For those who are interested and may not know; Bill Watterson also ghost-drew a few strips for the comic Pearls Before Swine (part of an arc beginning on the 2nd of June 2014[0] and continuing till the 8th). There are a couple of neat references to who it is behind the better art (anyone who's read Watterson's complaints on shrinking panel space in print media will be familiar with the guest character's comments) and I recall an old blog post by the artist of Pearls describing what it was like to work with Bill (terrifying; the thought of the postal worker just chucking these, the only comics anyone had gotten out of Watterson in years, onto his porch in the rain was horrible), but I can't find it.
Patsis's blog contains a post from 2014 and a post from 2018. Yet its "Pearls Books" page has been kept slightly more up to date. There is something comically sad about a recently active blog with only two posts over a 6+ year period. Bill Waterson and a canceled United flight were some of the most noteworthy things to have happened to him.
I've been running a Calvin & Hobbes bot for ~20 years now. Back when Google Reader was a thing, the bot published an RSS feed which had greater than >1M subscribers. It's now a bot on Reddit (/u/CalvinBot) with >700k karma.
During that time, I've tried to be very mindful of Watterson's copyright and make sure I don't violate it anyway.
This had led to some interesting "bugs." Specifically amuniversal.com only publishes the comic strip as a GIF. But the official Reddit mobile app has a bug. It treats all GIFs as a video & disables other image features, like zooming. The nature of C&H is such that very often want to zoom to see all the wonderful details Mr. Watterson put into the strip.
Because of that I routinely get complaints about it being in a GIF ("GIFs are for movies!" the whippersnappers say) and tell me to publish them as JPG or PNG. Now converting a GIF to JPG or PNG is trivial, but there's no way I can do so without violating his copyright. I'd have to host the converted image myself, which I don't have the right the do.
So I won't do it.
It's minor, but knowing Watterson felt so passionate about copyright, I think it's important to honor. But because the team at Reddit won't fix the bug, the complaints continue to come rolling in. Enough that I wrote a FAQ about it:
No, it's a GIF. This is explained in the FAQ I linked, but the file suffix (which probably made you think it's a JPG) doesn't matter. If you check the magic number, it's a GIF.
I changed the file suffix to "trick" some apps/extensions into treating it as an image instead of a movie.
> In the old days, there was this idea of “selling out” and we as a culture decided that it was bad. Monetizing a thing immediately called into question its integrity, and more importantly, the integrity of the artist. But then an interesting thing began happening in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation.
It did? I completely missed that, but it's probably because I'm old...
"Selling out" still has negative connotations, but "hustle" became a positive word that we use for a lot of behavior that previously would have been labeled "selling out."
Basically a bunch of upper-middle-class people adopted the concept of "hustle" from its poor urban context, where it acknowledged that the drive to do anything to scrape by was hard to reconcile with strict ethical standards. You don't question someone's ethics when they're trying to make sure their siblings have something to eat for dinner that night.
Upper-middle-class people recognized that feeling -- hey, that's the desperation I feel when I realize that if I don't take this adtech job, I might not be able to maintain the same lifestyle as my friends that I met in the dorm at my highly selective university. If I don't found a startup and get monstrously rich, other people will never think of me the way I think of myself, and that would suck.
How convenient that there's a word for when your desperate circumstances excuse you from the ethical standards that we apply to normal people! No matter how privileged you are, when you do ethically questionable things, just call them "hustle" and everyone will know that it isn't because of entitled self-indulgence, but because of your plucky determination to survive everything the world throws at you.
Solid comment. The word "hustle" conceals face-saving under the lip-service of survival. A careerist use it to cover up their wrongdoing. Like you said, they also believe in "hustle" because they're desperate; they've confused their face with their character. They believe "I needed to cheat and steal to get ahead because if I didn't, I won't be who I need to be, who I am." The belief in hustle masks and resolves an identity crisis, easily & selfishly.
When people can justify complex, bad behavior with simple, bad beliefs, bad behavior spreads like a fire. In the article, Bill Watterson calls out justifying as the first step for regulating bad beliefs:
> The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?”
It used to be that people lived life for the acts of life and a material things generally had a negative connotation. Now for a tremendous amount of people life is almost exclusively about material wealth and even many life experiences have a material quality because if you don't post pictures at certain landmarks did you really even go.
We're on a forum that will celebrate independant companies getting bought by bigger entities.
Going "major" is widely seen as positive.
More generally artists will openly talk about trying to get financing, be more transparent about advertisement spots being open, or request sponsorship. Patreons and direct support also comes here.
The "if you're not paying for it you're the product" quip at least cemented the idea that how money is made is something that can be discussed in the open, instead of just shunning "sell outs"
I do think the “selling out” argument is still a thing in the modern world. Here in Denmark we’re going back and forth on how to regulate things like influencers, and I’m not sure there would be a push back against it if being forced to tell people that you’re advertising a company that pays you money to advertise them wasn’t still seen as negative. Even here on HN it’s not like the buy of Red Hat by IBM was revived with a lot of love.
So I think user deng has a point about “selling out” still being a thing.
That being said, I think there is a big difference between selling out and wanting to remain in control of your creation. I have no idea whether George Lucas likes what happens with Star Wars or not, and I hope I’m not going to start a debate over it either, but by selling it he lost the creative control in a way the Bill Watterson didn’t.
My guess is that being “seen” as a “sell out” isn’t actually something that comes into play when people consider what to do with their creations very often. Because honestly, why would you ever care? So maybe there is less of it today, but to state that our public discourse has changed on the subject? I’m not convinced it has.
