
Bill Watterson's Speech – Kenyon College, 1990 - tim_sw
http://www.serverunderground.com/archive/bill_watterson.html
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GHFigs
I am reminded of one of Taleb's aphorisms: "You are rich if and only if money
you refuse tastes better than money you accept", and of Glenn Gould's
interview with himself:

"G.G.: I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and
for that of his public – and let me get on record right now the fact that I'm
not at all happy with words like "public" and "artist"; I'm not happy with the
hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology – that he should be
granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were,
unconcerned with – or, better still, unaware of – the presumed demands of the
marketplace – which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a
sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their
disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of "public"
responsibility, and his "public" will relinquish its role of servile
dependency.

g.g.: And never the twain shall meet, I daresay!

G.G.: No, they'll make contact, but on an altogether more meaningful level
than that which relates any stage to its apron."

\--
[http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/glenngould/028010-4020.07...](http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/glenngould/028010-4020.07-e.html)

~~~
skore
> "You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you
> accept"

Reminds my of my favorite saying of Thoreau: "A man is rich in proportion to
the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

And Watterson was right in that precise sense. Had he sold out, there would
have been no end to the things he didn't want to, but would have had to do.

------
precisioncoder
Bill Watterson is one of my heroes. From what I've read of him he had an
extraordinary strength of will. His comics were a major influence on me
growing up and the more I learn about him the more I admire him.

~~~
jdrobins2000
The world could use a little more Bill Watterson. There is a man who values
what is truly valuable, and refuses to sacrifice it for the sake of greed or
ego. To me, that is the epitome of virtue.

------
sramsay
"If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job
where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood."

Someone please put this in the fortune file for all eternity. It describes my
life as a scholar, and the life of every professor I've ever known.

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Wingman4l7
It tickles me to know that there's some dorm room ceiling at Kenyon with a
copy of of Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam", done by Watterson, hiding under
a few coats of paint -- unless of course that dorm has since been torn down
_(even if it was brand new when he was a student, it'd be ~35 years old now;
he attended 1976 - 1980)_.

~~~
mbreese
It's probably more common than you think. When I was in college (actually,
just down the road from Kenyon at Denison - they were our big rival), I had a
friend paint a large part of the "Creation of Adam" on her ceiling...

in Tide.

So, by day, it looked normal. However, by blacklight, you could see it in all
its glory. I still don't know how she got the shading right.

~~~
Wingman4l7
Working on that under blacklight would have been interesting. That's going to
really freak someone out someday, if it never got painted over...

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easyfrag
I recall Watterson also battled with the newspaper industry over how his
strips looked, especially with the use of colour in the Sunday strips. I
believe he felt somewhat constrained by the format and you can see him
stretching the format's boundaries in the Calvin & Hobbes strips, especially
the Sunday ones.

I used to wonder why he never moved to doing comic "books" where he had more
room to breathe. I've since come to believe that creative work benefits from
some kind of constraint - a boundary to push against.

~~~
nollidge
Not color, but format. Some newspapers will format a comic with two rows of
panels, whereas another newspaper will format it with three narrower rows,
etc. So the syndicates wanted comics with panel divisions that allowed that
reformatting, whereas Watterson wanted to simply have his block of space to do
whatever he wanted with.

He ended up winning that battle. But to hear him tell the tale (IIRC in the
10th anniversary collection), while it opened up creative possibilities, the
toll it took on his psyche probably helped ensure the relative brevity of his
career.

~~~
MaxGabriel
If I remember, another good example of this is that papers split on how much
space was given, thus many Calvin and Hobbes comics have a "throwaway joke" at
the top that the rest of the strip can be independent of.

Example: <http://calvinhobbesdaily.tumblr.com/image/48223268456>

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stkni
I wish that I'd heard that speech when I graduated. He nails a lot of things
I've discovered to be true as I've come along the way.

