Dear Mr. Watterson Page #9

I definitely think by him not allowing

anyone to merchandise,

the mystique of it grows and

the desire for those kinds of things,

or the care with which

it's taken by people.

You know, people preserve the

memory of Calvin and Hobbes

as something very precious

and personal.

And I think that has a lot to do

directly with the fact

that it wasn't exploited

in stuffed toys or cartoons

or post-it notes or sleeping bags

or anything.

It's pure in its purest form.

It's his, just his lines and his words

and not somebody else's interpretation

of how it should look in plastic

or plush or anything.

- I think it strengthened the strip,

and I think that the legacy

of the strip wouldn't be as strong

as it is if he hadn't focused

everything he had on making

that strip the absolute best strip

that he could make.

- The fact that there isn't Calvin

and Hobbes stuff all over the place

is really, I think that's

the reason why the strip

is still as popular as it is today.

There are two ways to look at Bill,

and I try to keep it as objective

as possible in the book.

There's the people that look

at him as a curmudgeon

and somebody they resent

for not sharing himself

when he was so famous,

and somebody who did not give them

what they wanted in terms of,

that might be like the fact

that he never made

a Saturday morning cartoon special

that they really wanted to see,

or they didn't allow a Hobbes doll

to be made,

and they always wanted one

as a kid.

There's that group of people,

and then there's the group of people

that look at him, and you know,

they respect the choices

that he made when it came to

merchandising and licensing.

They love him as a writer.

They respect him as an artist.

And those are the two people that

I was chasing at the same time.

You know, there was somebody

who is incredibly principled,

who stuck to it, and who also happened

to be incredibly talented.

And then there was a guy

that really turned his back

on this whole

public persona machine

that we've come to expect

as Americans.

So over the course of the journey,

I was rooting for the guy

that was so principled,

and yet I was peeved at the guy

that was like not giving me

what I wanted.

It was frustrating,

and yet at the same time,

I couldn't help but root for him.

I think that he made his decisions,

and I totally respect them.

And any personal wants that I have

from him are selfishly motivated,

and so, that's up to him.

I would say my favorite strips

are my arm.

I made sure I got some snowmen

in there, making fun of girls,

the silly ones, some of

the imagination stuff

where he think he's a crocodile

here and he's swimming.

I tried to get a little bit

of everything.

Stupendous Man.

I actually, when I was getting

this tattoo, I knew a guy

that could get phone numbers, and

I got Bill Watterson's phone number.

I wanted to get permission

to get the tattoo

so I wouldn't be just as bad

as the bootleggers.

But, he didn't return

my phone calls.

I did get it anyway, but I feel

like it's not a bootleg,

it's just a labor of love.

People talk about kind of

the death of cartooning

because of the passing

of newspapers.

But really we're in a time

right now

where it's not just newspapers,

it's media.

Like media is changing

and the way we make money

from media is changing.

Newspaper comics are

especially interesting, though,

because they used to be unified.

Every day you would open up

and your paper would have

one or two pages devoted

to newspaper comics.

And first of all, those pages

are getting cut down

and shrunk more and more

as time goes on

and as newspaper budgets

keep getting cut.

So, you're not coming to

the same collective space every day

to experience the

newspaper comics.

You can go online

if you're interested

and either find the strips

that you already like

or go discover new ones

but it's not the kind of same thing.

You have to go to one page

on GoComics for Calvin and Hobbes,

and then you go to another

independent artist's website

for their webcomic

and then you go to a website

for another webcomic

and then you're surfing,

you know.

But you're never going

to one place to get

all those different perspectives.

That was the cool thing

about comics.

Whether you liked Garfield

or Family Circus or The Wizard of Id

or Calvin and Hobbes,

you could come to one page

in the newspaper

and experience them all.

And because that medium is

disappearing or shrinking,

that experience is

disappearing as well.

There was sort of a high point

for mass distributed arts,

somewhere between the post-war era

and probably somewhere in the mid-90s

and it's been a diminishment

for TV, for film, for albums,

for cartooning, for novels

ever since then.

Because the basic fact is as a culture

the means of distribution

have been so filtered out

and the means of creation

have been so filtered out

that we're now getting

tens of thousands of blogs,

tens of thousands of webcomics,

tens of thousands of small bands

that can distribute directly.

There simply is no way

to concentrate people's attention.

And when it gets concentrated

on something,

it gets concentrated

for a very short period of time.

Probably very intensely.

Everybody is tweeting about it

and watching it on YouTube,

and then it's gone because

the next thing has come along.

You're getting all these

incredible voices

that you never would have

gotten before,

but you no longer have

those water cooler pieces of art

where everybody would know,

everybody would gather around at work

and say, ah yeah,

that's the one.

There will no longer ever be

a Rolling Stones,

there won't be the Beatles,

there won't be an Elvis Presley,

for the same reason there won't be

another Calvin and Hobbes.

The market is digitalizing

and it's atomizing,

so it's being spread over

a far wider surface

but in a much thinner layer.

If The Far Side started or

if Calvin and Hobbes started today

in newspapers,

it would probably do well,

but I don't think it would have the

impact that it had in the late 80s.

If you could name me

a cartoon character

that's been invented since 1985,

that's new from the comic page,

not on television.

If you can name me

a cartoon character

that is a household term

or name throughout this country,

truly, that my mother would know

and that I would know

and that my kids would know,

that anyone through Canada would know,

I would be very shocked.

And I don't think it's going

to happen again.

I think Calvin and Hobbes is

the last great cartoon characters.

So he nailed that.

It's great to be first,

but it's also good to be last.

Calvin and Hobbes was of its age and

you couldn't transplant it elsewhere.

And thankfully it was of its age,

which is another way of looking at it.

Thank God it did appear

when it appeared

and thank God it did run

when it ran and where it ran.

Because I don't think it would

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