“You can make your superhero a psychopath, you can draw gut-splattering

>>87674375
yes
/thread

Well, psychopathyc, gut-splattering, graphic superheroes tend to be pretty stupid comics.

>>87674375
Well yeah. Something stupid is still stupid no matter what you change the name too.

"Graphic novel" was just an attempt to get away from the reputation of comics as being for kids, but that doesn't mean they did less stupid things.

It's also worth noting that he wrote this at a time when grimdark comics were at their peak. Cape comics in general are still stupid though- I like them, but there's no sense in kidding ourselves.

I wonder what Watterson would've thought of European comics, though. At the time he was making Calvin and Hobbes, a lot of European comics didn't have much outlet here beyond stuff like Heavy Metal.

>>87674375
what

>>87674418
this

>>87674418
You can't /thread your own post, you tremendous faggot

I've never been quite sure how to feel about this, since I on a basic level disagree with him.

Sure at the time, Watchmen and TDKR had gotten the ball rolling, the 90s edgelord reigned supreme in cape work, but if Watterson was lumping together *all* comics and making a statement that non-strip comics can all go to hell, well then he was fucking wrong.

Bone was getting it's start; Sergio Aragones was still writing Groo on a semi regular basis, and Neil Gaiman had been doing Sandman for a few years by that point as well.

He probably meant cape comics at the time, and you can hardly blame him, but I've really felt this, and his utter indifference to webcomics in more modern times is the sign of an old man unwelcoming to change.

Because comic *strips* have gotten banal and stale, if not incredibly stupid, too.

>>87674538
>>87677986
He mentioned in an interview from "Exploring Calvin and Hobbes" that he didn't grow up reading too much superhero comics (or comic books; his preference was the comic strips); he read a few Batman and that was mainly cause the TV show with Adam West was airing at the time.

He took a little look into comics during the 80's, and while he wasn't fond of the grimness of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns it opened his eyes to how drastically a character could be revamped (remember that his frame of reference was the 60's Batman) and he also admired Bill Sienkiewicz's work (even though he didn't care much about the superhero stuff); he noticed how Sienkiewicz used painting and collage, methods Watterson never would've thought to use in comics and it made him question why that wasn't done with comic strips.

He was a lot more critical of Mad Magazine though; he enjoyed reading it back when he was a kid but he looked back on it as humor only for 11 year olds. He felt Mad's irreverence was "cynical" and "not really based on any moral outrage," that they just ridiculed things because they were popular. His other criticism was that they turned Mort Drucker's style into a house style for the movie parodies.

>>87678272
Huh, interesting.

I guess it's fondess for the medium that he seems attached to strips even though he left due to deadlines, not wanting to merchandise his work, etc, but at the same time it's kinda sad since the strip medium basically *died* with his, Gary Larson and ultimately Shulz's departure and Watterson still never gave other mediums much of a chance.

>>87678529

I forgot to mention that Watterson listed Don Martin, Sergio Aragones, Mort Drucker, "and some of the others" as his favorites from Mad. He just doesn't look back fondly at the magazine in general.

>>87674375
Only partially because content =/= medium.

>>87679096

Watterson has good taste.

>>87674375
No but his opinion was not an uncommon one among newspaper artists. Comic strips were always seen as the height of the medium for decades and comic books were considered second rate and juvenile. The effects of the CCA ensured that the perception of comic books as trash continued even when as newspaper strips started going through their own separate decline into shit.

>>87674418
>>87677765
Okay then I'll do it for him.
/thread.

>>87680298
cont. Bill probably was not super familiar with comic books and was not interested in becoming familiar with them, like many in the newspaper sphere he probably believed that there was no one in comic books who was ever as a good an artist as Milt Caniff, Alex Raymond, Will Eisner, Hal Foster, Leonard Starr, Frank Godwin, etc. Which was definitely true then and might still be true now.
Jim Davis probably thought comic books were garbage too, they just were brought up to think that.

>>87674375
No, he's a pretentious asshole that thinks his shit opinion has any worth.

>>87674375
Yes. Hell, if anything that makes it more stupid. With shit like Silver-Age comics it may be stupid, but at least it's honest about that and have no intentions of hiding it in a shallow veil of "maturity".