I personally think "selling out" is a bit more subtle than that, in my mind it's not about just making money, a tech company can sell out if it takes money from an entity and breaks promises that it made to it's early / current users, be they written or less spelled out.
Maybe your initial userbase was a bunch of hard core privacy people and post funding you start selling user data, or performing other actions which makes your original users or the people that supported you go, "wait, that's not the company I championed to success"
It's not exactly cut and dried when put like that, but there are a few companies that come to mind that effectively "sold out".
More generally, there is certainly a subgroup that mostly celebrates monetization as opposed to just doing something because you like to, you're good at it, and don't really try to make any money off it.
To see evidence that Bill Watterson made the right decision, all you have to do is look at what happened to the Simpsons' brand. Matt Groenig unleashed any and all restraint on product merchandising. It used to be a clever and insightful commentary on American society. Now it's just sad.
Same as what happened to David Bowie after he died. His estate seemed to let everything of his be merchandised after he passed. Monopoly version of David Bowie, lunchboxes, etc... oof.
Perhaps, but its the show itself that has declined, not driven by the merchandising. "The Simpsons" as a show used to be razor-sharp satire and commentary, and rather counter-cultural. Now it's everything it used to mock, and worst of all, dull as dirt.
The effect of merchandizing at this point is pretty irrelevant.
In the old days, there was this idea of “selling out” and we as a culture decided that it was bad. Monetizing a thing immediately called into question its integrity, and more importantly, the integrity of the artist. But then an interesting thing began happening in the late 90’s and early 00’s. The idea of selling out lost its negative connotation.
Chuck Klosterman's recent book "The Nineties" talks about this a lot! And honestly it's spot on. I had forgotten about this, and not realized how much it disappeared as a cultural concept.
We all used the phrase "selling out" frequently (on the east coast of the US), but I remember one high school friend who invoked it constantly. Calling people "sell outs" (i.e. lacking in authenticity) was a common insult.
Grunge bands and in particular Kurt Cobain had almost a pathological obsession with "selling out", to the point where it had some part in his death. Even popularity was seen as a sign of selling out -- it was better to be true to your indie roots.
There are some interesting quotes in the book from Cobain and contemporaries, and the author talks about influential movies at the time that dealt with the concept.
I was never a Calvin and Hobbes fan, but it's definitely interesting and notable that the creator avoided "selling out".
While I think we were too obsessed with it back then, I think a concept that probably needs more respect today. You could even talk coherently about Google "selling out", although that concept may now be foreign to many people. There was a notion of authenticity and that you cared about the mission, i.e. organizing the world's information. But that is long gone :-(
In retrospect the obsession with "selling out" in the 90's was a reaction to capitalist values affecting more and more parts of life. Though, being a teenager, I didn't realize that, and I just said what my friends said!
It was a way to keep your peers in check. But it's sad that people don't even notice it anymore. They would wonder why you did NOT "sell out".
You don't need to go as far forward as the 90s and grunge. Rush was skewering musical sellouts at the beginning of the 80s:
"For the words of the PROFITS were written on the studio walls. Echoes with the sound of salesmen, of SALESMEN (sung with the highest levels of disdain)"
I was about to recommend the same book. Also, recommend Klosterman's interview with Tyler Cowen [1] if you want to get a sense of what the book feels like.
I remember way back when no real athlete would carry sponsorship messages - it would be "selling out". People who participated in sports for money were banned from participating in "clean sports" (and shamed). Maybe it wasn't like that in the US, but in Scandinavia it certainly was.
In the good old days, in many ways. Kudos to Bill Watterson.
I'm a millennial, I don't see how licensing IP would be selling out compared with carrying sponsorship messages. I understand how the latter can be seen as selling out
The phenomenon is not new. The difference seems to be that there is no limit at all. Today nobody thinks "this is so tasteless that I don't want to work with it anymore".
I think it's more honest. Art's and creative jobs have had the aura of being form of uncompromising self-expression, vehicle of social and political change and beauty. Pretending adds layer of deceit.
That can't coexist with the goal of maximizing mass market popularity and income. I think this is the logical conclusion when something turns into pure commerce. Only thing valuable is visibility, recognizably, hype.
What makes Bill Watterson look like mystical figure is that "having enough" and "shutting up after you have said what you wanted" is alien concept in business.
There are a fair number of examples in cartooning (to greater or lesser degrees) where creators have partially or wholly walked away. Being engaging and funny day in and day out must be incredibly difficult and I imagine that many at the top of their field who aren't doing formulaic creations just burn out and--once out--don't really have the motivation to get back in again.
For many of you, some older and some those who did not get into street music, the cultural event that ended the concept of "selling out" was hip hop artists declaring "selling out" to be white establishment propaganda, and "getting paid" is all that matters anymore. The 90's street music was all about "getting paid" and quite elaborate examinations of how the negative attitude toward "selling out" was the establishment suppressing the voices of the street.
I suspect the difference is that in the past the only way to go commercial was to work with a big corporation. Going to market with something was so hugely expensive, and required extensive marketing and distribution infrastructure, which was all internal to these big concerns. The problem was these companies expected a lot of invasive creative control and long term contracts to give access to those capabilities, which to be fair were hugely expensive to build and operate.
Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc.
The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so creatives have a much stronger hand than they used to.
So I really don't think this is down to the generation themselves, the world they live in is just different.
> It did in the sense that kids these days don’t worry about selling out. It’s a generational change.
