Interestingly, while Schultz had a long period of sameness in the 70s-80s, in his last years (after Watterson’s retirement) he became experimental again, with single long panels and marked changes in styling (some driven by aging shaking hands, but interesting styling that embraced the challenges), and a series of decent new setups.
Edit: or at least as experimental as a quiet Lutheran from Minnesota could be :).
I think one downside to not merchandising is Calvin isn’t still as visible in pop culture as he could be. My 12 year old daughter loves C&H and keeps a volume from the complete collection in her backpack or near the bed most of the time. However that is because I introduced her to it. The majority of her classmates have never heard of Calvin and Hobbes. It seems a shame to me that most of a generation could miss out because their awareness of the strip’s existence depends on their parents exposing them to it.
As for quitting the strip, I think that was the right decision. My parents had scrapbooks of Peanuts they made by clipping the daily strips in the 50s and 60s since there weren’t anthologies you could buy. I loved reading those, but even in the 80s the peanuts strips in the paper were rarely funny, especially compared to the old ones. I was glad when the local paper final acknowledged what was so obvious, and put Calvin and Hobbes above the fold in the Sunday comics, over Peanuts.
Is there a company out there selling faux-vintage cat’s eye style glasses to hipsters and Tumblr bloggers? I smell licensing gold!
There were, you know. The first Peanuts anthology was published in 1952, and you’ve been able to buy collections from one publisher or another ever since.
As for the original question, I admire Watterson enormously for his decision. A flood of merchandising crap and the inevitable decline in quality which results from extending any strip’s life indefinitely could only have cheapened what he’d already achieved. He was protecting the work by refusing to dilute it, and that’s an admirable decision for any artist to make.
If you doubt me, just imagine what the similarly-truncated Fawlty Towers would be like now if it were just entering its 25th season.
Add me to the list of people who found Calvin and Hobbes kind of bitter and sanctimonious in its final years. That doesn’t mean it was never funny; crankiness and misanthropy are good wellsprings for humor, after all. But it’s obvious in retrospect (or least seems so to me) that Watterson’s struggles to survive in the industry on his own terms were coloring his work, and not in positive ways. The strip remained consistently worth reading from the start of its run to the end, but I don’t agree with the oft-stated line that Watterson quit “at his peak.”
As to whether I “admire” him or not, that’s a vexed question. Certainly I respect his decision to pursue his career in whatever direction he chooses, or not to pursue it at all. He’s obviously a brilliant artist and writer. I suppose I feel something akin to slight sadness that his principles proved so daunting that in the end, even he could no longer live up to them. He had without question the best deal of any syndicated cartoonist, better even than Schulz: he owned his characters and retained all merchandising rights to them, and in later years he was even able to demand that C&H’s Sunday strips would have an entire half-page devoted to them, without the “throwaway” panels cartoonists always had to build into their Sundays. And even that wasn’t enough.
I’m not sure that’s something to necessarily admire. Indeed, the argument could be made that in winning the battle against his syndicate, Watterson lost the war: the privileges he earned didn’t trickle down to others in the industry or reform it in any meaningful way, and in the end, they didn’t even save Calvin and Hobbes itself. The post above makes an interesting point I hadn’t considered — without the kind of merchandising Watterson fought against so stridently, how are new generations of readers going to discover his strip? Watterson may be content with the possibility that Calvin and Hobbes could one day be known and loved only by comic nerds. I would think it rather a shame.
Debates about Watterson invariably end up contrasting him with Schulz (and vice versa). I wanted to recommend this essay in the L.A. Review of Books for doing a good job of fairly defining the perspectives of both men. Both cared deeply about cartooning, and yet their devotion drove them in completely opposite directions.
That was likely because newspapers were required to give the Sunday strips their own half-page, and couldn’t drop or rearrange any of the panels.
The same way my kid did – by reading my books. And me buying him his own.
He discovered The Far Side the same way; I introduced him to it and he liked it and hunted down the rest. He didn’t get into it because of desk calendars and coffee mugs. Go buy your child or niece/nephew a nice C& H collection 