Marvel And DC Comics Face Backlash Over Pay: ‘They Send A Thank You Note And $5,000 – The Movie Made $1 Billion’

 As comics giants make billions from their storylines and characters, writers & artists are speaking out about the struggles for fair pay.

(Sam Thielman, The Guardian, 9 August 2021)

Watch any superhero movie and you will see a credit along the lines of “based on the comic book created by”, usually with the name of a beloved and/or long-dead writer or artist. But deep, deep in the credits scroll, you will also see “special thanks” to a long roster of comic book talent, most of them still alive, whose work forms the skeleton and musculature of the movie you just watched. Scenes storyboarded directly from Batman comics by Frank Miller; character arcs out of Thor comics by Walt Simonson; entire franchises, such as the Avengers films or Disney+ spinoff The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, that couldn’t exist without the likes of Kurt Busiek or Ed Brubaker.

The “big two” comic companies – Marvel and DC - may pretend they’ve tapped into some timeless part of the human psyche with characters such as Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but the truth is that their most popular stories have been carefully stewarded through the decades by individual artists and writers. But how much of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) $20bn-plus box office gross went to those who created the stories and characters in it? How are the unknown faces behind their biggest successes being treated?

Not well, according to Brubaker who, with Steve Epting, revived Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes to create the Winter Soldier, portrayed by Sebastian Stan in Marvel’s films and shows. “For the most part, all Steve and I have got for creating the Winter Soldier and his storyline is a ‘thanks’ here or there, and over the years that’s become harder and harder to live with,” Brubaker recently wrote in a newsletter.

“I have a great life as a writer and much of it is because of Cap and the Winter Soldier bringing so many readers to my other work,” he added. “But I also can’t deny feeling a bit sick to my stomach sometimes when my inbox fills up with people wanting comments on the show.” (Marvel told the Guardian it had to “decline to comment out of respect for the privacy of [Brubaker and Epting’s] personal conversations [with the company].”)

Comic creators are “work-for-hire”, so the companies they work for owe them nothing beyond a flat fee and royalty payments. But Marvel and DC also incentivise popular creators to stay on with the promise of steady work and what they call “equity”: a tiny share of the profits, should a character they create or a storyline they write become fodder for films, shows or merch. For some creators, work they did decades ago is providing vital income now as films bring their comics to a bigger audience; they reason – and the companies seem to agree – it’s only fair to pay them more. DC has a boilerplate internal contract, which the Guardian has seen, which guarantees payments to creators when their characters are used. Marvel’s contracts are similar, according to two sources with knowledge of them, but harder to find; some Marvel creators did not know they existed.

A Marvel spokesman said there was no restrictions on when creators could approach the company about contracts, and said that they are having ongoing conversations with writers and artists pertaining to both recent and past work. A DC spokesman did not return multiple requests for comment. But the use of these contracts is at these companies’ discretion and the promised money can fall by the wayside.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” Jim Starlin, who created Thanos, recently told the Hollywood Reporter; Starlin negotiated a bigger payout after arguing that Marvel had underpaid him for its use of Thanos as the big bad of the MCU. Prolific Marvel writer Roy Thomas got his name added to the credits of Disney+ series Loki after his agent made a fuss. But these are creators that Marvel needs to keep happy; things can go very differently if nobody cares when you complain.

Bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a run of Marvel’s Black Panther and followed Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America run with his own a few years later, says that he believes Marvel has moral obligations to its artists and writers that go beyond contracts.  “Long before I was writing Captain America, I read [Brubaker and Epting’s] Death of Captain America storyline, and Return of the Winter Soldier, and it was some of the most thrilling storytelling I’d ever read,” Coates says. “I’d rather read it than watch the movies – I love the movies too – but it doesn’t seem just for them to extract what Steve and Ed put into this and create a multi-billion dollar franchise.”

Coates says he feels fairly treated when it comes to his own work, but he is adamant that lesser known names deserve better treatment from the big studios, no matter what their contracts say: “Just because it’s in a contract doesn’t make it right. If I have some kind of leverage over you, I can get you to sign a contract to fuck you over. It’s just legalist.”

Over the decades, Marvel and DC have become parts of Fortune 500 companies: the Walt Disney Company owns Marvel, and DC is owned by a subsidiary of AT&T. Now, deciding what share of the success their comic creators deserve is a matter of complex wrangling between Marvel and DC, which want to maintain good relations with their talent, and the vast bureaucracies above them.

Among creators, there is a general sense that it has become harder to get paid at Marvel. One source told the Guardian that Marvel subtracted its own legal fees from a protracted negotiation over royalty payments. Others who have worked for DC and Marvel say both count on artists and writers preferring not to spend time chasing them for royalties.

“Lawyer up, always, with comic book company contracts,” says Jimmy Palmiotti, longtime writer of DC characters such as Jonah Hex and Harley Quinn. “They are not in the business of feeding you the math.” Once a year, freelancers are allowed to audit the returns on their creations for DC and Marvel, but Palmiotti says it happens too rarely: “I can count on one hand the number of creators who’ve actually audited a major comics company.”

According to multiple sources, when a writer or artist’s work features prominently in a Marvel film, the company’s practice is to send the creator an invitation to the premiere and a cheque for $5,000 (£3,600). Three different sources confirmed this amount to the Guardian. There’s no obligation to attend the premiere, or to use the $5,000 for travel or accommodation; sources described it as a tacit acknowledgment that compensation was due.  Marvel declined to comment on this, citing privacy concerns. “We can’t speak to our individual agreements or contracts with talent,” said a spokesman.

Several sources who have worked with Marvel say that remuneration for contributing to a franchise that hits it big varies between the $5,000 payment, nothing, or – very rarely – a “special character contract”, which allows a select few creators to claim remuneration when their characters or stories are used. There are other potential ways to earn more – many former writers and artists are made executives and producers on Marvel’s myriad movies, cartoons and streaming series, for example – but those deals depend on factors other than legal obligation.  “I’ve been offered a [special character contract] that was really, really terrible, but it was that or nothing,” says one Marvel creator, who asked not to be named. “And then instead of honouring it, they send a thank you note and are like, ‘Here’s some money we don’t owe you!’ and it’s five grand. And you’re like, ‘The movie made a billion dollars.’”

Both Marvel’s “special character contract”, or DC’s equivalent, a “creator equity” contract, are ways to keep creators happy enough that they don’t hold back all of their original creations for competitors. DC pioneered these contracts back in the 1970s and 1980s, responding in part to Marvel’s treatment of Captain America creator Jack Kirby. Jim Shooter, then Marvel’s editor-in-chief, refused to return original art to Kirby unless he signed a lengthy release form allowing the company to adapt his creations – including the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Black Panther and the X-Men – without any compensation. DC saw an opportunity to score PR points, and offered Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons what appeared to be much better contracts for works such as Ronin and Watchmen. (The company used a technicality to renege within a few years).

Brubaker has recalled once attending Comic-Con, where he watched Roz Kirby yell at Jim Shooter about his mistreatment of her husband in the middle of a panel on creators’ rights. (The panel, incidentally, included Moore and Miller, who were celebrating the apparent fairness of their own contracts at DC.) Decades later, Brubaker helped Marvel find success with his Captain America run with Steve Epting. According to sources, Brubaker and Epting showed up in tuxedos to the premiere party for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie directly based on their comics, only to find that they weren’t on the list. Brubaker texted Sebastian Stan, the actor who played his and Epting’s character, Bucky Barnes, and he let them in.

Some creators told the Guardian that they did not know that Marvel even had the special character contract like DC. In fact, the Guardian has seen an application for the “Marvel Special Character Contract”, in which creators can formally ask Marvel whether one of their characters qualifies for extra payouts. In the application form, Marvel explicitly reserves the right to tell creators their characters aren’t original enough to get the bonus, warning that “the decisions are final” and not subject to appeal. DC uses the same measure; in 2015, the studio was criticised for cancelling payments to writer Gerry Conway for his character Power Girl, which the company retroactively decided was derivative of Supergirl and therefore ineligible for the contract, according to Conway. He no longer receives payments for her, he confirmed to the Guardian. DC did not respond to request for comment.