But even if I had of heard it, I probably would've shrugged it off and made
the same mistakes that I made anyway :-)

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ctdonath
On a related note, an anecdote which has long stuck with me:

In the foreword to the _Complete Calvin & Hobbes_, Watterson noted his
excitement at receiving the first copy, a box containing his life's work
nicely arranged and packaged. Then horror hit him: that was it, his life's
work, in just one small box.

~~~
Zikes
As a fan of his work I do hope he realized how much everyone loves his life's
work, and that ultimately the reach of that work extends far beyond what was
in that one small box.

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F_J_H
So, somewhere out there exists a manager who was not able to harness and
utilize Bill Watterson's creativity, and fired him instead.

Don't be that guy....

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signa11
this is just _beautiful_ "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."

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mattm
It's a shame that Bill Watterson just simply disappeared.

~~~
noonespecial
The opposite, I assume, would be Jim Davis-hood. He said what he needed to
say, and no more. Magnificent.

(I'm actually expecting a disappearance of _why-like proportions from Randall
Munroe in the not-to-distant future as well.)

~~~
InclinedPlane
I doubt it. xkcd has been hitting it out of the park consistently of late, and
he's been experimenting more and more with radical new projects. I think it'll
be a while before he gets tired of cartooning.

~~~
noonespecial
That's why I said "_why-like proportions". It will be unexpected and shocking.
I know its a bold prediction, but this kind of whimsical genius seems like a
most unstable isotope.

~~~
InclinedPlane
The difference between Watterson and Munroe is that Watterson made far more
money but didn't have a ton of control, whereas Munroe probably makes less
money but has far more control. Part of that is down to sheer popularity.
Watterson is worth several hundred million dollars according to reports,
whereas Munroe likely makes at most a few hundred k a year. Which is still
very respectable, but not quite in the "fuck it, I'm retiring" impulse zone as
Watterson's wealth is. Also, Watterson was fairly disconnected from his fans
and the primary interaction of his work were the ongoing struggles with his
syndicate masters. Whereas Munroe's main interaction related to his work is
directly with his fans, which also directly provide his income (through merch
sales, mostly).

So there's very much less reason for Munroe to get frustrated with the process
and stop. Watterson got tired of the bullshit and decided he'd had enough. If
Munroe gets bored of doing the strip I suspect he'll just move on to some
other project, which will be equally public (like what-if).

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iagomr
First time I really read about the man behind the masterpiece of my youth, and
it did not disappoint, by far. What a great human being.

~~~
nollidge
It's kind of rare for our heroes to refrain from disappointing us, isn't it?

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nathell
So this is where the inspiration for <http://xkcd.com/557/> came from.

~~~
andrewb
I don't think he took inspiration from it. From speaking with friends we have
all had the same dream for the first few years graduating University.

~~~
scott_s
So much so that I'm shocked that nathell apparently _doesn't_ have them. In
the past six years, I've _taught_ more classes than I've attended, and I still
have them.

~~~
Pxtl
Good news! There's a version for dead loved ones too.

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Pxtl
Watterson was born in the wrong decade. The internet era has created a lot of
horrible things, but it has also created a massive culture of creator-owned
creativity. The webcomic revolution has run a complete short-circuit around
the heartless syndicates, establishing the relationship between the artist and
the consumer as a _direct_ one.

However, because nobody pays for webcomics, by necessity the artists can't
have Watterson's high minded attitude about merchandising. A web cartoonist
that doesn't merchandise is one who doesn't eat. But on the other hand, the
merch is entirely theirs to design - they have first and last say over what is
sold with their brand on it.

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curiousabout
Wonder if anyone has tried finding out where his room was and removing layers
to reveal his painting?

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spodek
I would love to be a fly on the wall of a room with Bill Watterson, Banksy,
and some beer.

What other artists work with such passion, independence, and integrity?

I'm sure there are others, but they come to mind.

~~~
wging
It's interesting that David Foster Wallace also spoke at Kenyon.
[http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-
wallac...](http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace-
kenyon.html)

