"Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards"- Watterson as commencement speaker at Kenyon College 20 May 1990.
Bill Watterson repeatedly, and against huge financial incentives, resisted selling out his cartoon strip, Calvin and Hobbes, to merchandising and mega-licensing deals. This is why you haven't ever seen any good, or legal, Calvin and Hobbes dolls, cards, t-shirts, car stickers, or even movies. Bill wants to keep it the way he envisioned it. He also stopped producing the strip before he felt it was running out of steam and before it would have been signed off to a team of artists to keep churning out ever more mediocre strips for years to come. He's the man standing up against the machine.
I find it useful to think about his insight any time I'm offered a deal that might involve compromising my creative freedom, schedule, or preferences for, say, financial gain. What do we really buy into with a golden handshake?
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