The Power Girl incident highlights how ethically fuzzy these contracts are, since they’re issued by DC and Marvel, drawn up unilaterally by the companies, and paid out when the companies account for their many films, TV shows, video games, trading cards, action figures and sundry other merch. One creator, who asked to remain anonymous, said he and other creators sometimes go to Target to take pictures of action figures of their characters for which payments are due, to demonstrate that their cheques are short.

DC and Marvel came into their own at a time of change in copyright law. The Copyright Act of 1976 gave artists the one-time right to cancel their contracts with IP holders, an option many exercised after witnessing the mistreatment of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were left penniless. Artist Al Jaffee once claimed his pay cheques from EC Comics were issued with contracts on the back, so he couldn’t cash them without signing over the rights to his work. This was a common practice throughout the industry, including at Marvel, and one that was reevaluated in the wake of the act.

As comics publishers evolved into major media operations, their staff grew concerned about mistreatment of talent. There were famous fights over royalties, and thorny questions over what credit was due to thousands of co-creators working in a shared universe. In 2000, a consortium of publishers founded a charity to directly aid artists who’d fallen on the hardest times, called the Hero Initiative. (Marvel is a founding member, and AT&T lets employees donate directly from their paycheques.) By the 1980s, people who worked in comics at every level were fans, in the same way that even the ushers on Broadway can sing and dance if called upon. In 1986, DC editor Paul Levitz and DC president Jeanette Kahn were working on new schemes to more fairly compensate writers and artists. Moore, Gibbons, and Miller’s contracts were meant to usher in a new era of fairness. It was a long time coming: some were already looking askance at DC after its treatment of Siegel and Shuster came to light during the production of the 1978 film Superman.

But Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen was a huge success, going through multiple reprints – unprecedented for a graphic novel – and DC never had to let its right to republish lapse, so it never did. The pair had a right to a share of merchandise profits; DC produced merch, classified it as “promotional items” and told Moore and Gibbons they weren’t owed anything. The vaunted in-house contracts that can make creators’ lives livable can always be subverted.

To the extent that there is any semblance of fairness in the industry now, it’s primarily Levitz’s doing, alongside Kahn and Karen Berger, who is now at Dark Horse Comics. Levitz left DC in 2009, but his influence is still felt across the industry.  “You want to create a situation where you never get to the old Russian joke where they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” Levitz says. “You want people to win when the companies win. I’m proud of the fact that we improved the quality of how we treated creative people.” More than one creator recounts calling Levitz to ask for more money because of a scene in a lucrative Batman movie that lifted plot points or names from their work, then being shocked when they got it.

Many of his peers say that Levitz was a bulwark against meddling by executives at Warner Brothers. For years, he blocked the publication of Watchmen sequels, of which Moore and Gibbons disapproved – something DC did soon after Levitz left, to widespread condemnation. Without another Levitz, the “big two” are once again attracting the criticism that led to the creation of these elusive “special” contracts in the first place. Some creators have left the medium entirely, but others have founded their own studios, such as Image and Dark Horse, providing creators with alternative outlets. As Marvel and DC may find, more creators – Brubaker and Jupiter’s Legacy creator Mark Millar are already among them – will simply not work for them again.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/09/marvel-and-dc-face-backlash-over-pay-they-sent-a-thank-you-note-and-5000-the-movie-made-1bn?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

Kevin Smith On Batman At 75: The Enduring Heartbreak & Why We Still Worship Him

(By Kevin Smith, Hollywood Reporter, 02 May 2014)

As Bruce Wayne's alter ego continues to pervade pop culture, TV and film, a famous fanboy expounds on the primal fear at the heart of his appeal.

Since he was created 75 years ago by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Batman has captured more fancies than he has colorful characters from Gotham's Rogues Gallery en route to the revolving door of Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. The appeal of the Batman has become so undeniable that at the conclusion of his latest multi-billion dollar franchise, the Caped Crusader wasn't gifted with the eight-year vacation his character was afforded by Christopher Nolan between The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises.  Instead, Warner Bros. lit the Bat-Signal and put his Bat-ass right back to work: on TV in Fox's Gotham, in video games like Batman: Arkham Origins, in animation like the short-lived Beware the Batman on Cartoon Network and on the big screen again, in Zack Snyder's Man of Steel sequel, the tentatively titled Batman vs. Superman, and the director's just-announced Justice League.

But why does Batman endure? In the age of the Marvel movie, a mild-mannered doctor can lose his temper and become a giant green monster, or a rich guy can put on a flying suit of armor and blow away bad guys with repulsor technology.  In The Avengers, a whole slew of super souls battled side by side, giving us so much ass-kickin' eye candy, the worldwide audience collectively screamed, "JUST TAKE ALL MY MONEY NOW!" The Marvel heroes were unwittingly designed for today's modern movie, where digital artists can finally depict not only what it looks like but also how it feels to be Spider-Man swinging through the canyons of Manhattan.

By comparison, however, on paper Batman comes across as kinda dull. He pulls on a mask and a cape and fights street-level bad guys. He has no superpowers. He has cool tech like Iron Man, but he likes to rely on his brains and brawn more than anything else. In a world of super- heroes, he's pretty uncinematically normal. When you take away the Batmobile and the Batcave, Batman is just a guy fighting mad men in makeup. He's not invulnerable: He's a human being.  And therein lies the appeal of the Batman: He is one of us. We can't identify with Superman because, in the real world, he'd be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. We can't identify with Wonder Woman because, in the real world, we don't know any Amazonian women made from clay. We can't identify with Green Lantern because, in the real world, there are no aliens giving out power rings.

But in the real world, parents die. Sometimes it's a car crash that does it, and sometimes it's a natural disaster. Sometimes it's merely something mundane and medical. And sometimes, it's a grisly crime at the hands of the desperate or demented. The thought of losing both parents is a primal fear that preoccupies our childhood imagination: There never has been a child who hasn't fretted, at one point in their lives, "What if Mom and Dad disappear and I'm left all alone?" It's a terrifying thought for a kid: "What would happen to me if the only two people in the world who love me the most were suddenly dead?"  See, it's the Passion Play aspect that keeps us coming back to Batman. In 1966, Batman went mainstream in a campy television show that only once mentioned the heartbreaking origin of the Dark Knight. This was a fun Batman, Biff-ing and Bam-ing bad guys -- in Dutch tilt shots -- simply because it was the right thing to do. But after Watergate and Vietnam, the bubbly Batman was returned to his onerous origins as the boy whose life would be forever altered in Crime Alley. And to a country and world that had lost its innocence with the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, the more somber Dark Knight Batman had a deeper impact than the Bright Knight that was the Adam West iteration of the character.

Ask someone in 1966 why Bruce Wayne became Batman and they couldn't tell you. Ask anyone now? Even the least geeky of us can tell you a young Bruce Wayne watched a mugger murder his parents in the midst of a back-alley robbery. We take this aspect of the story to heart because it's what appeals to us about Batman the most: his humanity. Before he was punching the Riddler in his turkey neck, Batman was a boy who survived the worst thing that can happen to a child.  Yes, we love the look of a man in uniform -- particularly when that uniform includes a cape and cowl. But while Batman is visually arresting, it's what lies at the heart of the character beneath the bat emblazoned across his chest that we respond to. We root for him with a mix of pity and power, the way we silently cheer on any kid we read about in the news who has to deal with issues and complications some full-grown adults couldn't be expected to weather.

And in this less innocent age, where greed and corruption are so commonplace it makes our world more like Gotham and less like shiny-happy Metropolis, we trust the establishment less and less. When even priests and politicians are pederasts, what authority figure can you believe in anymore without including caveats or excuses? Although he's a fictional character, Batman presents an adult any child (and most adults for that matter) can feel safe with, knowing that this masked man with his hidden identity will ironically never betray your trust. He will lay down his life to save yours. But because he spent his formative years honing his body and mind for a lifelong war on crime, we know he won't have to die for us: Unlike most messiahs, you can't stop the Batman.

