The Mysteries

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That’s the one thing we know for sure in this world,” Calvin says to Hobbes in the first panel of a two-panel strip that ran in more than two thousand newspapers on Monday, July 17, 1995. Gawain chops off the head of the Green Knight, who then picks up his head; says, See you in a year; and rides away. If you care to read more, there's a fascinating New York Times feature by Neima Jahromi, an editor at the Book Review, explaining how Watterson showed this basic story to artist John Kascht in 2018. With a different artist, I might interpret this as an enticement, but it seems more likely that Watterson is merely averse to marketing—he did no publicity for his first “Calvin and Hobbes” collection, and fought for years to prevent Hobbes and Calvin from appearing in snow globes, on pajamas, on chip-bag clips, on trading cards.

A long time passes, but finally those mysteries are found, the world domesticates a lot of them—in fact far too many of them—and the planet begins to change.In his prime with Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson was famous for sometimes creating very wordy comic strips (although he also was a master of almost wordless comic strips). I've now read this book a couple dozen times and those six words are sure to be quoted over and over again in coming years. I'm confused (and pleased) to report that it is indeed different but absolutely familiar to the previous work of both. Almost 30 years after Bill Watterson's last Calvin and Hobbes strip, we get this strange work of art. Hopefully it won't take him another 30 years to follow this up with a Jazz record, a contemporary art exhibition, or a performance piece at the MoMA.

George Herriman drew “Krazy Kat” for more than thirty years, through to the year of his death, 1944. The resonance of the story with facing the perils of a dark and unknown wood, of nature itself, is pretty clear. I’m also reminded of the strip in which Hobbes says, “I suppose if we couldn’t laugh at things that don’t make sense, we couldn’t react to a lot of life. The two friends are in a wagon, plummeting perilously forward into the unseen—a common pastime for them. Except for 3 strips he partly drew for Stephan Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine, Bill Watterson hasn’t done ANYTHING for the public since Calvin and Hobbes rode their toboggan down the hill one final time on December 31, 1995.For fans of Calvin and Hobbes, I don't know if you'll find the same comedic wonderment, but there is something solidly philosophical in THE MYSTERIES that longtime readers of the comics will recognize. I think there are many people who need to heed this message, but are they the ones picking up a book by Bill Watterson? Likewise, if I were for some reason tasked with ranking the artists who had the most impact on me, I cannot image Bill Watterson falling outside the top five.

These are stories about difficult and not infrequently destructive characters who are lost in their own worlds. Herriman, born in the nineteenth century in New Orleans to a mixed-race family, often presented himself, in his adult life, as Greek. The characters in “Krazy Kat” also didn’t age or really change much: Krazy Kat is a black cat forever in love with Ignatz, a white mouse who serially hits Krazy with bricks, an action that Krazy misinterprets as a sign of love. A good time, with feasting and friends, is interrupted by the arrival of a stranger: a massive knight, whose skin and hair are all green, who is dressed all in green, who is riding an all-green horse. I can openly admit I bought this solely because of Bill Watterson's name (and John Kascht certainly only adds to the hype).Growing up is always a loss—a loss of an enchanted way of seeing, at the very least—and for some people growing up is more of a loss than for others. A master of the form, he has caricatured thousands of famous faces for magazines, newspapers and Broadway marquees. 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. This makes for rather bleak reading, especially in these humorless and slightly menacing charcoal drawings.