In the commencement address linked above, he talks about three years of battles (as of 1990), and the speech continues with this:

The so-called “opportunity” I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I’d need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts.

On those terms, I found the offer easy to refuse. Unfortunately, the syndicate also found my refusal easy to refuse, and we’ve been fighting for over three years now. Such is American business, I guess, where the desire for obscene profit mutes any discussion of conscience.

Five years later, he called it quits. Wiki has his letter to his readers announcing the end of the strip: “I will be stopping Calvin and Hobbes at the end of the year. This was not a recent or an easy decision, and I leave with some sadness. My interests have shifted however, and I believe I’ve done what I can do within the constraints of daily deadlines and small panels. I am eager to work at a more thoughtful pace, with fewer artistic compromises.”

Those “compromises” involve the whole merchandising culture that he labeled “obscene” in 1990. I don’t think matters improved in the years that followed. Yes, he’s pursuing other forms of art, like painting, but he gave up C&H because of the syndicate’s demands with which he could not compromise.

No, that’s not true. It’s true that they fought early on, but he kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and stronger, and stronger, and was able to make them back down. It’s pretty clear from his announcement of his retirement that the retirement didn’t have anything to do with arguments with the syndicate. As I said, i read the Complete Calvin and Hobbes. This came out in 2005. Not 1990. Not 1995. He wrote commentary through the sets about some of what he was thinking and what was going on. It explained what happened with the dispute over licensing, and it explains why he retired. It wasn’t because of a dispute over licensing, a dispute which he decisively won. Check out the set, it explains matters well enough, and it’s also a great read.

This Modern World
http://www.workingforchange.co…..emid=22081

Mr. Fish
http://www.harpers.org/Cartoon.html

Clay Bennett
http://www.claybennett.com/

Ann Telnaes
http://www.anntelnaes.com/

Steve Bell
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cart…..l/archive/

Mark Fiore
http://www.markfiore.com/animation.html

Ted Rall
http://www.tedrall.com/

The Daily Scribble
http://www.theillustrateddailyscribble.com/

Kirktoons
http://www.kirktoons.com/cartoons.html

Red Meat
http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/

[Mod Note; for future reference, the filters view this many links in a single comment as spam and requires a mod to manually release your comment.]

Here’s a funny sign I just put up:

http://freewayblogger.blogspot…..h-101.html

“Of course, if Bush HAD gone to Vietnam, we’d probably all be speaking Vietnamese right now.”

Cardboard and paint…

Good on you, scarlet p! I saw two of your signs today between Novato and San Rafael and I said to myself: “Yup. There’s scartlet p.”

someone said to me that eating aminals doesn’t mean you aren’t also an environmentalist. but alas, it does. it shows your willingness to kill anything for your pleasure. raising many farm animals is a huge cause of pollution in this world. A huge problem in this country, as there are few water sources not affected by runoff from the byproducts created by the chemical upbringing of food animals

so examine your way of life. are you a part of the problem or solution? editing is a way to alter reality. add up some of these obvious contradictions for yourself. you too can lower your carbon footprint and take yourself out of a self fulfilling prophecy. reality can’t be edited out. personally, I would rather give Al Gore some of my credits to allow him to do what he needs to do and actually reduce the impact of his travels.

As I recall, Irving wore the lurvely pale blue tux with the black piping and the elegant patent leather platform fancy dress shoes at the last Cotillion.

And, just like in the grand jury, tripped and fell on his ass….