Calvin and Hobbes: Bill Watterson

Calvin and Hobbes is a newspaper comic than ran from November 18, 1985 to December 31, 1995, and is considered one of the greatest comic strips ever written. One aspect of its significance comes from the author, Bill Watterson’s, efforts to keep the syndicate from commercialising on the comic strip.

As Watterson puts it, “I didn’t think greeting cards, T-shirts, or plush dolls fit with the spirit or message of my comic strip, and I didn’t like the idea of using this hard-won, precious job to peddle a bunch of trinkets, I wanted to draw cartoons, not run an empire…”

While other comics strips have greeting cards, mugs and T-shirts featuring their characters and making a sizable profit in “shameless commercialism”, Watterson’s values forbidded him from marketing his characters. To him, licensing cheapens the original creation; it ruins the spirit, it intrudes the reality of the strip. Simply, he chose artistic integrity over “trainloads of money”.

This is one of the reasons why Calvin and Hobbes remains as one of the greatest strips ever created: it doesn’t ever lose its value.