5 May 2020 | Calvin & Hobbes | Being Yourself
Originally posted on Wordpress
5 May 2020
International Significance
Well, on hindsight, not that significant to everyone. But it should be. More people should know the story about the artists, especially those who admire their art so reverently.
Calvin and Hobbes is a daily American comic strip created by cartoonist Bill Watterson that was syndicated from November 18, 1985 to December 31, 1995. Commonly cited as “the last great newspaper comic”, Calvin and Hobbes has enjoyed broad and enduring popularity, influence, academic, and philosophical interest.
At the height of its popularity, Calvin and Hobbes was featured in over 2,400 newspapers worldwide. In 2010, reruns of the strip appeared in more than 50 countries, and nearly 45 million copies of the Calvin and Hobbes books had been sold worldwide.
Anyway enough rambling, back to the main topic.
Bill Watterson took two sabbaticals from the daily requirements of producing the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. The first took place from May 5, 1991 to February 1, 1992, and the second from April 3 through December 31, 1994.
These sabbaticals were included in the new contract Watterson managed to negotiate with the publishers. In fact, the sabbaticals were proposed by the syndicate themselves who, fearing Watterson’s complete burnout, endeavoured to get another five years of work from their star artist.
It seems puzzling at first glance, but sometimes, fame, success, money, global recognition are not the ultimate be-all and end-all of a human being’s life. At some point one has to decide for oneself what is more important, and what is worth the time.
Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it. You can make more money, but you can’t make more time. When you give someone your time, you are giving them a portion of your life that you’ll never get back. Your time is your life.
Personal Significance
Naushad Ali (25 December 1919–5 May 2006) was an Indian music director for Hindi films.He is widely considered to be one of the greatest and foremost music directors of the Hindi film industry. He is particularly known for popularising the use of classical music in films.
Naushad gave a new trend to popular film music by basing his tunes on classical music ragas and folk music.
He was one of the first to introduce sound mixing and the separate recording of voice and music tracks in playback singing. He was the first to combine the flute and the clarinet, the sitar and mandolin. He also introduced the accordion to Hindi film music and was among the first to focus on background music to extend characters’ moods and dialogue through music. But perhaps his greatest contribution was to bring Indian classical music into the film medium.
Many of his compositions were inspired by ragas and he even used distinguished classical artistes like Amir Khan and D.V. Paluskar in Baiju Bawra (1952) and Bade Ghulam Ali Khan in Mughal-e-Azam (1960).
Naushad commented on a pre-release meeting about “Baiju Bawra”: “When people heard that the film would be full of classical music and ragas, they protested, ‘People will get a headache and they will run away.’ I was adamant. I wanted to change public taste. Why should people be fed what they like all the time? We presented them with music from our culture and it worked.”
-> For Aan (1952), he was the first to use a 100-piece orchestra.
-> In Uran Khatola (1955), he recorded an entire song without the use of orchestra, having replaced the sound of musical instruments with choral sound of humming (‘a cappella’ before it was trendy!).
-> For Mughal-e-Azam (1960) song Ae Mohabbat Zindabad, he used a chorus of 100 persons.
-> He asked Lata Mangeshkar to render a part of the song “Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya” in a bathroom that had glazed tiles and then recorded the music to get the echo effect.
As Indian film music gradually turned to Western genres starting in the late 1960s, Naushad came to be considered old-fashioned. He was still considered to be a maestro, but his talents were sought mostly for historical movies.
Genius is never understood in its own time. ~ Bill Watterson
And sometimes not long enough after too. :) If you haven’t, try to get lost in the golden era of Bollywood, with these soulful songs. Jukebox | Part 1 | Part 2
Calvin & Hobbes
Bill Watterson is the artist and creator of (in my humble opinion) the greatest comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes. I was too young to understand it, let alone appreciate his art while it was originally published from 1985–1995, but once I read a book my brother gifted me, I literally devoured all the collections and have re-read the entire 10-year strip at least ten times in the past decade.
To me, Calvin and Hobbes is cartooning perfection — that rare strip that has both exquisite writing AND gorgeous artwork. A strip that managed to convey the joy of childhood, absurdity of humanity and power of imagination all through the relationship between a boy and his stuffed tiger. And most importantly, a strip that was consistently laugh-out-loud funny and in-your-face deeply philosophical, both at the same time.
Besides the fact that Calvin and Hobbes is my favourite comic of all times (it’s not Batman, it’s not Spiderman, it’s not Super Commando Dhruv or Chacha Chaudhary) I cherish above all others, Bill Watterson is an even bigger creative influence and someone I admire greatly as an artist and creator. And I won’t write more, will just outline just a handful of his real-life incidences and his own words to explain why:
• After getting fired as a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post, Watterson decided to instead focus on comic strips. Broke, he was forced to move back in with his parents and worked an advertising layout job he hated while he drew comics in his spare time. He stayed at this miserable job and submitted strips to comic syndicates for four years before Calvin and Hobbes was accepted. About this period Watterson wrote:
“The only way to learn how to write and draw is by writing and drawing … to persist in the face of continual rejection requires a deep love of the work itself, and learning that lesson kept me from ever taking Calvin and Hobbes for granted when the strip took off years later.”
• Watterson sacrificed millions (probably hundreds of millions) of dollars by never licensing and merchandising Calvin and Hobbes. He went through a long and traumatic fight with his syndicate over the licensing rights, and although he eventually prevailed, Watterson was so disillusioned with the industry he almost quit cartooning.
“I worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to let other people run away with my creation once it became successful. If I could not control what my own work was about and stood for, then cartooning meant very little to me.”
Luckily for us, Watterson didn’t quit and took a sabbatical instead.
• After working on the strip for 10 years, when Calvin and Hobbes was at the height of its popularity and was being published in over 2,000 newspapers, Watterson stopped. He had given his heart and soul to one project for 10 years, had said all he wanted to say and wanted to go out on top.
“I did not want Calvin and Hobbes to coast into half-hearted repetition, as so many long-running strips do. I was ready to pursue different artistic challenges, work at a less frantic pace with fewer business conflicts, and … start restoring some balance to my life.”
Since retiring the strip, Watterson has pursued his interest in painting and music.
It’s almost unbelievable to me when I think about it. Could I say ‘no’ to millions, I repeat, MILLIONS of dollars of merchandise money? The one lesson I will never forget from this brilliant man is, better to retire / quit your career and have people ask ‘why so soon’ rather than ‘finally / why not’.
Would you stop creating your art if millions of people admired your work and kept wanting more? I don’t know if I would.
Being Yourself
I always identified with Calvin, and this strip pretty much sums up what being a kid like Calvin is like. Constantly feeling out of sync with the rest of the world, and thus retreating to the world you create for yourself in your mind. If you think about it, Calvin was really quite an anomaly in popular entertainment — not just in comics, but in anything, be it movies, TV, etc. He has no friends, and no extracurricular activities; the only people he ever sees are his parents, who he has a strained relationship with, and Moe, Susie, Rosalyn, and Miss Wormwood, all of whom he detests and all of whom detest him. The only person he ever has any real interaction with exists only in his head. He is, for all intents and purposes, completely alone. And he’s fine with that. The kind of kid most people would entirely ignore all through school is not generally the kind you make the star of your show, and yet the strip became hugely successful.
It was Calvin who managed to truly express the idea to me — without being preachy, without being sappy, perhaps even without trying — that it was okay to be different.
Okay, this has already gotten a bit longer than I intended it to be, but (if you have made it till here, you’ll definitely like this and get through it to the end for sure!)
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