At the core of the character is an arrested development of sorts: Only a child makes a vow as untenable as “I will spend my life avenging my parents.”  And even though he's a lethal fighting machine who refuses to kill, at the heart of the heroic adult is just a broken boy -- so broken, in fact, that the man adheres to the juvenile promise he made as a child.  But without parents to tell him he's mounting an impossible task, the shattered kid becomes the driven adult, and his dark days make him a Dark Knight.  Bruce Wayne is the original "boy who lived," but his Voldemort isn't the Joker -- it's injustice. The injustice of loving parents taken too young. The injustice of a ruined childhood. The injustice of those superstitious and cowardly criminals taking not only things that don't belong to them, but also the innocence, joy, safety and security of the wonder years.

It wasn't fair what happened to Bruce Wayne, so instantly, we're on Bruce Wayne's side. But he wins our loyalty not because he's the victim we never want to be, but because he's the survivor and champion every one of us dreams we are, with or without childhood trauma and tragedy. Bruce the Boy vows to avenge his parents' murders, and Bruce the Adult makes good on the promise, taking it all one step further: On his watch, no child will ever have to know the pain of losing Mom and Dad. So even though this billionaire playboy has mountains of money with which to dry his eyes or can boo-hoo into the bosoms of any woman (or man) he desires, Bruce Wayne spends every waking hour as a soldier in the service of strangers. And because of this, we feel more connected to Bruce Wayne and Batman than Tony Stark and Iron Man, or Clark Kent and Superman.  Or the pope.  Or the president.  Even the good ones.

We won't let Batman go because, for such a ridiculous notion, he's so easy to believe in. He's a spiritual icon of survival for so many that it doesn't matter if he's a fictional character. He endures because of that young boy who made it through the worst thing that can ever happen to a child and came out stronger for it. And since every one of us has either faced or will face their own personal Crime Alley, where we lose someone precious to us, it's good to know there's someone out there who can show us how to survive heartbreak -- even if he does it by overdressing and socking bad guys in the mush.

Kevin Smith is the writer-director of Clerks, Dogma and the upcoming Tusk, starring Justin Long and Michael Parks.   For DC, he has written Green Arrow: Quiver and Batman: The Widening Gyre. He also is the executive producer of Comic Book Men on AMC.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/kevin-smith-batman-at-75-699807?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_boxoffice&utm_campaign=THR%20Box%20Office_now_2014-05-02%2016%3A02%3A26_rford

Animation

Oscars Revamp Animation Nomination Process

(By Scott Feinberg , Hollywood Reporter, 27 September 2013)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will soon announce changes to the way it picks its best animated feature and shorts nominees for the Oscars, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The move will make it easier for more of its 6,000 or so members to participate in the decision-making process, and almost certainly lead to a marked increase in the number of people who actually determine the nominees.

Nominees in those categories historically have been chosen by only a relatively small number of Los Angeles-based volunteers. Half have been members of the Short Films and Animated Feature branch and half have been members of one the Academy's other branches, but all have had to be not only unaffiliated with any of the movies in contention, but also available to attend L.A. screenings of the eligible films over several Sundays starting in November. This group is known as the Animated Feature Film Award Screening Committee.

The new rule change will enable Academy members who are based outside of the L.A. area to serve on the Screening Committee, as well, by permitting them to weigh the eligible films by watching them on DVD or Blu-Ray screeners, as opposed to having to attend the official screenings.  This decision is consistent with other recent Academy efforts to find ways to include more members in more voting decisions. For instance, the Academy recently began providing screeners of all of the nominated documentary features, animated shorts, documentary shorts and live-action shorts to all members of the Academy, so that they can easily see and weigh in on the final outcome in those races. And it recently announced plans to send all of the nominated foreign language films to the entire membership, as well.

 

The entire Short Films and Feature Animation branch -- which is currently composed of roughly 400 members and chaired by Jon Bloom, who also serves as one of its reps on the Board of Governors, along with Disney-Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter and Bill Kroyer -- still does not get to determine its corresponding nominees, though, unlike most of the Academy's other branches. This is apparently because some fear that branch members might just vote in blocks on behalf of their respective studios' contender(s) -- as the entire Academy once did when actors, producers, directors, writers, execs and publicity people were under contract to specific studios -- which would give an unfair advantage to studios that are heavily represented (i.e. Disney-Pixar, etc.) over studios that are not (i.e. GKIDS). The Annie Awards are often criticized for this sort of thing.

The Academy was not available for comment.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/oscars-revamp-animation-nomination-process-637555

 

Why Oscar Snubbed Pixar, 'Tintin,' 'Arthur Christmas' for Best Cartoon
(By Gregg Kilday, Hollywood Reporter, Feb 7, 2012)

When the Academy Award nominations were announced Jan. 24, most of Hollywood was waiting to see which films would emerge as best picture contenders. But within the smaller, intensely competitive animation community, the focus was on its own feature nominees, and in that category the results were shocking.  Sure, both of DreamWorks Animation's 2011 entries, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots, made the cut, as did Gore Verbinski's Rango. But where were Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin and Pixar's Cars 2, not to mention Sony/Aardman Animations' Arthur Christmas or Fox's Rio? Instead, two obscure, foreign-language, hand-drawn animated movies, Chico & Rita and A Cat in Paris, rounded out the list of nominees.

Insiders at the various companies snubbed were stunned, though none wanted to go on record with their displeasure. By way of explanation, one Academy member says of the voters: "They were sending a message. They are against motion capture and kids' movies, and they want to save hand-drawn animation."  Well, yes and no. Many traditional animators are suspicious of motion capture or, as it's also known, performance capture, in which actors' performances are fed into a computer. In 2010, they succeeded in adding a line to the Oscar rule book that says, "Motion capture by itself is not an animation technique." That doesn't rule out mo-cap movies; it just means that they must prove they include frame-by-frame animation as well.  In addition to Tintin, two other motion-capture movies, Happy Feet 2 and Mars Needs Moms, were entered; all three were judged sufficiently animated to proceed. (The only movie that ran afoul of Academy rules was The Smurfs, a live-action/animation hybrid that was found not to contain enough actual animation.)

But the fact that Tintin didn't receive a nom in the animation or visual effects categories and that Andy Serkis wasn't nominated as a supporting actor for his work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes suggest, as Visual Effects Society chair Jeffrey Okun puts it: "The industry is confused. It comes down to, 'What is animation?' That is something everyone has been struggling with."

The Academy's ani noms aren't just about kinds of animation, though. They are made by a committee of slightly fewer than 100 members -- half of them animators from the Academy's short films and feature animation branch and half from throughout the Academy. Each member rates each movie on a scale of six to 10. Says Jon Bloom, chair of the branch's executive committee, "Part of the instructions the committee is given is to consider the entire achievement as a whole, not just its animation." That means story, characters, music and vocal performances all come into play. He says no larger lesson can be drawn from this year's choices beyond the fact that it was a highly competitive year. "My own ballot had many highly rated films, far more than five," he says.

But the final list does appear to favor films with elements that appeal to adults -- such as Antonio Banderas' comic take on a Latin lover in Puss or the Clint Eastwood allusions of Rango. That put Cars 2, which some critics had complained was driven by merchandising, at a disadvantage -- even though it was a pet project of Pixar's John Lasseter, who sits on the Academy's board of governors. So, too, Tintin: The character may be beloved in Europe, but here the movie may have seemed too much of a boys' adventure tale.  Chico & Rita, on the other hand, is a genuinely adult movie -- it even features female nudity -- charting a tempestuous love affair between a Cuban songwriter and a sexy singer, set against a musical backdrop that includes everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to Tito Puente. "It's a great, beautiful, adult animated film," says Eric Beckman, who heads the New York-based micro-distributor GKids Films, which will release Chico through its adult Luma Films label. He also is handling A Cat in Paris, which follows a cat burglar across the rooftops of Paris. Of the upset, he says, "In all honesty, I expected we'd get one nomination, but I never thought we'd get two."

