I managed to get hold of the Tenth Anniversary Volume of Calvin and Hobbes from the local charity shop the other day. (Hey...I know I'm cheap, but it's all to do with artistic integrity, all right?) Now, I actually quite like Calvin and Hobbes. Or at least I did. It's Charlie Brown with bigger words. But the bloke who writes it, Bill Watterson or whatever his name is (I can't be arsed climbing up to the top of my wardrobe to get the book down again and check) strikes me as being a total and utter bell end.
"I took on the syndicates and won! 'Cos I'm just great!" "I was the first person ever to use the word 'Booger' in a cartoon strip!" That's probably because it's an American word. When I was a kid comics like the Beano and the Dandy used words such as 'Botty', 'Snot', 'Bogie' etc all the time...and that was years before you were even a twinkle in the milkman's eye, Watterson.
"I've always held onto my artistic integrity and won't compromise it. That way I managed to get into plenty of arguments with the syndicates but never sold out my true vision of the strip."
What a fucking wanker! Talk about thinking the sun shines out of his own arse. It's a rip-off of Charlie Brown, Pal! He even wears a striped sweater for Christ's sake...and plays baseball, and has a huge, hydrocephalic head, and heaps snowballs into mounds and...well...for Calvin write Charlie Brown crossed with Lucy Van Pelt and for Hobbes write Snoopy...and that's it. Fucking integrity of vision my arse. If you want to be truly expressive, mate...if you really want to stick two fingers up at the syndicates and do some good for the American cartoon market...then get one of your characters to say the word 'Fuck!' Go on, you spineless bastard! You keep going on about making Calvin true to the darker side of childhood unlike the other homogenised strips that the newspapers run. So go on...make the little bastard swear and pull the wings off flies and laugh at spastics and piss in the sink.
There's a world of difference between somebody being angry at an unjust, cruel and violent world and somebody just being bitter because, deep down inside, they know their 'artistic integrity' was invalidated the moment they sold their crappy little cartoon strip to the syndicates. Did the government force you at gun point to sell? Or did you just decide to sell out for a fat bank statement and then realise what an arsehole you'd been? If you don't like the syndicates, Watterson, tell the syndicates to get stuffed. Even Leonardo had to organise parties to make a living and you must be loaded by now anyway!
It's interesting to note that at about the time the 'ground breaking' Calvin and Hobbes came into existence, Britain was producing Viz. Viz...the popular comic that featured such characters as 'Buster Gonad and his unfeasibly large testicles' and 'Paul Whicker the Tall Vicar...he's a cunt.'
Calvin and Hobbes, groundbreaking? Hardly! And as for your artistic integrity, Watterson, it's nothing more than self-congratulatory/self-loathing bullshit. I've torn out the middle pages from your book and left them by the side of the toilet in case I run out of loo roll in the near future and feel like adding to your artistic expression with some integrity of my own.
'Nuff said.