And he did a good thing with that. Calvin and Hobbes never wanted for quality. We wouldn’t still consider it great literature if it had gone the way of Peanuts or, God forbid, Garfield.
It shows he was smart on another level than being just a great cartoonist.
...and worth one hundred million while turning down somewhere in the ballpark of three to five hundred million dollars in potential merchandising deals. Watterson is a class act like no other.
This also exemplifies what I love about the strip: for a strip that often centers around imagination, it holds itself to that same standard and leaves much to the imagination of the reader.
A worse strip would have started with the last panel.
Well, the phrasing sure leans towards the intellectual side, however Calvin adopting the artistic attitude (and lingo) before even making a name for himself or adopting any skill whatsoever is not just funny but in a simple way encouraging. Even an 11-year-old might realize that one doesn't just bullshit one's way through life like that.
The joke somewhat even reminds me of Tarantino's "Desperado" joke, because said artistic attitude resembles the guy looking for gratitude in the barman on whose bar he's urinating...
Funny how one can interpret things so differently. I see a lot of art just like this, like the clothes of the emperor: All nice and well until someone says: Wtf you speak a lot of hefty language but in the end my 4 y/o can do the same thing, but for the hefty language.
Sure, Art can make you think and the way you interpret it may teach you something about yourself (that is how I find value in art), but so can the painting of a 4 y/o and a nice river flowing in the distance.
Call me barbaric but I appreciate art when it took skill to make it. A nicely constructed, elegant, functional Python class with minimal but readable code, that is (also) art to me.
The thing is, I'm often getting away with this opinion because I have a PhD so somehow my intellectualism isn't easily dismissed, it's insane.
Criticizing the art because it’s not technically advanced is like criticizing a Python class because it’s just text on a screen and any four-year-old can put text on a screen. What makes the Python class meaningful to you is the context you bring with you. The world of art is a lot bigger than technically proficient realism.
A 4yo isn’t going to accidentally stumble onto a masterpiece on composition either.
In any case, the utility of the code is not in question here. Ugly code can have the same utility as beautiful code. Utility is not completely separated from beauty but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. If it were, only applied math would be considered beautiful, but plenty of other math is beautiful too.
After typing out my response I don’t know if I totally agree with what I’m saying here. And I don’t know if it even makes much sense but here it is anyway:
I think what I’m getting at is you wouldn’t call a proof with an error in it beautiful. Just like you wouldn’t call a useless python class beautiful. The purpose of pure math is finding truths. The purpose a python class is to do something useful. For something to be beautiful it has to complete its purpose (I don’t think I would go so far as utility) as well as be of a beautiful form. Relating this back to traditional art the question becomes what is the purpose of traditional art? Here by traditional art I mean making things with the intention of it being “art” and for people to look at/ hear/feel and doesn’t have other utility.