♦♦♦♦♦

10 YEARS OF ANIMATION OSCAR WINNERS

•Toy Story 3 -- Disney/Pixar (2011)

•Up -- Disney/Pixar (2010)

•WALL-E -- Disney/Pixar (2009)

•Ratatouille -- Disney/Pixar (2008)

•Happy Feet -- Warners (2007)

•Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit -- DreamWorks/Aardman (2006)

•The Incredibles -- Disney/Pixar (2005)

•Finding Nemo -- Disney/Pixar (2004)

•Spirited Away -- Disney/Studio Ghibli (2003)

•Shrek -- DreamWorks (2002)

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/oscars-cartoon-snub-tintin-arthur-christmas-pixar-287831

RIP, RAY HARRYHAUSEN: The Special-Effects Titan Transformed Fantasy On Film
(By Michael Cavna, WashingtonPost, May 08, 2013)

At just 13, Ray Harryhausen stumbled upon an illusion that changed his life. His parents liked to take him to the picture show — “metropolis,” perhaps, or “The Lost World” — but on this particular day in 1933, he went to see “King Kong.” And there, sitting in the dark, young Raymond Harryhausen saw the light.  “King Kong,” with its beastly brawling, featured the stop-motion mastery of Willis O’Brien. Ray exited the theater “haunted” by the film, he would later say — beguiled by how he had escaped into the surreal from the mundane. He became “a ‘King Kong’ addict.” The boy who made La Brea Tar Pit dioramas in school had just witnessed how one’s sculpted art could gurgle and rattle and slither to life. He would soon learn about stop-motion from a friend’s dad, an employee at RKO, and his garage became his lab, as he played God with his molded model creatures, frame by painstaking frame.

Fast-forward to 1949, and again a stop-motion gorilla fills the silver screen. Again it’s the guiding hand of O’Brien at the animated helm. Only this time, helping to summon most of the magic of motion is Ray Harryhausen. His boyhood addiction has propelled him into the business, to work on “Mighty Joe Young.” He had worked with animation while in the Army. Now, one of the great Hollywood careers is born.  Within several years, Ray Harryhausen would make the first of his several Sinbad adventures, and then came his breakthrough with Warner Bros.’ technically influential “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” Harryhausen devised camera tricks using rear projection and miniature split-screens and masked-out space, as he mastered how to combine stop-motion and live-action in the same frame. Trick by trick, he became the art form’s greatest magician.

Not long after came his masterpiece, 1963’s “Jason and the Argonauts” — complex, deliberate animation that sometimes yielded only a half-second of footage a day. The live actors tangle convincingly with such creatures as Thalos, the towering bronze statue-defender of Crete, and a sword-wielding army of skeletons. The battle scenes are dynamic, the interaction of flesh and coal-eyed armatures is magnificent, and these scenes will help profoundly influence the next generation of technical wizards.

And here is where the cinematic inheritance has a perfect symmetry. Harryhausen glimpsed his life’s work at age 13. What he, himself, would hand down were stop-motion scenes that had that same enchanting power to inspire young minds.  “I probably wouldn’t be a filmmaker today if it weren’t for him,” Sam Fell, co-director of Laika’s Oscar-nominated stop-motion “ParaNorman,” tells Comic Riffs. “My mum took me as an impressionable 9-year-old to the local cinema to see the Sinbad movies. I was completely enthralled by the exotic locations, the malevolent villains and most of all by the creatures Ray created.  “Those things are still etched in my mind all these years later,” continues Fell, whose credits include “Flushed Away” and “The Tale of Despereaux.”

Aardman Studios’ Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit, “Chicken Run”) has called Harryhausen the grandfather of stop-motion animation. And Steven Spielberg has said that Harryhausen is the father of the business that is filmic science fiction and fantasy and adventure.  “Ray Harryhausen’s impact on an entire generation -- several, actually -- of filmmakers cannot be overstated,” Hal Hickel, animation director at ILM, tells Comic Riffs. “All those animators and visual-effects artists whose lives were changed by their first viewings of ‘Jason and The Argonauts,’ or ‘The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,’ have gone on to transform the way movies are made. Each of them trying again and again to reproduce the wonder they first felt as a child watching Jason fight those skeletons.”

That skeleton crew of earth-born warriors -- and first experiencing them through a child’s eyes -- has stayed with LucasFilm director/animator Brenda Chapman.  “The film that stands out most in my memory is ‘Jason and the Argonauts,’ “ Chapman, who won an Oscar this year for Pixar’s “Brave,” tells Comic Riffs. “The fighting skeletons in that were absolutely hair-raising to me as a kid! I loved every second they were on screen.”  Through “One Million Years B.C.” and “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,” Harryhausen perhaps got to challenge himself most with 1981’s “Clash of the Titans,” as elaborate, ever-kinetic creatures like the serpent-maned Medusa interacted deftly with the live actors.  In 1992, Harryhausen finally was rightly recognized for his genius with an honorary Oscar. 

On Tuesday, Raymond Harryhausen — who was born in Los Angeles in 1920 — died in London, where he had lived since the ‘60s. He was 92.  “We all owe Ray such an enormous debt of gratitude,” Hickel says.  “He changed the movies and he changed me,” Fell says. “What a life!”  “It’s a sad time for the industry -- but Mr. Harryhausen left us a wonderful and inspired legacy,” Chapman says. “He changed how we imagined storytelling on film in bringing these fantastical images to life. He showed us that anything was possible on film.  “I think that Mr. Harryhausen’s spirit will definitely live on through every new innovation in special effects.”  “I’m very happy that so many young fans have told me that my films have changed their lives,” Harryhausen once said, as cited by imdb.com. “That’s a great compliment. It means I did more than just make entertaining films. I actually touched people’s lives — and, I hope, changed them for the better.”  You did, Ray. You did.

INDUSTRY FIGURES PAY TRIBUTE ON TWITTER:

Here is Ray, holding the Kong puppet I made as a child. I owe Ray a lifetime of wonder. Thank you sir. twitter.com/halhickel/stat…  — hal hickel (@halhickel) May 7, 2013

Anyone in the world of animation, SFX, or fantasy owes everything to Ray Harryhausen. A true legend. RIP Sir. #rayharryhausen  — andrew stanton (@andrewstanton) May 7, 2013

If I believed in God, I'd want him to be like Ray Harryhausen -- nudging us one frame at a time toward the sublime & fantastic.  — Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2013

RIP Ray Harryhausen. He was a source of inspiration, the master of stop motion, and even a voice actor in Elf. His work still holds up.  — Jon Favreau (@Jon_Favreau) May 7, 2013

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/rip-ray-harryhausen-inspired-as-a-child-the-special-effects-titan-transformed-fantasy-on-film/2013/05/08/4d70911e-b77e-11e2-aa9e-a02b765ff0ea_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads

  

‘THE AVENGERS’: Assembling 7 Reasons why it’s the Best Marvel Movie Yet

(By David Betancourt and Michael Cavna, Comic Riff’s website, May 2, 2012)

EDITOR’S NOTE: “We’re not a team. We’re a time bomb.” So says Mark Ruffalo’s de-Hulked Bruce Banner, as if he were describing not only the Avengers but also “The Avengers,” the hotly anticipated mega-movie that’s set to detonate Friday against its box-office rivals. Some cumulative alchemy of the preceding Marvel movies and the proceeding popcorn-movie season — plus a slew of good reviews — has “The Avengers” poised to become one of the year’s top-three commercial flicks, threatening to set records. But is the film all that the buzz says it's cracked up to be? Comic Riffs contributor David Betancourt hit a screening of Hollywood’s latest superhero entry to see whether it passed his Extreme Fanboy Test. His verdict? It reigns supreme.

MARVEL STUDIOS gave us fair warning.  Back in 2008, at the end of the first “Iron Man,” Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury said to Robert Downey Jr.’s billionaire industrialist: “I am Iron Man? You think you’re the only superhero in the world? Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of a bigger universe. You just don’t know it yet. ... I’m here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative.”  Those words launched a studio’s real initiative — Marvel’s bold plan to roll out four more films: an Iron Man sequel (which would debut Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow) and movies featuring the Incredible Hulk, Thor (which briefly introduced us to Hawkeye) and Captain America, all linked with the presence of S.H.I.E.L.D (as well as hidden scenes at the end of each film). Then, the biggest step: Assemble all the heroes together for a super-film.  The studio’s initiative has paid off — and not just because those Marvel films have grossed more than $2-billion at the global box office.