I mean, I can understand that establishing a "brand" is more important nowadays, but it must still be important to carefully curate it and not mindlessly promoting anything that earns you money. When Tony Hawk promoted crypto.com, I immediately regretted any kind of respect I ever had for that man. Does the younger generation really not care at all?
"Hustling" is viewed as an on-the-whole good, even if various archetypes associated with it (the Logan Pauls of the world) aren't viewed positively.
Being able to monetize a personal brand is viewed as more than just benign, it's viewed as a societal endorsement of the individual and their ideas/perspectives/strategies.
The only selling out buy-in I’ve seen is on HN with all the talk about being at “faang” or wanting to get into “faang”, all the while being very aware of how problematic big tech is.
There definitely was a time, and I noticed I myself let go of it. Recently I watched an old clip of Bill Hicks where he calls out Leno for doing a commercial! I can't imagine anybody calling someone out over a commercial today and having an audience.
It did. Partly this was a change in economics: it got harder to make a good living as an artist in a digital, networked environment, where your art wasn't worth as much. So, artists started doing a lot more commercials, selling their art or their image to advertisers, and later using their access to fans to sell their own consumer products directly to them.
Once the cultural taboo was banished, it disappeared quickly. The idea that outside money pollutes art is not a concept most people under 20 would find intuitive or familiar, and relatively few under 30 either.
Now, whether this is good or bad, I can't say. It certainly feels like there is less art produced today that will stand the test of time. But there are a lot of reasons that might be true other than just this one, and in any case as a man in my 40s, I'm generally out of touch with culture, and not a suitable judge. Nor are teenagers the authorities in this matter, though for other reasons. It's something historians of the future will have to sort out.
Came here to say this. AFAIK "selling out" has just as negative a connotation as it ever did. Maybe he means commercialism is more prevalent, but that's not what he wrote.
Nobody says "congratulations on being a sellout" unless they are being sarcastic.
"Old days" is a very relative term here. This attitude was common for Watterson's generation (b. 1958), but for example Schulz (b. 1922) had zero problems with monetization.
There was a really interesting NYTimes piece [0] about Gen X comedy icon Janeane Garafolo earlier this week that touched on similar themes of “not selling out.” I have often wondered over the years what happened to her. It turns out that she really walked the walk of not selling out and the obscurity that comes with avoiding publicity and promotion.
Personally my feelings on the subject are conflicted. I think that some degree of promotion is important so that others can discover great art and contributions, and so that artists and creators can make a comfortable living off of their work, but that “selling out” becomes bad when the pursuit of commerce overtakes and reduces the art.
That's exactly what happened to San Francisco's culture. It started the during the first tech boom when all the artists started leaving for the East Bay and PDX.
"Selling out" is basing your morality on someone's well deserved accomplishment and whether they should be rewarded for that or not. That seems complete opposite of how I see morality ought to be. Seems incredibly contemptious and anything but moral.
Well, it's also happened to the music market. Songs are worthless so you play a show and then hit the merch tent to sell LPs, hoodies, VIP passes etc. How many full time cartoonists are employed by papers vs 100 years ago?
It’s still prevalent in music, especially the hardcore and metal scenes. Changing your sound and/or finding commercial success are frequently met with accusations of “selling out” (see Turnstile or Deafheaven for examples).
There are plenty of people out there who share Bill Watterson's beliefs about art or their creations. You just don't hear about it because obviously they aren't interested in shilling.
I do, however, wish that blatant self-promotion was more frowned-upon by our culture. It's hard to tell when the creator is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for personal gain.
I personally believe, though, that we don't live by money (or prestige) alone. I take comfort from the fact that for thousands of years others have shared this belief.
If you don't promote then your work is much less likely to be noticed by the people who would like or appreciate it, though. There's SOOO much crap being released now, you're really knee-capping your chances at success if you don't promote as much as possible (speaking as someone who has thrown away opportunities because I've been pretty terrible at self-promotion).
I'm watching it right now with my wife. She's been relentlessly promoting her first book, and she's gone from someone no one knows about and 0 preorders, 0 followers to beating several established authors in her writing groups' in having more preorders for her first book than they've gotten for any book they've ever released. She's creating her own promo graphics, writing and engaging in Facebook group takeovers, and filming her own Instagram and Tik Tok videos. She's up to almost 1000 followers in just a couple months. And this is for a pen name she doesn't want to share with friends or family, so not even getting any initial boost from them.
Meanwhile I've been trying to make it as a board game designer for the past six years (as a side-thing), and haven't really gotten anywhere, since I've been mostly just networking with publishers and other designers and not the fans, and have hesitated to really put myself out there much (still get nervous talking to a publisher for the first time). I do have one signed game, but it's probably not coming out for a few years still.
It generally irks me when I hear about someone who tried to get famous in about 5 distinctly different categories before they actually became famous. It seems like that is just not looked down upon enough. I was reading about how Blippi was apparently a Jackass like videos where he shit on his naked friend in a Harlem Shake video. It really tells you what he's after and it informs you about his goals. And when Blippi came out with his own NFTs it made sense because you know what he's out for.
This very idea that you should be trying to determine if a creator is motivated by sincerity or a cynical desire for personal gain, assumes negative intentions.
When you assume negative intentions, you accuse sincere people of a cynical desire for personal gain.
The reality is, you can't tell what someone's motivations are, and believing you can sets you up for a world of intentionally hurting people who are just trying to live their life.
