Very nice to see Watterson returning to comics - too bad the comic he returned to (based on the strips in the link) isn’t very good.
I kind of like Fred Basset. Not because I think it’s funny, because I don’t. I think it’s cute. You have this middle-aged British couple living in a country house, and they don’t have kids; they have this dog. And they have a cozy life, gardening and wearing cardigans and going out walking with the dog. And now and then, the husband walks in, scratching his head in puzzlement, the wife gently clues him in to where he left his cigar case or whatever, and Fred turns to the viewer and thinks “That man would lose his head if it wasn’t fasted on!” There’s no humor, but it’s inoffensive and…cute. Not Rose Is Rose or Baby Blues cute, just sweet and inoffensive.
I don’t find any of the bad comics mentioned in this thread offensive.
I’m glad you posted this. I watched it last night. I strongly recommend it for any *Calvin & Hobbes *fans.
I agree. Watterson and Schulz really represent two exemplary, but polar opposite, approaches to creating a comic strip. If you read any of the C&H collections with Watterson’s commentary, you can see his approach to the strip was to constantly pare it down and refine it until only the truly essential elements remained. (Cf. Calvin’s uncle, who showed up for one story arc and never came back; his “adult” perspective spoiled the purity of Calvin’s child-world.) In that light, it was inevitable that he would have to end Calvin and Hobbes, because there was nothing left to take away and no more fresh ideas to derive from the initial premise. Chuck Jones, creator of the rigidly schematic Road Runner cartoons, said that creativity needed limitations to work best, and Watterson exemplified that better than anyone else; there’s something so pure about Calvin & Hobbes, it’s like the Platonic ideal of a comic strip.
Schulz was the opposite: he expanded Peanuts far beyond what it originally started out as. People forget that by the time Peanuts “got good” in the mid-60s, it had already been around for a decade and a half, and still had many major characters who hadn’t come on the scene yet. (In particular Peppermint Patty, one of the strip’s most underrated personalities.) in that sense, Schulz has more in common with his early idols like E.C. Segar (Popeye, or Thimble Theater if you you want to get technical), who introduced new characters and settings fairly regularly over some very long runs. It was inevitable that some repetition and decline would set in, but for at least a decade — about as long as Calvin and Hobbes ran — there was nothing to touch Peanuts on the comics page.
Therefore, while Peanuts remains a formative influence and an all-time favorite for me, it seems unfair to compare it and Calvin and Hobbes; they came from opposite approaches to stand as the best works of their respective times.
Oooh! I’m glad that you’re glad. 
I thought it was interesting that the young adults seen in the doc were all too young to have seen the strip in the papers: they discovered the C&H books in their school or public libraries!
I watched Dear Mr. Watterson last night and it was most enjoyable. Thanks so much for pointing it out.
Now I want to go and visit the Comic Library and look at some of the original drawings.
I don’t have Netflix streaming. What was his issue with C&H merchandising? I totally would buy a stuffed Hobbes if they were available!
Well, exactly, and so would EVERYBODY ELSE. But he feels that the strip is the strip and it should stop there, I guess, so he never made any deals for toys and T-shirts and lunchboxes and calendars and everything else. I don’t know how much money he made from the strip and the books but he could have been a megazillionaire selling the other stuff but he didn’t want to do that.
I thought it was mostly because Watterson didn’t want to constantly have to think of ways to get around Max not being able to refer to his brother and sister in law by their first names.
Basically he hated the idea of being a sell-out.
I enjoyed the documentary although the most interesting part was the interview with Berkeley Breathed and the guy at Universal Comics because they actually had things to say beyond, “OMG, Watterson is amazing and C&H made me the artist I am today!” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but 90 minutes is a bit much for my tastes.
I wonder if Watterson’s refusal to markey any C&H merchandise had the unintended consequence of abetting the spread of those bootleg “peeing Calvin” decals that were everywhere 10-20 years ago.
