In this day and age, every article of clothing is prominently emblazoned with the manufacturer's logo, successful comic books and novels are optioned for Hollywood movies, and fictional characters are turned into action figures, plush dolls, Halloween costumes, etc. Isn't it suspicious that Ewoks look like highly-merchandisable teddy bears? Religious holidays like Christmas and Easter have turned into orgies of consumption. Everything in our culture is commercialized and monetized to the maximum extent possible, until its currency is so debased that it becomes a cliche.
Take, for example, the Garfield comic strip: it was in a lot of papers, but there was really nothing to it. Yet they have sold millions of stuffed Garfields, and they even made a movie out of a lousy three-panel comic strip that was about about a cat that eats lasagna. Strips like Bloom County and Dilbert were higher quality and were frequently
about something, but they also went the merchandising route, cashing in on plush Opuses and Dogberts.
The Simpsons is a merchandising monolith.
In such a world it's hard to imagine someone who would turn down all that cold hard cash to maintain artistic integrity. Yet there is such a man. He and his creation are the topic of a documentary called
Dear Mr. Watterson.
The director was recently interviewed on NPR.
The comic strip
Calvin and Hobbes, written and drawn by Bill Watterson, was a classic. It's about Calvin, a boy who thinks his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, is real. Calvin is constantly ambushed by Hobbes, and Calvin talks about this imaginary playmate as if he's a real tiger. His friends think he's nuts, but he has amazing adventures with dinosaurs and spaceships and film noir detectives, even though the world around him is disappointingly mundane.
People still love
Calvin and Hobbes: it was smart, funny, philosophical, touching, poignant and sometimes mean and crude. It ran for 10 years, and when Watterson had said everything he wanted to say, he stopped writing the strip. That was almost 20 years ago. In a world where pointless comics like
Mark Trail and
Rex Morgan, M.D., soldier on for decades, penned by faceless corporate shills, Watterson voluntarily ended one of the best comic strips ever written.
Bill Watterson never sold out, even though the strip has the most obvious merchandising gimmick you can imagine. One of the titular characters
is a stuffed animal. But you can't get an officially licensed Hobbes stuffed tiger.
It's not like Watterson is a pauper and
needs to sell out:
Calvin and Hobbes was tremendously successful during its run, and book-length collections of the strips are still doing a brisk business. The strip is syndicated in reruns and
you can see it on the web. So Watterson has no financial need to sell out: he's got a steady income and has maintained the artistic integrity of his creation.
But that doesn't stop the vast majority of successful artists and writers from cashing in. Most, given the opportunity, decide to merchandise their creations even though they're already doing quite well.
Now, I'm not saying that selling out is always a bad thing. But most Americans seem to take it as an article of faith that
more is
better, as so eloquently stated in the immortal words of The Tick, spoken to his disciples in the Mystic Order of Arachnid Vigilance (from
The Tick #9, "Road Trip", 1991):
Always ... always remember: Less is less. More is more. More is better, and twice as much is good too... Not enough is bad, and too much is never enough except when it's just about right.
This attitude, which almost caused the collapse of our entire economic system in 2008, was presaged in the pages of
The Tick. To finance their organization the M.O.A.V. planned to "buy
real estate for no-money down and sell it at
huge profits!" The author was a seer!
The Tick is a satirical superhero comic created by
Ben Edlund, who has "sold out" several times with licensed merchandise and animated and live-action television versions of
The Tick. He's also done a lot of work in Hollywood (well, mostly Canada) on shows such as
Firefly, Angel,
Supernatural and
Revolution.
So, yeah, he's a sellout. But if Edlund had never sold out I wouldn't have found the original black and white
Tick comics. The shows he's worked on, and the specific episodes and characters he's created are self-aware, self-critical and self-deprecating. They never take themselves too seriously.
It warms my heart that Bill Watterson can keep the memory of
Calvin and Hobbes pristine (at least until his money-grubbing heirs get their mitts on it). But I also like that Edlund went on to do a lot of new and entertaining work that was made possible by him selling out.
The most important thing is these men got to choose: they had control over their creations and could choose whether to license them. This is unlike many artists and writers who've been shafted by giant corporations, like Siegel and Shuster of Superman fame.
If there's anything that should be changed in our intellectual property laws it's the idea that the creator of a work of art can sign away the rights to their creations. It should be illegal, like selling your own children.
To decide whether something is a sell-out or not, you have to ask whether the merchandising is a betrayal of the original artistic concept. Star Wars action figures? Not a sellout. Superman Halloween costume? Not a sellout. Tick live-action TV series? A lousy failure, but not a sellout.
But the core of
Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin's antics and the living, breathing Hobbes are products of his vivid imagination. Calvin can take any mundane object and through the power of his mind transform it into a grand adventure.
A licensed Hobbes stuffed tiger that replaces a child's imagination with a product manufactured by people whose childhood dreams ended in a sweatshop making slave wages? Definitely a sellout.