Current technology reinforces and incentivizes this model. You, your friends, and the people whose thoughts
you find interesting are placed in the same feed, on an equivalent level, with global brands that have astronomical marketing budgets. The individual must evolve toward a brand in order to remain relevant in the feed.
Berkeley Breathed's "Bloom County" shares a similar cultural and temporal space (1980--1989 initial run) with "Calvin and Hobbes", and I was going to comment that for the most part Breathed's also avoided commercialisation. Only to learn that there's an animated series planned to appear on Fox:
In the current world of Web2.0 / Web3 hype and catastrophe, much of the Waterson ethic resonates fairly strongly with me. The 1980s and early 1990s were something of a spiritual child / echo of the 1960s, within the digital realm, and there was a promise of possibilities which ... have to a large extent failed to materialise.
The cesspits of Facebook and Twitter are the Altemont to Usenet and the WELL's Woodstock. Reality, bad trips, and Hells Angels have intruded.
> In the current world of Web2.0 / Web3 hype and catastrophe, much of the Waterson ethic resonates fairly strongly with me.
You get shanghaied into a way of thinking. I recently wrote a simple 1998 style (flask.py + mongodb) web thing for someone hosted on the other side of the Atlantic to me.
A domain.com/search page with results below the search box loaded on a page refresh
Even before adding pagination the clicking a search->query with 10k rows of results->return and render on a different page with a full page refresh was faster than any other site i had used recently doing a fraction of the information display. I was shocked that i was able to do all that in less than a second... because my brain had been conditioned by the modern web
I had become used to news website which take 15 seconds to fully render the content using 25MB of data or react apps or wordpress sites with dozens of fade in animations and the like.
I am fully blackpilled on the present state of the web. Outside HN it is basically unusable
The reason we have come to this is because there is real FOMO in Megacorp marketing departments across the globe.
The way to solve it is to bring forward evidence that despite the info graphics and impression statistics and dashboards, targeted advertising by tracking users does not bring in more sales than say showing your ad on a relevant content page.
Showing me ads for bicycle helmets because from my profile you know I bought one on another site is idiotic. However, showing me an ad for fishing rods when I'm looking for fishing supplies stores would probably be a good idea.
If you can prove that than all of ad words and facebook non-sense and user tracking is busy work with no value added.
No, but there's always someone listening in from the outside. Woodstock wasn't pure, like...some people were just there to sell bad weed. There is no purity.
This is purity, like a gold coin is .999 pure, that's what you get, this. Hacker News was created with the intent of avoiding the Neverending September that happened when Usenet was opened up in ¿1993 was it? So that led to a series of attempts to cling to a more beautiful time, until Reddit, and in response to Reddit getting massified, this pretty small forum that lost a lot of its inertia it had seven years ago, and it's cool, it's a joint that's out of the way and few know about but it's a cool place. I'm rate-limited on here, which I embrace as a way of spending less time saying my words. I say a lot of things that make people's head hurt. Like there's stuff I only tell friends if there is aspirin on hand.
And the other thing is it has to be subsidized in some way. So this forum is subsidized by Y Combinator Management LLC (I think that's what it's called) and even though it is very synergistic, like...it's not as synergistic now. Well I don't know. I didn't do winter during Covid, until now which I regret, winter sucks. But there has to be a winter for there to be a spring...I'm losing conviction in what I just wrote as I continue writing. Like why lose when you can win and win forever?
It's less that Woodstock was pure and more that it was idealistic, and ... mostly, the idealism held / didn't break.
Altamont wasn't necessarily bad. But reality intruded to an extent it hadn't at the earlier festival.
The idealism of the 1960s stumbled heavily when it hit the Real World. Communes often proved to be unsustainable, tremendously unequal, and microcosms of the outer world of The Man that they were intended as an antidote / counterpoint to. Collective and cooperative organisations folded. Or evolved --- Whole Foods didn't simply out-compete many local and regional "natural food stores", but often bought them out.
It's not possible to simply wish (or mission-statement) away human behaviour and it's darker nature. I'm not sure if Mark Zuckerberg really believed that most people are good and privacy was obsolete, though those are principles he said and promoted aggressively ... which haven't worked out so well.
Part of me regrets tremendously that the idealism didn't deliver. Another part recognises that the idealist model of reality was fundamentally flawed. The questions of how and why it was flawed, if there's some way to redeem or resurrect parts, or if there are alternative ways to deliver on some of those principles or goals ... I'm not sure of.
Looking at the present state of things, its systems and organisations and institutions, I'm strongly disinclined to participate at all. Watterson's very few public comments don't seem to indicate he feels this way, and I don't want to put words in his mouth. The commentary on selling out ... suggests at least some alignment with this philosophy.
Among the things I've focused on over the past decade or so has been trying to understand media, its interactions with society (there's a bidirectional feedback), and both its capabilties and limitations. If I'd known then (in the late 1980s / early 1990s) what I know now ... I don't know how my activities would have differed, though I suspect my outlook would have been vastly less idealistic.[1] As I've come to hold that view myself it seems also to have become far more prominent generally, I don't know if I've led or followed that path to any particular extent.
Understanding who was promoting what visions of the future of technology, and what their own motiviations, beliefs, and priors were, has also been illuminating.
