Imagine my embarrassment.
Edit- add a smiley face. I didn’t mean to sound so snotty.
Hm. I think the 60s (when the WWI Flying Ace debuted) were when Peanuts was at its best.
Frankly, I think Peanuts kept going strong until the end. The artwork got shaky (and I mean that literally – I’ve got the complete Peanuts collection online and it’s heartbreaking to see him go from the smooth, crisp lines of the 1950’s and 1960’s to the slightly-wavy lines of the 80’s to the lines in the 90’s that looked like that “Dr. Katz” show) but the jokes were still good. And the multi-day Peanuts series that appeared in the 70’s and 80’s were utterly hilarious. “I think you’ve made a little mistake … this is a roller-skating contest.”
I always thought Calvin and Hobbes was great, but when I read through it all at once a year or so ago, I could see the kind of thing Eonwe and Chronos are talking about – it starts to repeat and get a little preachy near the end. Still an awesome strip, though.
(However, I think there have been some awesome strips since then, like Get Fuzzy and Pearls Before Swine and Pooch Cafe.)
I understand there are no paintings to see because he destroys each one. Something lika a great artist said ’ no one is a great painter until they’ve completed 200 paintings.’
I came back to the US after a few yeaars in China to find the first C&H book in a bookstore. ‘Hmmm, what’s this I wondered’ and then practically peed myself laughing as I read the first half of it. Oh My God. priceless
He stopped making the comic in the 90’s, he hasn’t turned it into a franchise and now he paints, only he destroys all the paintings – so, does this mean he economically secured from book sales?
I imagine so. His complete collection is still #1 for comic books, five years after it was released, and costs nearly a hundred bucks even when discounted on Amazon. I imagine he has good royalties on those. So he’s probably making a hundred grand a year just on those hardcovers*, and a bunch more of the softcovers. I also understand his last contract with the syndicate was pretty big and with his modest lifestyle he was able to stash a lot of it.
*Taking a modest estimate of 10,000 sold a year and that he’d get 10% royalties he’d make that much, but I imagine the first number is five to ten times that and the second is underestimated by 3-5% points.
I’ve been thinking about this since Chronus’ post yesterday and I am not so sure that it would have been possible to merchandise “just a little”. Presumably any merchandising deal must make sense to both parties. To protect his art, Watterson would need to exert a lot of creative control as well as business control (how much stuff to churn out). It wouldn’t make sense for the merchandiser to enter in such a deal since they would have to put so much money up front only to risk it on Watterson’s decisions. For instance, imagine if they start stamping out a Calvin mug and Watterson decides he doesn’t like the graphics any more and that he wants production to stop. No merchandiser would enter into a contract that allowed this.
Likewise, Watterson wouldn’t enter into a contract that didn’t. It also wouldn’t make a lot of sense to Watterson since he would have to expend a lot of effort to exert his creative control over something he is not particularly keen on having done in the first place.
Finally, if you accept the comic strip as an art form (which it seems Watterson does), then as an artist you are sensitive to the ways in which people interact with your art. In addition to drawing lines on a paper and coloring them, a comic artist might consider the whole comic-reading experience as integral to its presentation. The process of leafing through the paper, the smell of the newspaper ink, the frame of mind one has when sitting down to read the comics page – all of these things might be part of the experience; an experience that would be missing if the strips were on the sides of mugs and T-shirts. If you feel that the Mona Lisa or American Gothic are diminished by their reproductions and parodies, then you might feel similar about comic reproductions.
And to be fair: I know that no one has asserted that Watterson was wrong not to license merchandise. I don’t intend this as a rebuttal. I just wanted to provide an alternative perspective to merchandising; one that Watterson may hold considering his nostalgia for his childhood strips.
Or he could have completely reinvented the strip, which could end up being x10 worse than merely repeating himself. Exhibit A on that count of course has to be Funky Winkerbean.
Oh, I agree there. “Snoopy and the Red Baron” were during Peanuts’ golden age. It was during the endless succession of Snoopy golf and tennis strips that the strip was obviously in decline.
To speak heresy here, I will say that I felt the same way when “Calvin and Hobbes” started what seemed to be too many ‘Calvin builds disturbing snowmen’ strips. Not the Snow Goons, that was classic. But towards the end, there was a plethora of Calvin’s Snow Creatures, and it got a little tedious.
Exhibit B: Outland.
Fair enough. And, my point wasn’t that later stuff was derivative and bad, just that taken on the whole, it seems clear that Watterson was right, he had started to run out of things to say.
FWIW, this was my feeling too. I like that he retired when he did.
I can summarize the Peanuts decline in one word: Spike