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- Hacker News
- "A few weeks later, the project is finished. Watterson probably takes a moment to stand in the middle of the room and look up, contemplating the months of work, the tins of paint he went through, the things he learned about technique, about the joy of a job done for its own sake, about himself. Then he opens a tin of whitewash, climbs up the bed-chairs-table one last time, and paints over his work. He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh."
Is it Zen where they do this with mandalas? The monks spend forever building intricate sand paintings and then wipe/blow them away in an instant. Love it.
I wish I could explain why, but this is the C+H comic I think of the most: https://i0.wp.com/www.thedockchurch.org/blog/wp-content/uplo...
- I believe those are the Tibetan Buddhists.
- > He leaves the ceiling white, empty, fresh.
Did anyone ever try and recover the painting/palimpsest?
by robocat - A lot of artists do this a lot of times. Especially work that pushes your boundaries is often not of the best quality, not suited for release. We finish it, we enjoy it, we share it perhaps with a small group of friends, and then it goes in the bin. It's just the way of it, and why I'm so skeptical of so many social media influencers who create stuff but the creation of that stuff becomes the media of their particular medium, not the thing they're meant to be making. Like game developers who post a lot about whatever game they're making, and get such engagement that the thing they're making and the quality of it almost takes a back seat to simply continuing the work for the sake of documenting it and posting about it.
It's also why despite using AI for work and for occasional brainstorming, it never, ever will find it's way into my actual artistic processes and works. The friction of creating is the point of creating, and where AI removes that friction, it renders the product pointless. An AI image feels empty precisely because there were, by definition, no long nights spent with it, no difficult to solve problems, no taste to reckon with: it was simply made with precision and perfection by a machine being told what to make. An achievement certainly, but not a human one.
by ToucanLoucan - > I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it. I think that’s how life works.
Not to spoil a beautiful joke by explaining it, but all of the strips are based on this. Two characters see things differently. Sometimes it’s because Calvin is in the grip of his (psychosis|childhood) and sometimes it’s a totally ex machina Watterson idea that they’re exploring, but there’s always two worlds colliding hilariously.
I have no idea if a truly competent director could catch lightning in a bottle. The movie Fight Club has been correctly compared to Calvin and Hobbes. There’s no way for stuffed toys to capture this at all. Good for Watterson for allowing his genius not to be trampled.
by hyperhello - > The movie Fight Club has been correctly compared to Calvin and Hobbes.
Bit of a tangent, but I recently watched Fight Club with my son. He was surprised he liked it because he'd gotten the impression it was a dog whistle for manosphere spazzes. I was like "exactly, Matrix is actually good too...".
by rapind - I didn’t know Calvin and Hobbes so well until recently. My wife recently got me the integral of Calvin and Hobbes and I read it in full in a few weeks. What a masterpiece!
What struck me the most is the magical balance between humor, philosophical tale, and ode to childhood. I have two kids and it helped me numerous time approaching their silliness in a more constructive and patient way.
by jurgenaut23 - This is one of the reasons I have Stupendous Man on my forearm. It's the version of him running into his classroom on the back of one of the books (arms flexing triumphantly), only I had that artist style the costume based on how he appears in Calvin's imagination.
I can't imagine getting Garfield or Snoopy on my skin. CnH was massively important to me growing up. It had so much meaning.
I also remember Watterson writing, in the CnH retrospective anthology (on the topic of Moe, the school bully), that he didn't identify with people who were nostalgic for childhood because he remembered it being a very difficult time. Poignant and true.
Edit: Btw, CnH lovers: See new book The Mysteries
by alsetmusic - You have linked to your own comment.by aqfamnzc
- Thats very interesting to me that Watterson remembers his childhood as a difficult time. Calvin’s moments of sadness/anxiety/anger are a big part of why I found those comics so relatable and endearing as a kid.by biophysboy
- I can safely say the three biggest influences in my teens were Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, The Muppet Show, and Calvin and Hobbes. Sagan ignited my passion for learning and made me realise I a rare ability to understand complicated things visually.
The Muppets taught me that nothing in life should be beyond ridicule, and that I should be the first one to laugh at myself, and to never be afraid to do stupid things. Also that a touch of surrealism is key to a healthy life.