Marvel brilliantly cast every Avenger: from Captain America (Chris Evans, despite the fact that most fanboys knew him as the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four) to Thor (Chris Hemsworth) to the first inspired casting choice that made everything since possible: Downey Jr. wearing the Iron Man role like a second skin.

So what happens when they finally mix together iron, super soldier serum, thunder and lighting, gamma radiation, a Russian spy and bows and arrows? We get one of the best comic-book movies ever — and the top movie from Marvel Studios by a fair margin.  Here is why (and caution, of course: mild spoilers ahead):

1. ‘THE AVENGERS” fleshes out each superhero — and our villain — smartly.

Everything about Joss Whedon’s film is on point — even going so far as to pay homage to the original first issue of the comic from 1963, which featured Loki (Tom Hiddleston) as the main villain (just like the movie).   Among the Avengers, Captain America struggles to adapt to life 70 years past his present, as well as to the edgy sense of humor of Iron Man.  Bruce Banner’s big brain is needed, even though the doc’s not interested in letting the Hulk out of his mental cage. The Black Widow is dealing with her own personal issues, and Thor must accept that he has to help take down step-brother Loki for the sake of Earth.  Even when the skin is gamma-green, characters are fleshed-out with white-hot intelligence.  

2. HOW BLACK WIDOW holds her own:
With a lesser director and actress, it would be easy for Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow — who doesn’t have the powers quite like the rest — to be lost in this big-boys-with-toys club. But Scarlett's Black Widow stares down the Hulk and Loki — and her powers of persuasion are sometimes the strongest talent of all.

3. IRON MAN’s suite of new suit tricks:
With all the nifty flying maneuvers and impressive weapons arsenal, we tend to forget that Iron Man’s high-tech suit also makes him very strong. In “Avengers,” he easily goes toe to toe, blow to blow with Thor when they battle in a heated disagreement.

4. THOR’s hairy conflicts:

Even better than Thor’s mano-a-hammered-mano showdown with Iron Man:  the Hulk and Thor duke it out in spectacular fashion. (When the Hulk tries to pick up Thor’s hammer Mjolnir? Nothing good.)  And then there’s Thor’s relationship with Loki that plays like ancient tragedy. At most every turn, he tries to make his villainous sibling see the error of his ways.

5. THE STARK snark:

What's better than Iron Man’s maneuvers? Tony Stark’s quick-quips, verbally thrusting and parrying, when the armor’s off.  Robert Downey Jr. doesn’t need the super-suit to light up the screen — and here, his deft, laser-sharp lines play even brilliantly when delivered with cheek and edge to those on his own team.

6. THE HULK as “smash!” hit:

Enter Hulk, up-stage right. New addition Mark Ruffalo is winning as a thoughtful Bruce Banner — the best big-screen Dr. Banner so far, superior to the gifted Ed Norton and Eric Bana — but his CGI alter-ego steals entire scenes.  Verdict: Hulk like Whedon!

7. THE EXQUISITE build:
It’s no mean feat to keep the wealth of storylines and characters all propelling clearly and cleanly to the unifying Big Finish. By the time we get to the Avengers forming a circle on that blasted-out Manhattan avenue — literally having each other’s backs in a moment already viewed by millions — the film has built to the finale beautifully.  Verdict: Whedon knows crescendo!

BONUS: You know how Marvel movies always feature a treat after the credits? “The Avengers” offers its own tease after the credits.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/the-avengers-assembling-7-reasons-why-its-the-best-marvel-movie-yet/2012/05/02/gIQAMLgPwT_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads

Frank Miller: Occupy Wall Street 'Louts, Thieves & Rapists,' Comic Writer Says

                                             (Huffington Post & Aol.com, Nov 11, 2011)

Frank Miller has spent much of his famed comic book writing career creating dark, urban dystopias, but the groundbreaking scribe has little regard for the chaos he says reigns at Zuccotti Park.  The man behind such famed comic series as "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," "Sin City" and "300," in fact, is entirely against the Occupy Wall Street movement.  "'Occupy' is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness," Miller wrote in a blog entry last week. "These clowns can do nothing but harm America."

Though, for the most part, the participants in the now-global Occupy moment have protested the imbalances of the economy, corporate fiscal abuses and government officials' close ties to Wall Street, Miller mentions the War on Terror in his slamming of the nascent movement.  "Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy," he later continues. "Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism."  Miller then implores protestors to join the military, or otherwise, to go "back to your mommas' basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft."

In his work, Miller's protagonists often face off against corrupt government officials. Batman, in both "The Dark Knight Returns" and "The Dark Knight Strikes Again" is faced with heavy governmental opposition, with the latter featuring an especially oppressive and corrupt government.  In 2006, Miller announced that he would have Batman take on Osama bin Laden in "Holy Terror, Batman!" but later dropped Batman from the book; it became "Holy Terror," and has been highly criticized for being hatefully anti-Islam.

In a blog entry on his own site posted in September, Miller calls the book "propaganda," a sort of throw-back to when Captain America punched Hitler, rips the news media as slanted propaganda in its own right, and says, "3000 of my neighbors were murdered. My country was, utterly unprovoked, savagely attacked. I wish all those responsible for the Atrocity of 9/11 to burn in hell."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/13/frank-miller-occupy-wall-street_n_1090790.html

Calvin and Hobbes

The Tiger Strikes Again

(By Neely Tucker, Washington Post, 2005)

"Calvin and Hobbes" was such an exuberant, strange and metaphysical realm you wonder how it ever got shoveled into a comic strip.  You remember this when you look at "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes," a 1,456-page art-book epic of every panel ever published: It was original by sheer force of personality. Calvin sounded like a 6-year-old psychotic on Ritalin one day and a Yale lit grad the next.  He was id off the leash. He wondered what was worthwhile in life if death was inevitable. ("Seafood," answered Hobbes, his imaginary tiger friend. Wait - was Hobbes real or not?  Debatable.)  Calvin battled blobs of oatmeal and the bathtub suds monster. He and Hobbes hurtled downhill in their wagon and set out for the Yukon. He turned himself into a Tyrannosaurus Rex , Calvin the Human Insect, Calvin the Bug, Captain Napalm, Stupendous Man and Spaceman Spiff.  In the middle of class, Calvin's teacher suddenly turns into a pig-snouted monster! The drooling blob demands attention and homework!  "Chew electric death, snarling cur," Spiff howls, blasting her face off with his Atomic Napalm Neutralizer!  He was known to wear little rocket ship underpants. He feared nothing but the babysitter. Also the dark.

The strip ran from 1985 to 1995. Thirty million people have bought earlier collections of the strip, but as of today you can buy it all in one pop. It will set you back $150, but the three-volume, glossy-papered tome finally gives proper appreciation and display to creator Bill Watterson's efforts, the kind of size and color quality that he waged such epic battles for with newspapers and syndicates before retiring into silence at age 37, tired of the fray, wary of drifting into the bankrolls of mediocrity.  Flip open a page here:  "I want a grenade launcher, Mom. When's Christmas?" Calvin barks in one panel.  "What do you think is the meaning of true happiness?" he asks Hobbes in another. "Is it money, cars and women? Or is it just money and cars?"

All 10 years gone now.  People still remember because it was never worse than good, and was often simply brilliant.  It parodied the issues of the day, the materialism, the greed-is-good cynicism, the pointlessness of television, the rampaging egos, the growing crassness of public intercourse, the bad behavior, our infinitesimal place in the universe.  There was also time for snacks and a bedtime story.  " 'Calvin and Hobbes' is probably one of the last great American comic strips," says Dirk Deppey, editor of the Comics Journal.  A generation earlier, "Peanuts" reshaped the comics world by imagining children with interior psychological lives in a neighborhood devoid of adults. Charlie Brown was a kid on the verge of midlife crisis. There was a beagle who fancied himself a fighter pilot.  "Calvin and Hobbes," the best kid strip since, worked on the conceit that Hobbes was a stuffed animal to everyone in the world but Calvin, an only child. Only when he and Calvin are alone in the panel does Hobbes spring to life - a tiger who walks on two feet, makes cheesecake grins at girls and appears to be more mature than Calvin by oh, about an hour and a half.  They wrestle, pull the covers back and forth at bedtime and make goofy faces at one another while sitting in the back seat of the family car - best friends of the type boys no longer have after age 12.     

