I’m not so sure I agree.
Yeah. Does anyone else remember when Garfield was new and it was not only funny but really, hilariously funny. Other than a slight debt to B. Kliban, it was also fairly original. And it was about a real cat. Cat owners could recognize their own pets. Then Davis ran out of “cat” material, I guess, and Garfield started standing on two feet a lot, and having human problems.
Now it’s almost as stale as Henry. How I wish Jim Davis could have walked away when I still had fond memories of the strip.
Breathed has gone psychedelic, or something. It’s much more hit-and-miss than the 80’s Bloom County, but the hits are pretty good.
I adored Calvin and Hobbes when it was running – the Madison newspaper picked it up very early in its run, while I was going to the University of Wisconsin, and so, I discovered it very early on. I still regularly re-read my collection of C&H books, and still enjoy them a great deal.
The books which contained commentary from Watterson made it clear, even back then, that he was a bit of a curmudgeon, and had some very strict principles that he stood on with regards to the strip. While I was saddened to see him retire from the strip, it was pretty clear that he had discovered that being a successful cartoonist wasn’t terribly fun for him. And, so, from that aspect, I absolutely understood his reasoning.
With regards to some of the other cartoonists mentioned:
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I also loved The Far Side, and still miss it, too, but again, I give Larson credit for stepping away before he became totally burned out.
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Like The Far Side and C&H, Bloom County was strongly part of my college days. Breathed has returned to cartooning several times since originally retiring Bloom County, but it always felt like he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to do with it. Even if the revived Bloom County doesn’t always have the same crazed humor that the original did, I’ve been enjoying it a lot.
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As a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, Peanuts was my favorite comic strip, and I spent many hours drawing Snoopy.
By the 1990s, it felt, to me, like everyone but Schulz realized that he was no longer creating great comics – ISTR reading an interview near the end of his life, in which Schulz said that he felt that the strip was as good as it had ever been. While, on the one hand, I might’ve wished that Schulz had stepped away from the strip earlier, if it gave him satisfaction to keep doing it, who am I to gainsay that decision? -
From the start, Jim Davis intended Garfield to be “marketable”, and it seems like the strip itself quickly became the necessary evil to keep the merchandise empire going. And, while Davis appears to still have a level of creative control over the strip, it sounds like much of the day-to-day work has been done by assistants for a long while.
If they did make a Hobbes toy, should it look the way the world sees him or the way Calvin sees him?
Both, depending on who’s looking at it. 
Regarding the question in the OP, I wouldn’t say I admire Bill Watterson for not merchandising the strip, because I don’t personally see anything wrong with merchandising. But I do admire the fact that he turned down large amounts of money for something he believed in. And I avoid buying unlicensed Calvin and Hobbes stuff out of respect for his choice. (I do own all the books, though, even the ones that are basically just reprints of the other ones.)
And yes, Watterson was fortunate enough to be in a position where he could afford to turn down easy money. But then, there are lots of people who also have plenty of money but who would nevertheless be willing to throw their principles out the window for a little more. (Or in this case, a lot more.)
His net worth is reportedly450 million.
There is a point where more money doesn’t matter. Watterson passed that a long, long time ago.
Slee
I admire him quite a bit.
I didn’t see anything in those google results explaining how they calculated that. Not that it really matters, but that seems rather shockingly high to me. Is that mostly just from royalties on book sales? (Admittedly, I know nothing about publishing royalties.)
The same top Google result show’s J.K. Rowling’s new worth as a billion dollars, and her work was not just a best-selling book series but led to a series of blockbuster movies, plus about a billion toys, plus theme parks and god knows what all else. I would have expected her net worth to be many times more than Watterson’s.
He wasn’t adverse to money, but becoming a foreman rather than an auteur for a product. At that point Jim Davis was already having other people ghosting his Garfield strip so he could focus on approving and autographing paraphernalia. I don’t think he meant that C&H merch itself cheapened the strip per se, but that if he didn’t make the strip itself his sole job he’d lose focus on what it was; that if it weren’t himself writing and penning it, it’d lose his vision and personal message.
Somewhere – intro to one of the books, maybe? – Watterson said that he didn’t start out being opposed to all merchandizing, but everything they showed him was so awful and antithetical to the strip that eventually it was easier to just say no to all of it. [I’m paraphrasing from memory.]
It was in the 10th Anniversary book. He more or less said he didn’t want to become a foreman, and that approving satisfactory products was time he didn’t want to invest in.
I admire him. And Larsen, too.
The strip was his and his alone, and so likewise was the decision of whether to further monetize it. My opinions on the matter are irrelevant, as is what I would have chosen to do in Watterson’s shoes, because I’m not the one in Watterson’s shoes.
To be fair, it’s not like merchandising has to take up a lot of time. He could turn his books into calendars and make money every year with no real work at all. I respect his choice but it’s not an all or nothing deal.
Well, he did license out his comic as a reading comprehension aid for what he deemed a noble cause.
It may have mutated from time management into an image integrity thing at some point, I’ll concede.
Whether or not you or I think Breathed’s current work outshines or is a pale shadow of his peak is immaterial. Does Breathed have fun dong what he does? Is he happier working at the job as he does it and making what he makes or would be happier today having avoided the last decade of comics production and doing something else?
Watterson decided that more millions would not make him happier and that continuing the strip, milking it as a cash cow, when he sensed his creative well running dry, even though those cash udders were assured of squirting for a long time to come, would make him less happy.
If Breathed is, given the chance to have a choice in the matter, doing what makes him happiest to do, then more power to him, even if you think his quality is off.
I’m picturing it now: “Well, Mr. Watterson, if you don’t like the bra and panty set how about this: the Calvin & Hobbes flask! You just unscrew Hobbes’ head and…”
Watterson, a curmudgeon? “I wish everyone ELSE was dead.”
Magnetized refrigerator punch line for the AGES.