HN has been extraordinarily durable for an online forum, even by historical standards. Usenet's heyday was about a decade (mid-1980s -- mid-1990s), Slashdot only about 5 years (1999--2004). Reddit and Facebook both grew far too large for meaningful discussion (as well as suffering numerous other failings[2]). A large part of HN's success has been in remaining reasonably small, and it is of course dilligently moderated. Despite that, there are topics HN really can't discuss, and I'm often frustrated by the shallowness with which meatier topics and articles are addressed. But relative to other general online fora it really does excel. Applying my lens, perhaps it has the right ballance of ideal vs. pragmatism.
PSA: Don't take the brown acid.
________________________________
Notes:
1. The "light reading list" I've occasionally linked in earlier HN comments gives a pretty good grounding in my thinking / reading. It's incomplete and probably always will be, but should give good initial vectoring and velocity. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
2. I don't, and never have, participated in Facebook, so can't comment on its dynamics. I was an active participant on the conceptually similar platform Google+ where a "salon-style" form of discussion emerged around a few dilligent hosts. I've discussed Reddit's issues numerous times at my now all-but-entirely-defunct subreddit, with several of those addressed / linked here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...
I also feel very strongly about the failure of the digital era. Understanding that society moves in weird curves and is rarely self aware enough to do good things in one shot. Maybe it will have to crash and rebuild using some valuable bits and a better insight (or hindsight).
Breathed was always hyper-conscious of selling out in the comics industry and elsewhere; his approach was just to create Bill the Cat as an anti-Garfield. It was only later that irony became the only thing that sells.
Bloom County was revived in 2015 - when I saw Breathed speak at the National Book Festival the next year he indicated Trump’s resurgence was “not unrelated”
We're talking a lot about "selling out" but maybe not so much about the bigger issue of his work leaving his control and becoming a property that would be used all sorts of weird ways.
If you want a cautionary tale, look at the Iron Giant. A thoughtful and interesting character whose whole arc is choosing peace is now shoved into things like Ready Player One [1] as a fighting weapon.
It's hard not to think that Calvin wouldn't get reduced to some Dennis the Menace type character that misses the point were he to leave Watterson's control.
Winnie the Pooh also comes to mind. There was one beautiful and very authentic animated movie followed by two or three terrible films that just felt like a horrible caricature of anything the
original work was about.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet, so in case you're a big Calvin and Hobbes fan and haven't heard about Watterson's brief return to the comics page as a guest artist for Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine, Stephan describes the whole thing in a really fun story here: https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t...
It includes links to the strips.
C&H remains one of very few influential and yet uncorrupted parts of my youth. I'm grateful to Mr. Watterson for never selling out. But it's bittersweet, because kids don't read newspaper funnies with their breakfast cereal anymore, and I fear that Calvin and Hobbes will disappear from the public consciousness long before Garfield does.
It's amazing how you uncover just a bit more depth to Calvin and Hobbes every single time you read it. Reading it once again recently, I began to really see the subtle depth written into his parents.
They're generally seen from Calvin's perspective: super old, crabby, out of touch. But then you realize that's just how a 6 year old sees them, and that there's a lot more to their characters. They're likely only in their early 30's, and are honestly doing their best job as parents. There are all sorts of little hints towards how much they love their son (even though he can drive them crazy), their fears, their hobbies and interests outside of parenting, their relationship, etc. It's really beautiful.
Now, though, I get it. Parenting is hard, and it's not only thing going on in their lives. And despite it all, they put up with Calvin's behavior, encourage his imagination, keep him fed and warm, and comfort him when it matters. What more could you ask for?
Really? I think I've read all the C&H strips multiple times and never picked up on that. Notably, Calvin's parents are never given names, and the only relative ever featured as I recall was his uncle on his dad's side.
Do you have a link to a strip where this is hinted at?
It's made clear both parents were naturally difficult too, which is part of the point. This panel probably had to be expressly stated since Mom doesn't encourage Calvin's (over) imagination like his father does.
Now I want to go back and read all my old Calvin and Hobbes books again!
Speaking to the depth of the comic strip, one of my favorite themes was the philosophical discussions about the nature of reality and meaning of life while they were barreling down a huge hill in the sled or wagon :)
Even when I was a kid I thought the parents were cool. Other than perhaps Moe, Calvin is obviously the worst human being in the comic (although in a mostly funny and relatable way).
Readit News
[0]: https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2014/06/02
EDIT: Nevermind, found it! https://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/ever-wished-t...
During that time, I've tried to be very mindful of Watterson's copyright and make sure I don't violate it anyway.
This had led to some interesting "bugs." Specifically amuniversal.com only publishes the comic strip as a GIF. But the official Reddit mobile app has a bug. It treats all GIFs as a video & disables other image features, like zooming. The nature of C&H is such that very often want to zoom to see all the wonderful details Mr. Watterson put into the strip.
Because of that I routinely get complaints about it being in a GIF ("GIFs are for movies!" the whippersnappers say) and tell me to publish them as JPG or PNG. Now converting a GIF to JPG or PNG is trivial, but there's no way I can do so without violating his copyright. I'd have to host the converted image myself, which I don't have the right the do.
So I won't do it.
It's minor, but knowing Watterson felt so passionate about copyright, I think it's important to honor. But because the team at Reddit won't fix the bug, the complaints continue to come rolling in. Enough that I wrote a FAQ about it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p...
If any C&H fans knows anyone on the team at Reddit, I'd much appreciate it if you could ask them to fix it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/CalvinBot/comments/bdxb6h/why_are_p...
https://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif89a.txt ctrl+f "25."
Deleted Comment
I changed the file suffix to "trick" some apps/extensions into treating it as an image instead of a movie.
Dead Comment
It did? I completely missed that, but it's probably because I'm old...