The only other kids in the strip were Susie, who lived around the block, and Moe, the school bully. Calvin's parents did not have names.  They lived in a house that had a sort of American foursquare sensibility to it, in a nameless town that seemed lost on the Midwestern prairie.  It all bespoke a certain Sunday-afternoon loneliness. (Hobbes was Calvin's imagination, right? His alter ego? Which means the whole thing is just Calvin talking to himself? Nobody knows; Watterson never made it clear.)  The childish exuberance, the adult cynicism, the gorgeous colors in the Sunday panels. Hyper-literate third graders read it, overweight taxi drivers in El Paso read it, terminally hip people wearing black in Manhattan read it.  It was a brilliant blue flame of creativity that startled Watterson's friends.  "He wasn't exactly a ball of laughs," says Richard West, a comics historian and author who has known Watterson since college. "Where did this stuff come from? I don't know. I didn't see the genius in his day-to-day personality."  Watterson, in the book's introduction: "Hobbes got all my better qualities (with a few quirks from our cats), and Calvin my ranting, escapist side. Together, they're pretty much a transcript of my mental diary . . . it's pretty startling to reread these strips ands see my personality exposed so plainly right there on paper. I meant to disguise that better."  Well. It's not that the man was ever overexposed -- and that was before he did the Garbo thing.

It is 1988. The strip has been going for three years. The phone rings at Universal Press Syndicate. It is Steven Spielberg's assistant.  Mr. Spielberg would very much like to speak to Mr. Watterson.  Lee Salem, the syndicate's president, is ecstatic. Two creative minds like that getting together! The Wizard of Oz! Winnie the Pooh! Peter Pan! Excited, he calls Watterson at home in Chagrin Falls, a leafy suburb of Cleveland. Would he talk to Spielberg?  No, Watterson says.  "Bill simply was not interested," Salem remembers now, the sound of lost millions in licensing revenue like so much static down the phone line.  It turned out Watterson wasn't interested in doing anything other than the strip. After the first couple of years, no interviews. No "Calvin and Hobbes" dolls -- even if Hobbes was, at least as adults see it, a doll himself. (There's no telling how much a Hobbes doll could have made. The syndicate originally had licensing rights, but Watterson's opposition was so vehement that Salem ultimately "caved in completely'' and gave all the rights back to Watterson. "Otherwise, I'd be on the beach somewhere right now,'' Salem says.) No animated specials. No calendars, notebooks, pencils, backpacks or lunch boxes. (Those car decals of a Calvinesque brat whizzing rip-offs.) 

In 1990, Watterson gave the commencement speech at his alma mater, Kenyon College in Ohio. It was about fleeing the "real world."  He apparently hasn't appeared in a public forum since.  Very few photographs, too. These are old now, but show a slender, bespectacled man with a Marine buzz cut and a thick, somber mustache. Dark eyes, maybe friendly, maybe just tired of you.  He's 47 now. Lives in Cleveland proper with his wife, Melissa, in a house tax records show the couple bought last year for less than you can get a condo for in Washington. In the introduction to the book, he says he paints and studies music.  "He's a pretty regular guy who lives on a regular street," says West. "His neighbors know who he is. He visits his family, but trotting around the world never interested him. He doesn't live significantly different than he did 20 years ago."  Watterson was born in the District and grew up in the droning normalcy of Chagrin Falls. His mom, Kathryn, was on the city council and his dad a patent attorney. He would use the family house as the model for Calvin's, Kathryn Watterson says in a telephone interview, and his dad as the model for Calvin's. ("I'd be happy to talk to you all day long, but Bill's been so private," she says. "He's a thoughtful, introspective person, so it sort of goes along that he wouldn't seek out publicity.")  At Kenyon, Watterson wanted to be a political cartoonist. He got a job as one for a paper in Cincinnati after graduation, but wound up in the unemployment line six months later. He designed ads for a weekly shopper in the windowless basement of a convenience store.

After hours and on weekends, he developed comic strips no one wanted. He eventually drew one populated by a dozen characters including a kid named Marvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. On the suggestion of one syndicate, Watterson kept the stuffed tiger, gave Marvin's Beatlesque mop a haircut, changed his name and dumped the rest of the cast.  And lo.  Universal Press Syndicate picked up the strip in 1985. There were clues all along that this was about more than slapstick.  Calvin was named for the 16th-century Protestant theologian who believed in predestination, Hobbes for the philosopher a century later who once observed that life is "nasty, brutish and short."  Miss Wormwood, Calvin's teacher, was named after the apprentice devil in "The Screwtape Letters."  Success was quick - the cartoon was quickly picked up by dozens of papers, and eventually ran in more than 2,400.  But the young cartoonist was developing his characters on the fly, uncertain about working in the huge shadow cast by "Peanuts." He often agreed with syndicate editors who thought a lot of the early submissions didn't work.  "Calvin was little more than a mischievous loudmouth and Hobbes was simply his somewhat more sensible friend," Watterson writes of those early days in his introduction.  But the strip was deepened by the friendship between the main pair, which was always sent into the stratosphere by Calvin's imagination.  This led to Watterson's other breakthrough idea, that of drawing Calvin's daydreams as the boy himself saw them - a cartoon within a cartoon.  It became a running gag, a four-panel rimshot: First panel, a crocodile floating to the top of the murky Amazon.  Second and third panels, the croc drifting toward a hippo.  Panel 4: Calvin's dad (the hippo) standing in the shallow end of the swimming pool, asking his floating-face-down son what on earth he's doing.

 The joke was in the contrast; fantasy compared with banal reality.  That one goes B-B-B-A.  Others, which started in reality, would go A-B-B-A. On Sundays, when Calvin turned into a roaring T. rex, the pattern was elongated for more space.  This got harder to do as time wore on.  "That was originally a fun idea, but the burden on the strip has been to make each switch more clever," Watterson said in an interview with West, published in the Comics Journal in 1989.  "Each time it's got to be done with some unpredictability, some cleverness to it so that it doesn't become moribund. . . . I'm doing fewer because it's getting more and more difficult."  Six years later, he would do no more at all.  He drew one final cartoon and let a boy and his tiger take off downhill on their snow sled and slide into comics history.  Ten years gone now.  Maybe that was the smart thing, you know.  Maybe it was for the best.  But still, the last book comes along and you realize there'll be no more Spaceman Spiff, no more Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons.  As a cartoon blockhead might have observed in an earlier era:  Sigh.  You wonder what that Susie Derkins is doing these days.

 

'Calvin and Hobbes' Creator Has No Regrets

(By Michelle Ruiz, AOL News Feb. 2, 2010)

In today's cult of celebrity, it's a rare phenomenon: an artist who produces much-loved work, wins the hearts of fans and critics, and then abruptly retires and attempts to lead a normal, sometimes reclusive, life. We're talking about the likes of Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger and "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip creator Bill Watterson, who recently gave what's believed to be his first interview since 1989, to his hometown newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer.Watterson, now 51, crushed millions of funnies readers around the world in 1995 when he suddenly retired Calvin, a 6-year-old, philosophical version of Bart Simpson, and Hobbes, the stuffed tiger who comes to life in his imagination.

Watterson has never really talked about it publicly, until now. It turns out Watterson ended "Calvin and Hobbes" at the height of its popularity because he understands something the creators of long-running TV shows like "ER" and "The Simpsons" may not have."It's always better to leave the party early," Watterson writes in an e-mail Q&A with the Plain Dealer's John Campanelli. "If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now 'grieving' for "Calvin and Hobbes" would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them." He added, "I've never regretted stopping when I did."

Still, like many rock stars of the 1990s, Watterson waxes nostalgic about his celebrity. "Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist -- how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms!" he joked. But seriously -- in the 15 years since retiring from "Calvin and Hobbes," Watterson has been laying low in the Greater Cleveland area, no paparazzi in sight. "The public attention has faded a lot. In pop culture time, the 1990s were eons ago," he said. "An artwork can stay frozen in time, but I stumble through the years like everyone else. I think the deeper fans understand that and are willing to give me some room to go on with my life."

