Bill Watterson #2: Anti-Merchandising

Why did Bill Watterson fight the merchandising of Calvin and Hobbes so much, so bitterly, asks and answers Matthew Morgan.

 

One gets a clue from a question fans of the strip asked: Was Hobbes real or imaginary? Here is Watterson’s own Zen koan-like answer:

“Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that’s how life works.”

 

The article summarizes Watterson’s answer perfectly:

“You could say Hobbes is both imaginatively real and really imaginary, depending on your perspective. Hobbes can be either, which also means he’s both. Is Hobbes a tiger or a toy? Yes.”

 

If Watterson looked at Hobbes with this Zen/quantum mechanical duality lens, one can understand:

“(Why Watterson was so averse to) some toy manufacturer settle it by turning Hobbes “into a stuffed toy for real, and deprive the strip of an element of its magic”.

 

Merchandising, Watterson rightly feared, would ruin the strip and its characters.

“He’d sound off wherever he could on how “licensing usually cheapens the original creation” by saturating a market with characters until readers are bored of seeing them; how a multi-paneled story with dynamic action cannot be respected by the vagaries of a coffee mug illustration; how subtlety is sacrificed for immediacy; how selling off “everything fun and magical” means “the strip’s world is diminished”.

 

No wonder then that:

“Watterson viewed the conflict as something Biblical in its intensity and stakes.”

~~

 

All of the above makes you admire Watterson. But he was human too, emotional at times. Like the time “he drops the high-and-mighty in favour of I-the-mighty: “Calvin and Hobbes was designed to be a comic strip and that’s all I want it to be. It’s the one place where everything works the way I intend it to.”

 

Perhaps Watterson “never quite made peace with the public nature of the private world he created in Calvin and Hobbes”.

 

The same man who was so comfortable with the ambiguity of Hobbes’ real or imaginary status, saw the world in binary, black and white terms during his fights with the syndicate. People aren’t simple; they’re not always consistent...

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