Basically a bunch of upper-middle-class people adopted the concept of "hustle" from its poor urban context, where it acknowledged that the drive to do anything to scrape by was hard to reconcile with strict ethical standards. You don't question someone's ethics when they're trying to make sure their siblings have something to eat for dinner that night.
Upper-middle-class people recognized that feeling -- hey, that's the desperation I feel when I realize that if I don't take this adtech job, I might not be able to maintain the same lifestyle as my friends that I met in the dorm at my highly selective university. If I don't found a startup and get monstrously rich, other people will never think of me the way I think of myself, and that would suck.
How convenient that there's a word for when your desperate circumstances excuse you from the ethical standards that we apply to normal people! No matter how privileged you are, when you do ethically questionable things, just call them "hustle" and everyone will know that it isn't because of entitled self-indulgence, but because of your plucky determination to survive everything the world throws at you.
When people can justify complex, bad behavior with simple, bad beliefs, bad behavior spreads like a fire. In the article, Bill Watterson calls out justifying as the first step for regulating bad beliefs:
> The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?”
Going "major" is widely seen as positive.
More generally artists will openly talk about trying to get financing, be more transparent about advertisement spots being open, or request sponsorship. Patreons and direct support also comes here.
The "if you're not paying for it you're the product" quip at least cemented the idea that how money is made is something that can be discussed in the open, instead of just shunning "sell outs"
So I think user deng has a point about “selling out” still being a thing.
That being said, I think there is a big difference between selling out and wanting to remain in control of your creation. I have no idea whether George Lucas likes what happens with Star Wars or not, and I hope I’m not going to start a debate over it either, but by selling it he lost the creative control in a way the Bill Watterson didn’t.
My guess is that being “seen” as a “sell out” isn’t actually something that comes into play when people consider what to do with their creations very often. Because honestly, why would you ever care? So maybe there is less of it today, but to state that our public discourse has changed on the subject? I’m not convinced it has.
Maybe your initial userbase was a bunch of hard core privacy people and post funding you start selling user data, or performing other actions which makes your original users or the people that supported you go, "wait, that's not the company I championed to success"
It's not exactly cut and dried when put like that, but there are a few companies that come to mind that effectively "sold out".
I dont think anyone really ever thought selling your company, particularly a speculative tech start up type company, is the same type of bad.
The effect of merchandizing at this point is pretty irrelevant.
Chuck Klosterman's recent book "The Nineties" talks about this a lot! And honestly it's spot on. I had forgotten about this, and not realized how much it disappeared as a cultural concept.
https://www.amazon.com/Nineties-Book-Chuck-Klosterman/dp/073...
We all used the phrase "selling out" frequently (on the east coast of the US), but I remember one high school friend who invoked it constantly. Calling people "sell outs" (i.e. lacking in authenticity) was a common insult.
Grunge bands and in particular Kurt Cobain had almost a pathological obsession with "selling out", to the point where it had some part in his death. Even popularity was seen as a sign of selling out -- it was better to be true to your indie roots.
There are some interesting quotes in the book from Cobain and contemporaries, and the author talks about influential movies at the time that dealt with the concept.
I was never a Calvin and Hobbes fan, but it's definitely interesting and notable that the creator avoided "selling out".
While I think we were too obsessed with it back then, I think a concept that probably needs more respect today. You could even talk coherently about Google "selling out", although that concept may now be foreign to many people. There was a notion of authenticity and that you cared about the mission, i.e. organizing the world's information. But that is long gone :-(
In retrospect the obsession with "selling out" in the 90's was a reaction to capitalist values affecting more and more parts of life. Though, being a teenager, I didn't realize that, and I just said what my friends said!
It was a way to keep your peers in check. But it's sad that people don't even notice it anymore. They would wonder why you did NOT "sell out".
"For the words of the PROFITS were written on the studio walls. Echoes with the sound of salesmen, of SALESMEN (sung with the highest levels of disdain)"
[1]: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/chuck-klosterman...
In the good old days, in many ways. Kudos to Bill Watterson.
making money as an athlete used to disqualify you from the olympics
I think it's more honest. Art's and creative jobs have had the aura of being form of uncompromising self-expression, vehicle of social and political change and beauty. Pretending adds layer of deceit.
That can't coexist with the goal of maximizing mass market popularity and income. I think this is the logical conclusion when something turns into pure commerce. Only thing valuable is visibility, recognizably, hype.
What makes Bill Watterson look like mystical figure is that "having enough" and "shutting up after you have said what you wanted" is alien concept in business.
Or can you? I haven't actually given the idea serious thought.
Yeah, it totally did. Ever since the 90s. The majority of the mainstream youth don't even understand the concept.
Nowadays all of that infrastructure exists as generic services on the internet you can throw together in a few days, with costs that scale with your needs. I recently watched a Q&A Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Harvard CS50 class in 2005 [0]. He explained that what made Facebook possible to start with was cheap hosted servers running open source software, and the ways that had changed over the previous decade. Nowadays with AWS and Google Cloud its even easier and cheaper. The same applies to physical goods now with eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Etsy, Shopify, running your own one-person media empire on Youtube, etc.
The negative connotations with "selling out" were the fact that you had to sell out creative control. You don't have to do that anymore. Dave Chappelle is rightly still sore about how he was cheated over the Chappelle Show. Nowadays you can build an audience independently, and that fact means that even if you do make a deal with big business, they know you're not as dependent on them anymore, so creatives have a much stronger hand than they used to.