Watterson may be kidding himself in that regard, as "Calvin and Hobbes" books continue to sell half a million copies a year, and recycled versions of the comic strip still run in 50 countries around the world, not including the U.S. Watterson long ago refused to license his characters, which means no animated TV specials or cuddly Hobbes toys, but fans will get a break this year when the U.S. Postal Service issues a "Calvin and Hobbes" stamp. How soon will the reclusive Watterson actually use one to mail a letter? "Immediately," he said. "I'm going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription."

Mental Floss: Our Interview With Bill Watterson!

(By Jake Rossen, Mental Floss, October 2013)

For the December issue of mental_floss magazine, Jake Rossen managed to do something we thought was impossible—he snagged an interview with the legendary Bill Watterson! Since we’re guessing there are a few Calvin and Hobbes enthusiasts in the audience, we thought we’d provide a glimpse of the e-mail exchange. For our full story on the comic strip, be sure to pick up the print magazine.

There is a tendency to rehash and regurgitate properties with sequels and remakes. You had an idea, executed it, then moved on. And you ignored the clamor for more. Why is it so hard for readers to let go?
Well, coming at a new work requires a certain amount of patience and energy, and there’s always the risk of disappointment. You can’t really blame people for preferring more of what they already know and like. The trade-off, of course, is that predictability is boring. Repetition is the death of magic.

Years ago, you hadn’t quite dismissed the notion of animating the strip. Are you a fan of Pixar? Does their competency ever make the idea of animating your creations more palatable?
The visual sophistication of Pixar blows me away, but I have zero interest in animating Calvin and Hobbes. If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served. As a comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes works exactly the way I intended it to. There’s no upside for me in adapting it.

Your fight over protecting Calvin and Hobbes from licensing deals, and your battle to increase the real estate for your Sunday page comic, were notable—partially because they indicated your incredible autonomy over your work. Had you "lost" those battles, it appears you would have ended the strip. It reminds me of Howard Roark and his desire to blow up his building rather than see it molested by other hands. Was there a critical moment in your career that instilled such unwavering creative integrity?
Just to be clear, I did not have incredible autonomy until afterward. I had signed most of my rights away in order to get syndicated, so I had no control over what happened to my own work, and I had no legal position to argue anything. I could not take the strip with me if I quit, or even prevent the syndicate from replacing me, so I was truly scared I was going to lose everything I cared about either way. I made a lot of impassioned arguments for why a work of art should reflect the ideas and beliefs of its creator, but the simple fact was that my contract made that issue irrelevant. It was a grim, sad time. Desperation makes a person do crazy things.

Where do you think the comic strip fits in today’s culture?
Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they’ll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won’t be the same as what I grew up with.

I’m assuming you’ve gotten wind of people animating your strip for YouTube? Did you ever mimic cartoonists you admired before finding your own style?
Every artist learns through imitation, but I rather doubt the aim of these things is artistic development. I assume they’re either homages or satiric riffs, and are not intended to be taken too seriously as works in their own right. Otherwise I should be talking to a copyright lawyer.

Is it possible some new form of sequential art is waiting to be discovered? Could the four-panel template die out as newspapers dwindle?
Form follows function, as the architects say. With words and pictures, you can do just about anything.

According to your collection introductions, you took up painting after the strip ended. Why don’t you exhibit the work?
My first problem is that I don’t paint ambitiously. It’s all catch and release—just tiny fish that aren’t really worth the trouble to clean and cook. But yes, my second problem is that Calvin and Hobbes created a level of attention and expectation that I don't know how to process.

Purely for trivia and posterity’s sake, if you could indulge some (even more) inane queries: One story that’s made the rounds is that a plush toy manufacturer once delivered a box of Hobbes dolls to you unsolicited, which you promptly set ablaze. For people who share your low opinion of merchandising, this is a fairly delightful story. Did it actually happen?
Not exactly. It was only my head that burst into flames.

I once read a mention of you producing some original art intended for a Rolling Stone cover story that “went south.” Considering your preference for privacy, an invasive profile sounds like anathema. Was this very early on in the strip’s run?
Boy, I barely remember this. I think that was the interview that ended up in The Comics Journal. It was early, when my desire to air my grievances with the business temporarily outweighed my desire for privacy.

Owing to spite or just a foul mood, have you ever peeled one of those stupid Calvin stickers off of a pickup truck?
I figure that, long after the strip is forgotten, those decals are my ticket to immortality.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/53216/mental-floss-exclusive-our-interview-bill-watterson?wpisrc=nl_lunchln#ixzz2jACAkH8E

‘Cul De Sac’ Creator Richard Thompson Faces Life’s Cruel Twists With Artful Wit

(By Michael Cavna, Washington Post, May 20, 2011)

Bill Watterson receives Reporters About As Often As Charlie Brown Receives A Valentine. Once Viewed As The J.D. Salinger Of Comics, The Creator Of the retired and still-beloved strip “Calvin and Hobbes” guards his privacy by rebuffing most every entreaty for an interview.  Now, however, comes a question about a certain “kid strip” cartoonist.  One name, one talent entices Watterson to give what his syndicate says is only his second interview in two decades: Richard Thompson — creator of “Cul de Sac” and father to little “Alice Otterloop” and her child’s-eye view of life in Washington’s suburbs.  “Where to start?... ” Watterson says. “The strip has a unique and honest voice, a seemingly intuitive feel for what comics do best ... a very funny intelligence ... the artwork, which I just slobber over. It’s a wonderful surprise to see that this level of talent is still out there, and that a strip like this is still possible.”
 

Within comics, many colleagues share that sentiment. On May 28 in Boston, Thompson will learn whether he has won the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award for cartoonist of the year; it is his second straight nomination for a strip that was first syndicated almost four years ago. “Cul de Sac” is carried by nearly 150 newspapers, including The Washington Post, where it began. It has spawned four books, a handful of animated shorts — and legions of fans.  “Cul de Sac” is a sly, whimsical skip through suburban life with Alice, her friends Beni and Dill, elder brother Petey and her classmates at Blisshaven Academy preschool. It’s all about sidewalk discoveries, childhood invention, parents and other authority figures who are one step behind the children’s antics. At summoning our early years, Watterson says: “The strip depicts all sorts of moments that ring true.”  And residing within this skewed suburbia is also the macro-satire: Mom and Dad Otterloop drive a minivan whose color is so neutral, “it doesn’t appear in nature.”
 

A 2007 offering is the prototypical “Cul de Sac.” Alice- “who’s not afraid of anything”- is momentarily cowed by winged cicadas. Petey, typically squeamish out of doors, advises: “Do what I do. Construct a distancing fantasy as a coping mechanism.” Next thing we know, Alice is costuming the cicadas in napkin dresses and naming them. By the last panel, with precise elliptical wit, the Otterloop parents are reading headlines about intelligent “superbugs” wearing paper clothes. “Don’t tell the kids,” Mom says. “It’ll just scare them.”  Thompson “has this huge range of cartooning skills ... ,” Watterson says. “Richard draws all sorts of complex stuff — architecture, traffic jams, playground sets — that I would never touch. And how does he accomplish this? Well, I like to imagine him ignoring his family, living on caffeine and sugar, with his feet in a bucket of ice, working 20 hours a day.  Otherwise, it’s not really fair.”
 

Watterson wrote the foreword for Thompson’s first “Cul de Sac” book in 2008. The foreword to an earlier Thompson collection was written by another industry legend, Pat Oliphant, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist.  “You would never suspect it by looking at him, but behind the quiet, mild-mannered Richard Thompson exterior lurks the real Richard Thompson,” Oliphant says now. “I know he would hate to be termed a genius, but that is exactly what he is.”  So after a measured, decades-long career ascent, Richard Thompson sits at the comics mountaintop. Still, he is keenly aware of a constant fact: The pinnacle is crumbling.
 

