them as taking a side — the side of the newspapers.”

 

What would be artistic considerations for most, Watterson considered almost a spiritual aspect! He looked at them as “questions of ethics, which explains his refusal to back down even when giving in was so much easier (not to mention more profitable).”

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Watterson’s contract with the syndicate was the usual kind:

“The syndicate retained the right to turn Calvin and Hobbes into toys, t-shirts, and other ephemera, and it became clear pretty early that they could all expect stupid amounts of money from merchandising.”

What the syndicate had in mind included Calvin sweatshirts. Spaceman Spiff bumper stickers. An animated Calvin and Hobbes Saturday show, maybe a movie. What made Watterson shudder the most was a Hobbes doll!

 

One can understand why the syndicate couldn’t get Watterson on this topic:

“All that money for doing what he loves? Seemed a no-brainer.”

What was different (strange?) about Watterson was that he had “an exacting idea of what it was he loved doing, and it was at odds with toys and tat, indifferent to silos of cash”.

 

What was Watterson’s problem with merchandising? We’ll see in the next blog.