So I really don't think this is down to the generation themselves, the world they live in is just different.
[0] https://youtu.be/xFFs9UgOAlE?t=935
I mean, I can understand that establishing a "brand" is more important nowadays, but it must still be important to carefully curate it and not mindlessly promoting anything that earns you money. When Tony Hawk promoted crypto.com, I immediately regretted any kind of respect I ever had for that man. Does the younger generation really not care at all?
Being able to monetize a personal brand is viewed as more than just benign, it's viewed as a societal endorsement of the individual and their ideas/perspectives/strategies.
IIRC, being a "social media influencer" is literally selling out, and it seems like it's what a lot of kids aspire to these days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8aj3BA3cGg
Once the cultural taboo was banished, it disappeared quickly. The idea that outside money pollutes art is not a concept most people under 20 would find intuitive or familiar, and relatively few under 30 either.
Now, whether this is good or bad, I can't say. It certainly feels like there is less art produced today that will stand the test of time. But there are a lot of reasons that might be true other than just this one, and in any case as a man in my 40s, I'm generally out of touch with culture, and not a suitable judge. Nor are teenagers the authorities in this matter, though for other reasons. It's something historians of the future will have to sort out.
Nobody says "congratulations on being a sellout" unless they are being sarcastic.
Sigh, so kawaii.
Personally my feelings on the subject are conflicted. I think that some degree of promotion is important so that others can discover great art and contributions, and so that artists and creators can make a comfortable living off of their work, but that “selling out” becomes bad when the pursuit of commerce overtakes and reduces the art.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/14/movies/janeane-garofalo.h...
I'm watching it right now with my wife. She's been relentlessly promoting her first book, and she's gone from someone no one knows about and 0 preorders, 0 followers to beating several established authors in her writing groups' in having more preorders for her first book than they've gotten for any book they've ever released. She's creating her own promo graphics, writing and engaging in Facebook group takeovers, and filming her own Instagram and Tik Tok videos. She's up to almost 1000 followers in just a couple months. And this is for a pen name she doesn't want to share with friends or family, so not even getting any initial boost from them.
Meanwhile I've been trying to make it as a board game designer for the past six years (as a side-thing), and haven't really gotten anywhere, since I've been mostly just networking with publishers and other designers and not the fans, and have hesitated to really put myself out there much (still get nervous talking to a publisher for the first time). I do have one signed game, but it's probably not coming out for a few years still.
I'm saying some people, like Bill or the dwarf fortress brothers, or countless others, have a different idea of success.
When you assume negative intentions, you accuse sincere people of a cynical desire for personal gain.
The reality is, you can't tell what someone's motivations are, and believing you can sets you up for a world of intentionally hurting people who are just trying to live their life.
Bill Watterson did return to public cartooning, if briefly, in 2014. There's a reference here:[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/55321/first-new-bill-wat...
Berkeley Breathed's "Bloom County" shares a similar cultural and temporal space (1980--1989 initial run) with "Calvin and Hobbes", and I was going to comment that for the most part Breathed's also avoided commercialisation. Only to learn that there's an animated series planned to appear on Fox:
https://collider.com/bloom-county-animated-series-berkeley-b...
In the current world of Web2.0 / Web3 hype and catastrophe, much of the Waterson ethic resonates fairly strongly with me. The 1980s and early 1990s were something of a spiritual child / echo of the 1960s, within the digital realm, and there was a promise of possibilities which ... have to a large extent failed to materialise.
The cesspits of Facebook and Twitter are the Altemont to Usenet and the WELL's Woodstock. Reality, bad trips, and Hells Angels have intruded.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Stealth footnote edit: thaumaturgy's commented with the strip in question, Pearls Before Swine, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32116647
You get shanghaied into a way of thinking. I recently wrote a simple 1998 style (flask.py + mongodb) web thing for someone hosted on the other side of the Atlantic to me.
A domain.com/search page with results below the search box loaded on a page refresh
Even before adding pagination the clicking a search->query with 10k rows of results->return and render on a different page with a full page refresh was faster than any other site i had used recently doing a fraction of the information display. I was shocked that i was able to do all that in less than a second... because my brain had been conditioned by the modern web
I had become used to news website which take 15 seconds to fully render the content using 25MB of data or react apps or wordpress sites with dozens of fade in animations and the like.
I am fully blackpilled on the present state of the web. Outside HN it is basically unusable
The reason we have come to this is because there is real FOMO in Megacorp marketing departments across the globe.
The way to solve it is to bring forward evidence that despite the info graphics and impression statistics and dashboards, targeted advertising by tracking users does not bring in more sales than say showing your ad on a relevant content page.
Showing me ads for bicycle helmets because from my profile you know I bought one on another site is idiotic. However, showing me an ad for fishing rods when I'm looking for fishing supplies stores would probably be a good idea.
If you can prove that than all of ad words and facebook non-sense and user tracking is busy work with no value added.
Then maybe we could go back to a saner web.
This is purity, like a gold coin is .999 pure, that's what you get, this. Hacker News was created with the intent of avoiding the Neverending September that happened when Usenet was opened up in ¿1993 was it? So that led to a series of attempts to cling to a more beautiful time, until Reddit, and in response to Reddit getting massified, this pretty small forum that lost a lot of its inertia it had seven years ago, and it's cool, it's a joint that's out of the way and few know about but it's a cool place. I'm rate-limited on here, which I embrace as a way of spending less time saying my words. I say a lot of things that make people's head hurt. Like there's stuff I only tell friends if there is aspirin on hand.