Thompson- who at 53 is a year older than the long-retired Watterson — arrived at print syndication in an era of strapped newspapers and comics sections that are so shrunken they could double as eye charts.  And then there’s the second cruel twist: Less than a year after “Cul de Sac” became syndicated, Thompson learned he has Parkinson’s, the incurable neurodegenerative disease that robs patients of motor skills. His deft line and lithe mind are under attack by his own cells.  Yet here is Thompson, grinning behind his wire rims on a sunny March afternoon as he walks the half-dozen blocks from a taqueria to his modest brick home in Arlington. His gait is tentative. Each day with the disease, he says, brings “a new normality.” But each day also brings the chance to sit at the drafting board, ink-dipped crow quill in hand, and explore new worlds.  As Alice says: “Every day, I test the boundaries of my domain.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/the-comic-riffspost-magazine-profile-cul-de-sac-creator-richard-thompson-faces-lifes-cruel-twists-with-artful-wit/2011/05/18/AFiNaT7G_blog.html

 

Bill Watterson Returns To The Comics Page To Offer A Few ‘Pearls’ Gems

(By Michael Cavna, Washington Post, 07 June 2014)

WRITER’S NOTE: On Monday night, after he and I did a public Q&A for nearly 500 people at The Washington Post building, Stephan Pastis — acclaimed author of “Pearls Before Swine” and bestselling author of the “Timmy Failure” books — made a few self-deprecating jokes about his own drawing ability. Because Pastis and “Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson have confirmed this exclusive report (below), I can now say: Pastis has just executed a gift at “drawing” that few cartoonists can top: 1. Amazingly, he drew the long-retired, once-reclusive Watterson … out of retirement — and got him to create fresh art for this week’s “Pearls”; and 2. Pastis managed to draw out his Watterson-week storyline brilliantly, layering humor upon meta-humor in a hilarious house-of-mirrors reflection on the comic-strip industry past and present. Has anyone in recent memory drawn such feats as that? It is special to have Watterson back into the comic-page spotlight, even if only for a few wonderful days.  –M.C

 

AT THE END OF 1995, the beloved “Calvin and Hobbes” sledded off the comics page for the final time, and its long-reclusive legendary creator, Bill Watterson, retired from the business, never to draw another syndicated newspaper strip.  Until now.  This week, the millions of readers across generations who have pined for the cartoonist’s return got a sudden glimmer. Turns out, Watterson’s brilliant artistic hand has recently been hiding in plain sight. Readers don’t need to go back a couple of decades to see his latest work; they need only go back, say, a couple of days. That’s because Watterson has returned home to the comics page — even if only for a limited engagement.

 

Yes, you read that right. For three days, Watterson — once known as the J.D. Salinger of the strips — has resurfaced, his inspired visual wit intact. For this, we have Stephan Pastis’s real estate and surreal humor to thank.  Since Wednesday, Watterson’s new artwork has been featured in Pastis’s syndicated strip, “Pearls Before Swine.” It’s a creative collaboration that stunned Pastis, who says that he sooner expected to team up with “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz. “And yes,” Pastis says slyly, “I am aware that Schulz is dead.”

 

Last Wednesday’s “Pearls Before Swine” by Stephan Pastis (2014 Pastis/ Distr. by Universal Uclick)
 

Watterson has long eschewed most interviews and publicity photos — he once made Time magazine’s list of most-reclusive celebrities, sandwiched between Syd Barrett and Thomas Pynchon. Working with him, Pastis tells me, “is like getting a call from Bigfoot.”  So what, exactly, lured Watterson back to the page for the first time since ending his immensely popular boy-and-tiger comic in December of 1995?  “Several years ago, when Stephan did one of his strips that mocked his own drawing ability and mentioned my strip in comparison, I thought it might be funny for me to ghost ‘Pearls’ sometime, just to flip it all on its head,” the goateed Watterson tells me, offering a clear indication that he still follows the funnies. “It was just a silly idea, and I didn’t know Stephan, so I never pursued it, and years went by.”

 

Earlier this year, Watterson says, Pastis got in touch with him when the “Pearls” author was in the Cleveland area on his book tour (though the two didn’t meet then). At the same time, Watterson says, he knew that editor/designer Chris Sparks was looking for new ways to raise money for Team Cul de Sac, a charity co-founded by Sparks and cartoonist-illustrator Richard Thompson that raises funds to fight Parkinson’s disease, in coordination with the Michael J. Fox Foundation.  “Somehow the juxtaposition clicked on a light bulb,” Watterson says.  Thompson, a longtime Washington Post artist who lives in Arlington, Va., ended his Reuben Award-winning syndicated strip “Cul de Sac” in 2012 as he underwent therapy and surgery to treat his Parkinson’s; Watterson is an enormous fan of Thompson’s, and the two now have a dual exhibit at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus.  “I thought maybe Stephan and I could do this goofy collaboration and then use the result to raise some money for Parkinson’s research in honor of Richard Thompson,” Watterson tells me. “It just seemed like a perfect convergence.  So I explained the idea to Stephan,” Watterson says, “and he was more than happy to give it a shot.”

 

Last Thursday’s “Pearls Before Swine,” by Stephan Pastis (2014 Pastis/ Distr. by Universal Uclick)
 

Both in person and on the page, Pastis — a recent Reuben Award finalist and best-selling “Timmy Failure” author — is self-deprecating about his artistic prowess. So the conceit in this week’s strips is that a second-grader named Libby (a name that nods to “Bill”) boasts that she can draw “Pearls” better than the feature’s creator. Pastis’s cartoon avatar turns over his “stick figure” comic to the girl — who proceeds to render rich worlds of imagination beyond the signature style of the strip. From invading Martians to big-mouthed (and Pastis-devouring) crocodiles, the art brims with the life of Watterson’s expressive line.  The collaboration is a brilliant pairing of strengths, with Watterson illustrating Pastis’s sometimes-meta script. “I think we both got some surprises,” Watterson says. “I didn’t know what he was going to write, and he didn’t know how I was going to draw it.” 

Friday’s “Pearls Before Swine,” by Stephan Pastis (2014 Pastis/ Distr. by Universal Uclick)
 

From Wednesday through Friday, Pastis ceded his middle panels to Watterson, whose virtuosic art is vivid testament that his talent remains undiminished. Still, Pastis summoned the gumption to offer a few editing changes.  “It was like editing the pope,” Pastis says. “Like telling Michelangelo: ‘David’s hands are too big.’ ” Yet the California-based Pastis suggested minor tweaks to fit the tone and idiosyncrasies of his strip — including the number of “grawlix,” or punctuation characters that represent cartoon profanity, he uses to match the number of letters in his curse words.  Pastis drew Saturday’s “Pearls” himself as a respectful tip of the cap to Watterson, referencing one of the best farewell strips in the history of comics: “Calvin and Hobbes’ ” bittersweet, sledding-into-white-space (and untold adventures) goodbye.

Saturday’s “Pearls Before Swine.” (2014 Stephan Pastis / distr. by Universal Uclick)
 

Some true “Calvin” geeks began blogging theories Wednesday, noting visual touches in “Pearls” that piqued their curiosity — were those “Watterson shoes,” or his headlighted spaceships, or his telltale furniture legs? Like pilgrims studying crop circles or Stonehenge, some cartoonists stoked the guessing game.  Fans had reason to be optimistic. Watterson has twice produced public art in recent years: A poster for the recent homage-to-comics documentary “Stripped,” and a painting of a Richard Thompson character that was auctioned off for Team Cul de Sac.  The original “Pearls” strips featuring Watterson’s work — which will be on display at the Heroes Convention (or HeroesCon) later this month in Charlotte — will also be auctioned at some point for the Cul de Sac charity.  “It was generous of Stephan to let me hijack his creation, and more generous still to donate the originals,” says Watterson, adding that he hopes the auctioning “meets with some success.”

 

As for the experience of collaborating with Pastis, whom he had never met prior to this week, the “Calvin and Hobbes” creator welcomed the challenge of a limited return to the page.  “I had expected to just mess around with his characters while they did their usual things,” Watterson tells me, “but Stephan kept setting up these situations that required more challenging drawings . . . so I had to work a lot harder than I had planned to! It was a lot of fun.”

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