As Aaron Allston notes: there is going to be a Marmaduke movie,but not… well, read:
Calvin & Hobbes. If there’s one comic strip just about everyone wishes hadn’t stopped, it was Bill Waterson’s epic about a boy terror and his imaginary(?) friend, a stuffed tiger. They should have hucked “Dennis the Menace” when looking to the funnies and picked up Calvin, but… How it would work: Give it to Pixar and let them work on it without interference. Send Waterson to them in a locked crate so they can study him at leisure. If anyone tried making this in to a live-action film, it would fail so hard that audiences would be killed by the shrapnel.
When you think about it, the fact that there isn’t a Calvin & Hobbes film out there is superficially inexplicable. The combination of nigh-universal audience appeal + actors/actresses fighting to get in on the project + major animation studio capable of handling it should = instant box office mega-mojo. That it doesn’t… oh. Right. That entire ‘eating your soul’ thing that happens to movie executives above a certain level.
Never mind.
Moe Lane
The fault is Bill Waterson’s alone. He’s a first class prick.
Yep, he’s got the whole “I . . . am an Artiste!!” thing down pat. Specific example: he has refused to license the images in any way, which has eventually contributed to the proliferation of the execrable Calvin-pissing-on-brand-x window stickers. He likes to complain about it, but refuses to bestir himself to actually do anything about it.
I think the argument that there would be no counterfeits, if only Watterson had allowed Calvin to be whored out like Snoopy, is unsustainable.
You know what though? I like Watterson, at least the part of Watterson that comes out through through the characters in C&H. The man I read behind the comic is something like a hippie that got mugged by reality and became a reactionary. Now he just wishes he could stand athwart Progress and shout Stop.
Well, he can’t do that about everything, but he could take a stand with his comic, so he did. And I respect him for it.
Besides: better Calvin end than become the hollow shell that a comic like Garfield, Dilbert, or even Peanuts became.
In fact there was a comic that alluded to that. Calvin’s parents decide that they can’t change the whole world to be polite and respectful, but dang it, they’re going to try with Calvin.
Also, had his syndicate been willing to leave the golden goose alone, then the comic might have kept going.
But it is they, ultimately, who left him with the choices of ending the comic or selling out as thoroughly as Schulz did.