Nitpick: there were a couple of calendars (I had one—probably still do have it somewhere). But a calendar reprinting some of the strips isn’t that far removed from a book reprinting some of the strips, so I can see why he might’ve been okay with it. See also Point #4 of 7 Things You Might Not Know About Calvin and Hobbes.
Ooo! Okay. Did not know about these, thanks.
Kind of the same thing, isn’t it? Giving the parents names expands the strip’s POV beyond Calvin, for whom they are simply Mom and Dad.
Pretty much what others are saying. He thought is might cheapen the comic. He also wrote a letter to someone in the industry, I forget who, in which he stated, “I never intended for it to be anything other than a comic strip.”
One of the other comics interviewed, Stephen Pastis, creator or Pearls Before Swine, theorizes it is also about control and that once you start licensing you lose control.
He said that once you license, the license people get involved and you give up some control. Then the people who design the merchandise get involved and their opinions come in to play and you lose more control and the manufacturers get involved and you lose more control and so on.
On the control issue here is an exerpt from Wattersons introduction of the C&H box collection I grabbed from Amazons page of it. Control does seem to play into his decision not to license.
They spend a good chunk of the documentary about the licensing issue and other comics wiegh in with their opinions on. One of the more interesting parts IMO.
The syndicate he worked for actually had the rights, for awhile, to license with out his permission and they fought about that and eventually they rewrote Wattersons’ contract to give him back the rights.
As to the Hobbes stuffed/plushie Stephen Pastis said he understands Wattersons’ refusal to license C&H except for the Hobbes doll. He says the dolls design for it is right in the comic and everybody and their grandma would buy one.
But he continued saying that once Hobbes is a stuffed toy on a shelf that you can buy then it does take away some of the magic of if Hobbes is real or not. And I can see that.
But that was America - in the 1970s no less. America’s music tastes in in the 1970s were naff beyond belief, as if the nation had given up on pop music. They worshipped Boston, the Eagles, Journey during the 1970s. It was just a horribly lightweight decade and the Beatles were tainted with that. From the point of view of a UK audience the American obsession with the Beatles was a sign that (a) they were no longer capable of producing their own music (b) there were lots of sad, older music buyers who wanted to be young again.
In the UK there was a reissue programme in 1976, when EMI regained the rights to the band’s music, but only “Yesterday” hit the top ten, and the rest fizzled (“Back in the USSR” reached #19, “Sgt Pepper’s” #63, Rock and Roll Music got to #11 in the album charts). The Beatles were just meaningless in the late 1970s, early 1980s. They occupied the same cultural space as H G Wells Outline of History, a grand project from the distant past that was simply no longer relevant.
When Joe Strummer sang “No Elvis, Beatles, or The Rolling Stones / In 1977” he wasn’t joking. Elvis died a fat joke and remains so; it took a decade for the Beatles to be rehabilitated.
As opposed to the British, who evidently worshipped Perry Como, Roy Orbison, Slim Whitman, Bert Weedon, and Glen Campbell, all of whom had UK #1 albums in 1976.
And:
Alice Cooper,
Deep Purple,
Led Zeppelin,
Nazareth,
Black Sabbath,
Blue Öyster Cult,
AC/DC,
Kiss,
Aerosmith,
Van Halen,
Ted Nugent,
Supertramp
ELO,
Foreigner,
Kansas,
Styx,
The Cars,
Queen,
Billy Joel,
Elton John,
Lynyrd Skynyrd,
Cat Stevens,
Fleetwood Mac,
Judas Priest,
The Moody Blues,
Yes,
Genesis,
Pink Floyd,
Jethro Tull,
Emerson, Lake & Palmer,
Rod Stewart,
David Bowie,
Roxy Music,
Mott the Hoople,
T.Rex.
Shit man, there was more music in the 1970s to choose from than ever before in the history of the world. Lots, and lots, and lots of really great music.
