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Cameron Maxwell's avatar

I don't see C&H ever going out of print, or vanishing from the public interest; for kids like us who grew up in these worlds, our books will always be heirloom objects, and we'll always want to transmit the magic to our own children. I think this is the legacy that Watterson had in mind, and the one he strove to create. The man was a crank, but he knew what he was about.

I also think Watterson intuited his hero's contradictions made the most sense on the page. Calvin is by turns an avatar for slack-jawed consumerism, an impulsive solipcist, a terrible son, AND a compassionate nature-lover full of whimsy and imaginative/philosophical yearnings. Keeping all those plates spinning was a magic act, and one which Watterson probably felt he could only do through his chosen medium.

It's interesting to posit a world where Bill had a separate relationship to syndication, though. The idea of syndication-as-fan-service could've taken the ideas present in the strip down some interesting avenues, and I'd be hella down for a Tracer Bullet LARP.

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Alexandru Constantin's avatar

The problem with this is that with mass market commercialization you end up with a crass de-sacralization of the core text. Look at Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. First you have Jackson's trilogy which decent paled in comparison to the text and cheapened it with nonsense like Legolas bouncing around, which led to The Hobbit movies which were unwatchable garbage and spawned Denny's Hobbit Brunches and finally to the ultimate cheapening of it becoming a streaming Amazon action show. It's the Funko Popification cheapening and removal of depth that concerns me.

Of course you do have a point. Will this material die without the commercialization? I don't know, maybe. But I like to think that it will survive to inspire others to create better and more time relevant work when they discover it, instead of saturating the world with ever cheaper dull versions of itself.

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