Johnny Hart on licensing and Bill Watterson

MARSCHALL: What do you think of Bill Watterson's work and the claims that he staked against licensing and merchandising characters? Evidently you don't agree with that. HART: I do in a sense. I look at it in a couple of ways. First, I think you're going for the bucks, "Let's get all the bucks!" I admire his restraint, but I don't understand it. If my strip was as popular as his, everyone was clamoring for it, couldn't wait to pay money to get it, I would go ahead with the merchandising. I don't do a lot of merchandising because people do a lot of dumb merchandising on my stuff and some of it doesn't even look like my stuff, the shape of it, and I don't want to get involved where I have to do all the work for them.
MARSCHALL: Which you did in the past. What was the early campaign? Dr Pepper?
HART: I created different characters for them.
MARSCHALL: Harmon?
HART Yeah, Harmon... it was from one of those characters that I got Grog. I created some really stupid mechanical character for Harmon. You'd throw bottles in his mouth and caps would fly out of his ears. I thought this character was pretty good so I created Grog from that.
Anyway, Watterson -- I think Watterson should go for decent, class-type of merchandising, and keep his thumb on it. Don't let them just put out trash. MARSCHALL: Because the readers like it.
HART: It's an excellent comic strip. He's good, he's very good at it, his ideas are great. If I were him, I would set down all the rules and make sure that it was good quality, class merchandise, and then take all the money and give it to God. If you don't want all that money then give it to the poor. See, people out there go out and buy the Garfield stuff, trinkets and all, because they love it. They want it. Children love it, they wish they had one to take to bed at night and hug. Don't deprive them of that, Let them spend their money. Make sure they do a class stuff with merchandising and take the money and give it to orphanages or good causes or something like that. That's what we're here to do, anyway. To throw away an opportunity like that seems kind of foolish.
MARSCHALL: One of his points of view is that it's a comic strip. This is something that bothered him about Pogo and Peanuts when he was growing up. He thinks that readers read it as a comic strip and they create their own world that's beyond the four panels, they create the voices they hear in their heads, and anything that would change that is doing violence to the characters.
HART: I don't hold this art form to the high level you're elevating it to; it's not a deity; I don't think we should be taking a comic strip and saying that this is so marvelous and magnificent and you must not risk doing bad things to it. Maybe they're making it too sacred. It is, after all, another comic strip among many. And all the reverence in the world that he wants to pay to it, isn't going to make it any holier than all the other ones. But he will receive great admiration for doing this. He takes a stand and says, This is my profession and I respect my profession and revere it and I don't want people just taking my characters and cheapening them.
All I'm saying is don't let them cheapen it -- let them come out with class Hobbes things that cost $400 apiece. They'll still buy them for their kids.., no, he shouldn't do that either because there are lots of little kids who would like to have a Hobbes and can't because their parents couldn't afford it. Let them put it out there and do a nice job, take the money -ー don't even take the money, just reroute it.

[I think Hart is missing Watterson's point. It was never about the money or what he would do with it. It was always about the integrity of the creation. He created a thing, and he wants the thing to remain what it is, self-contained, not to be burdened by other products that exist outside of that thing. He said explicitly that he is not against licensing across the board. He just didn't want to do it with Calvin and Hobbes.]