October 10, 1999
Apparently, naked lady mudflaps are simply out of style.
If you want to be stylish in this day in age, your car must sport a crude decal of Bill Watterson's Calvin urinating, mooning, spitting, or making a public spectacle of his orifices.
These little car stickers disgust me -- they're tacky, tasteless and unimaginative -- everything that Calvin and Hobbes are not. The idea that Watterson had signed the approval to these things made me most dismayed... and then I ran across the 10th anniversary book wherein Watterson bemoans the unauthorized use of his characters and waxes furious over the comic strip business which requires that artists license their characters from the beginning.
" I have several problems with licensing. First of all, I believe licensing usually cheapens the original creation...commercial products rarely respect how a comic strip works. A wordy, multiple-panel strip with extended conversation and developed personalities does not condense to a coffee mug illustration without great violation to the strip's spirit...The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life. I don't want some animation studio giving Hobbes an actor's voice, and I don't want some greeting card company using Calvin to wish people a happy anniversary, and I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer. When everything fun and magical is turned into something for sale, the strip's world is diminished... Cartoonists who think they can be taken seriously as artists while using the strip's protagonists to sell boxer shorts are deluding themselves."
--Bill Watterson.
Watterson's bitter struggle with the cartoon syndicates is heart-wrenching. The issues of copyrighting and determining who really owns a work of art really interest me. I feel very passionately about the issues, but many of my feelings contradict each other completely.
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