Leave Calvin & Hobbes alone

It's totally understandable that, when you feel as passionately about something as they do about Calvin & Hobbes, you want more. And in the case of Calvin & Hobbes, when there is a resounding lack of "more," a lot of people feel the need to fill that void.

The latest work of fanart is, I grant you, spectacular [edit: the video has been removed for legal reason]. It was done by a professional animator: Adam Brown, of Comedy Central's "Ugly Americans." And Brown does a great job. He recreates the look and feel of the strip perfectly, and his admirably light touch is welcome in this context.

Brown did a great job, but that kind of only makes it worse, in the sense that I feel like he's just encouraging people to make more of the same.

Don't get me wrong, I love fanart. And I'm in favor of fanfic, although I never touch the stuff, myself. I'm in favor of anything that gets people thinking and working creatively, focusing on character development, writing to an audience, handling public criticism, and in general building writing skills that you can't learn in a class or from a book.

But in the case of Calvin & Hobbes, it's less like fanart and more like a grotesque, Weekend at Bernie's-style reanimation of a corpse that has long since gone cold. Watterson, a noted recluse, was always firmly against any kind of licensing, marketing, or brand extension of his comic strip.

Watterson very deliberately gave us the comic strip and nothing more, and he did that for a reason: to keep it pure. He didn't want to cheapen his creation by diluting it in this way. And I would argue that all the fan-based continuations of the strip, well-intentioned though they may be, are doing exactly that.

This animated clip is amazing. But if you love Calvin, you'll let him go.

Image courtesy Flickr/marcusjroberts