The Mysteries
As anticipated by literally no one on earth, Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes has made a surprise return from retirement with a new book: The Mysteries.
Its a small, strange, delightful little book about which you can say almost nothing without spoiling something beyond quoting the marketing copy:
From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.
Most of the press about the book has centered on the partnership between Watterson and Kascht to create the unique and striking art, presumably because of this fact where the actual contents are nearly impossible to talk about without giving something away. (The summary on amazon covers, roughly, the first page and a half only.)
An aside about the art: it is very cool, and very strange. It’s hard to tell exactly how it was made; some pages look like carefully photographed clay models using that “opening credits of Sherlock” filter to make them look smaller than they are, some look like detailed charcoal drawings. It’s the kind of book where the art does easily 2/3s of the storytelling, and the relationship between the words on the left side and the picture on the right are not always obvious at first glance. I feel like you could teach a high school literary analysis class using this book by asking “what does it mean that these two things were put together” and have every class come up with a different answer. It’s not so much that it defies an easy explanation as that an easy interpretation is besides the point. But now I’m getting to close to spoiling things so I’ll shift gears.
At first glance, it has very little in common with the comic strip about the boy and his tiger. The sense of humor is nearly absent, and the art is about as different as art can be.
But.
It shares something of the same outlook as Calvin & Hobbes did. The strip always had a slightly grouchy outlook—not pessimistic, or negative, but grouchy—where one of the major themes was “why can’t people just quit being jerks and enjoy all this?” That same sensibility is behind this new work.
Early on in Calvin & Hobbes’ run, there was a lot of speculation about which, if any, of the characters were autobiographical. Was Watterson like the active and hyper-imaginative Calvin as a kid, or more like the laid-back thoughtful Hobbes? Of course, as the reclusive Watterson gave more interviews, it seemed clear that the closest to an “author insert” character was actually Calvin’s Dad, which I have always found delightful.
With that context in mind, The Mysteries almost reads like a bedtime story Calvin’s Dad read Calvin to try and teach him a lesson that Calvin didn’t absorb. I almost expected the last page to snap out to Calvin in bed looking disgruntled.
To be clear, that is not how it ends. It ends with three words you have seen many times, but absolutely never deployed in this context. But again—argh—we dance up to the line of giving too much away.
Anyway. One of the major comic artists of the last century popped back up and delivered a new work. It’s excellent. Strongly recommended! Everyone needs to go read it so we can talk about it.