Calvin gave me a sense of belonging, and made me realise I was not as weird as I originally thought. If people enough like it to the point newspapers publish the strips, I would not be alone. The final strip really hit me hard. I miss those two.
by rbanffy - Some interesting discussion here about Bill Watterson and Jim Davis and it makes me wonder about this word, "integrity," that's being used. In my mind, integrity is to be honest and to do what you promise to do (unless we are talking about physical structures, which we aren't here, are we?). When an artist "sells out" is that really showing a lack of integrity? I guess it depends on what promises they made to... themselves? To others? What if things have changed since they made those promises? We aren't talking about moral absolutes like "thou shall not kill," here (if even that is an absolute). I feel like "integrity" is possibly the wrong word to use for all this, but as someone who grew up very religious and who strives to maintain his own integrity, I can see why people might use the word here. I think my concern is for when other artists who make different decisions than Bill Watterson are ridiculed for not having integrity, as if they have broken some moral code. They haven't.by krupan
- I agree. Davis intended to do what he did all along.
If Watterson deviated and sold the merchandise he would have lacked integrity, sure. But someone like Davis is acting according to their ideals and intentions and so on; there is a lot of integrity present in the matter.
People use it to mean “they did something I disagree with” which doesn’t inherently overlap with integrity concerns.
I suppose you could argue that art isn’t meant to be commercialized in such a way, and so Davis lacked integrity to the discipline and trade. Some comic artists might say his approach takes away from comic artistry and lacks integrity in that manner. I’m not sure if that’s true or reasonable to say at all. Someone can make a comic for any reason they want as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t know what Davis is like personally, but from the outside and looking only at Garfield, it doesn’t appear that he lacked integrity.
- The last Calvin and Hobbes strip [1].
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/calvinandhobbes/comments/6pig9h/hon...
by apparent - Still brings a lump to my throat.by lproven
- Sometimes I entertain the fantasy that Watterson continued writing Calvin and Hobbes as a hobby-- whenever a particularly good idea came to him he'd put it to paper. And someday he'll drop a collection that dwarfs the original strip.by ckw
- This is really well written, which is refreshing with all the AI.
Past:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116184 Bill Watterson’s refusal to license Calvin and Hobbes (2016) 464 points July 16, 2022 311 comments
More on Calvin and Hobbes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by Cider9986 - I model my parenting style on Calvin’s dad. I actually had almost the identical conversation with my kids about why old pictures are in black and white. When they were in fourth grade my daughter came home from school angry at me about having let her and her brother believe for four years that the world used to be in black and white.
They haven’t brought up bridges and weight limits yet so I can only assume they still believe that.
by dhosek - What was the one about bridges and weight limits? I remember the one about the sun being the size of a quarter.
- That last truck really shows off the engineering workby conartist6
- I once posted Bill Watterson's speech to the 1990 graduating class of his alma mater, but it never got to the front pages. I think I tried posting it again, no go. I just made this account so I can try it a third time. More than any comment I could write to some HN post, I wished people would click on the link and read it. Here's hoping some of you will do it, before it's wiped out from the net:
- Thanks for sharing that!by bear8642
- Inspiring and thoughtful! Thanks for sharing
- That is a wonderful speech, I have never read it before. Thank you for sharing.
- by smallerize
- I take advice from rich people with a grain of salt. It's easier to praise the value of money over integrity when you have both. They don't ask starving artists to give graduation speeches.
Watterson appears to have genuine integrity and I applaud him. There is a point where you have enough money, and the ones who deserve the most scorn are those who cheat to get even more when they have orders of magnitude more than that. But don't forget that a lot of people really do have to choose between integrity and dinner, and I don't judge their decision.
by jfengel - Great speech. I appreciate how he talked about not selling out, but only after he described how tough it is to earn money in the real world. Especially because Kenyon is one of those places you would hear "I don't care about money" from people who already got it the easy way.
A quote that stood out: "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards."
by frollogaston - What a brilliantly written piece. Maintaining one's integrity is unfortunately rare enough that it makes Watterson's story so remarkable. I completely respect and admire his dedication to doing something for its own sake, for holding himself to the highest standards imaginable, and from walking away from it all for his own reasons - even if selfishly I'd rather him keep writing so that there would be more to enjoy. Time to go pull some old volumes of Calvin & Hobbes off the shelf for the hundredth time, I suppose.by dgritsko
- Was this the right choice, though?
Interest in Calvin & Hobbes has fallen off a cliff. I don't see any references to it in public anymore, and it used to be everywhere.
Kids today probably don't even know about it.
by echelon - It's great that he wasn't tricked or coerced. I imagine some artists have the integrity, but not the knowledge to prevent being taken advantage of.by Cider9986