Remember his strip was popular enough that papers didn't have a choice. People were buying newspapers to get the latest Calvin and Hobbes. They may not like what he did but he had the power. Most cartoonists people read and sometimes laugh but if they get replaced nobody will care.

Watterson was known for being very much a stickler for the format and color of the comic.

He'd eschew printing norms for the Sunday format and more or less force papers to either print it how he wanted or not get it at all.

The response was that the papers would just cancel the whole strip rather than give in to his artistic demands.

Only 7 out of 1800 cancelled, according to the article.

Sounds like you would be interested in the article linked at the top of the page.

>>This directly contradicts the first statement, does it not?

It does not.

The former was threats in the before times, the latter was the lackluster result after the dust had settled.

The contrast between "Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation." and "only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened" is quite stark.

Yeah, so? Turns out the papers were bluffing/complaining. This sort of thing happens in many parts of life.

>>quite stark

Yes it is.

If you are running a paper and are already under stress and trying to streamline operations and now some cartoonist demands you use a format that requires significant extra work, you'd probably complain too, even threaten to drop that content. Threats are free, and they might work, especially if a lot of papers made similar complaints and threats.

But, when it came right down to the actual decision, knowing how many readers really love that particular artwork, and would even cancel their subscriptions if it were absent from your paper, and the math told you those losses would exceed the costs you were trying to avoid, so you'd find the papers collectively lost the conflict, and you'd keep it, do the extra work, and keep the subscribers.

Thinking about it for a minute, it seems unsurprising the difference between the initial cost-free bluster vs the final whimper of a handful of costly cancellations would be quite stark?

My comment was not about what happened, which does not need to be justified, in my opinion, especially at this late date.

My comment was about the contrast between "widespread" and the actual number that threatened, which was immediately stated to be 15/1800. The actual number that canceled was even smaller, but the characterization of one one-hundred-twentieth as "widespread" was interesting.

Yup, but I'd bet the number who complained approached 1800 and the number of complaints that verbally threatened, or alluded to "having to reconsider whether we run it" vs making a specific written threat was much higher. And yes, they could have been more clear about it.

I think the first threatened is from groups like moral majority or similar threatening we will get your papers to remove it, and then the second is the actual papers making the threat based on threats from moral watchdog groups. Anyway that is my interpretation of what happened.

The threatened cancellation was over Watterson demanding an unmodifiable half-page for his Sunday strips, not over the content of his strips.

ah sorry I had it confused in my mind with Berkley Breathed, should have read article first but I saw the cancellation thing and I thought oh yeah I remember that.