And the other thing is it has to be subsidized in some way. So this forum is subsidized by Y Combinator Management LLC (I think that's what it's called) and even though it is very synergistic, like...it's not as synergistic now. Well I don't know. I didn't do winter during Covid, until now which I regret, winter sucks. But there has to be a winter for there to be a spring...I'm losing conviction in what I just wrote as I continue writing. Like why lose when you can win and win forever?
Altamont wasn't necessarily bad. But reality intruded to an extent it hadn't at the earlier festival.
The idealism of the 1960s stumbled heavily when it hit the Real World. Communes often proved to be unsustainable, tremendously unequal, and microcosms of the outer world of The Man that they were intended as an antidote / counterpoint to. Collective and cooperative organisations folded. Or evolved --- Whole Foods didn't simply out-compete many local and regional "natural food stores", but often bought them out.
It's not possible to simply wish (or mission-statement) away human behaviour and it's darker nature. I'm not sure if Mark Zuckerberg really believed that most people are good and privacy was obsolete, though those are principles he said and promoted aggressively ... which haven't worked out so well.
Part of me regrets tremendously that the idealism didn't deliver. Another part recognises that the idealist model of reality was fundamentally flawed. The questions of how and why it was flawed, if there's some way to redeem or resurrect parts, or if there are alternative ways to deliver on some of those principles or goals ... I'm not sure of.
Looking at the present state of things, its systems and organisations and institutions, I'm strongly disinclined to participate at all. Watterson's very few public comments don't seem to indicate he feels this way, and I don't want to put words in his mouth. The commentary on selling out ... suggests at least some alignment with this philosophy.
Among the things I've focused on over the past decade or so has been trying to understand media, its interactions with society (there's a bidirectional feedback), and both its capabilties and limitations. If I'd known then (in the late 1980s / early 1990s) what I know now ... I don't know how my activities would have differed, though I suspect my outlook would have been vastly less idealistic.[1] As I've come to hold that view myself it seems also to have become far more prominent generally, I don't know if I've led or followed that path to any particular extent.
Understanding who was promoting what visions of the future of technology, and what their own motiviations, beliefs, and priors were, has also been illuminating.
HN has been extraordinarily durable for an online forum, even by historical standards. Usenet's heyday was about a decade (mid-1980s -- mid-1990s), Slashdot only about 5 years (1999--2004). Reddit and Facebook both grew far too large for meaningful discussion (as well as suffering numerous other failings[2]). A large part of HN's success has been in remaining reasonably small, and it is of course dilligently moderated. Despite that, there are topics HN really can't discuss, and I'm often frustrated by the shallowness with which meatier topics and articles are addressed. But relative to other general online fora it really does excel. Applying my lens, perhaps it has the right ballance of ideal vs. pragmatism.
PSA: Don't take the brown acid.
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Notes:
1. The "light reading list" I've occasionally linked in earlier HN comments gives a pretty good grounding in my thinking / reading. It's incomplete and probably always will be, but should give good initial vectoring and velocity. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
2. I don't, and never have, participated in Facebook, so can't comment on its dynamics. I was an active participant on the conceptually similar platform Google+ where a "salon-style" form of discussion emerged around a few dilligent hosts. I've discussed Reddit's issues numerous times at my now all-but-entirely-defunct subreddit, with several of those addressed / linked here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...
I was speaking more to the aversion to commercialising the comic or its characters.
If you want a cautionary tale, look at the Iron Giant. A thoughtful and interesting character whose whole arc is choosing peace is now shoved into things like Ready Player One [1] as a fighting weapon.
It's hard not to think that Calvin wouldn't get reduced to some Dennis the Menace type character that misses the point were he to leave Watterson's control.
1 - https://www.inverse.com/article/42896-ready-player-one-iron-...
Dead Comment
And an excellent illustration of the perils of “selling out” rights to depict a fictional character.
loss of creative control can be fan fiction/comic too?
It includes links to the strips.
C&H remains one of very few influential and yet uncorrupted parts of my youth. I'm grateful to Mr. Watterson for never selling out. But it's bittersweet, because kids don't read newspaper funnies with their breakfast cereal anymore, and I fear that Calvin and Hobbes will disappear from the public consciousness long before Garfield does.
Neither kids nor adults read the newspaper with their breakfast much anymore...
That said, my kid came across my old C&H books and loves to read them. She also reads Fox Trot, Garfield, and Peanuts, but not nearly as much as C&H.
That's one of the returns I was thinking of earlier (see my top level comment in thread), though I couldn't think of the strip. It was of course PBS.
They're generally seen from Calvin's perspective: super old, crabby, out of touch. But then you realize that's just how a 6 year old sees them, and that there's a lot more to their characters. They're likely only in their early 30's, and are honestly doing their best job as parents. There are all sorts of little hints towards how much they love their son (even though he can drive them crazy), their fears, their hobbies and interests outside of parenting, their relationship, etc. It's really beautiful.
Now, though, I get it. Parenting is hard, and it's not only thing going on in their lives. And despite it all, they put up with Calvin's behavior, encourage his imagination, keep him fed and warm, and comfort him when it matters. What more could you ask for?
Do you have a link to a strip where this is hinted at?
Speaking to the depth of the comic strip, one of my favorite themes was the philosophical discussions about the nature of reality and meaning of life while they were barreling down a huge hill in the sled or wagon :)
Calvin and Hobbes is magic in how it seems to unlock new depth at every age.