The Mysteries

Product Information

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. You can't help but notice the similarities between the plot of The Mysteries and the story of Watterson's own life - his surprise retirement in 1995, the mystery that grew about his departure, and now this surprise return with a very un-Calvin & Hobbes-like story. We delved into that theory more here. Watterson has always been a outstanding modern philosophical thinker. And this book doubles down on that title. He provides some old school, Calvin and Hobbes red wagon tangents and questions, but this time there isn't a pithy conclusion. And that's ok. I don't think it's the story (which is clever, but nothing new) or the lush artwork that makes this uninteresting, I think it's the medium. I think it would have been much more interesting as a short stop motion film. Short meaning 3 to 5 minutes, max. Shakespeare this is not. John Kascht's visuals are gorgeous, and beg to be in motion. For the book’s illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate—a mysterious process in its own right.

It’s been decades since Bill Watterson closed shop on his Calvin & Hobbescomic and retired. This year, however, Watterson is coming out of retirement with a new book called The Mysteries, which he created with caricaturist John Kascht. Calvin and Hobbes" was a daily comic strip from 1985-1995 about a boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. Charles Schulz, seen here in 1962, created Charlie Brown, among his Peanuts characters. Getty Images In a sense, The Mysteries is a continuation of Watterson's work on Calvin and Hobbes. It's a story about one of life's essential qualities: mystery. To that end, the book's execution embraces that idea wholesale. There are no named figures to cling to and no explanation for how the medieval world collides quite suddenly with modernity and frappuccinos. While the artwork remains simultaneously opaque and inviting, the message couldn't be more explicit about the state of the world, where it's headed, and how it might possibly ring out into a universe that is indifferent to our existence.Humans are naturally afraid of what they don't understand. Once they understand a given mystery, it's no longer necessarily something to fear. Ultimately, the story boiled down to "man is afraid of the unknown, man explores the unknown, man thinks he knows all there is and loses the primal respect for the unknown, man destroys himself in his own hubris, the universe spins ever onward without noticing". I mean, I am a recovering nihilist who still finds comfort in knowing the universe is vast beyond our joys and pain, our triumphs and follies, but I had hoped for a message with more depth. The book is noted as "a fable for grown-ups", but the message of the book is one I learned to grapple with through Calvin and Hobbes as a child, and I thought it was handled with more depth and nuance in seemingly off-handed remarks in a comic. Though Watterson has been described as reclusive, that might not be the best word; he lives a normal life, says Robb, one of the few people to have interviewed him, but “he doesn’t like to be in the spotlight. He wants to let his artwork speak for itself. And he’s uncomfortable in the role of a spokesperson for comics – he would prefer that people read and experience the comic strip rather than engaging with it filtered through him talking about it.” That's what this book is, it's poetry. The words themselves are poetry and so are the images. The words fill in what's missing from the images and vice versa. I can see am argument that this particular story is too vague and up for too much interpretation, but I would disagree. Sure it's not Humpty Dumpty, which has some more easily digested morals to offer, but The Mysteries offers plenty of thought provoking opportunities. Just perhaps not ones where you will have a Eureka moment. It was exactly what I needed, and precisely what I knew it was going to be - beautifully succinct, perfectly weird, and amazingly detailed.

Watterson has said, of the illustrations in “Calvin and Hobbes,” “One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what’s going on in Calvin’s head.” Only one reality in “Calvin and Hobbes” is drawn with a level of detail comparable to the scenes of Calvin’s imagination: the natural world. The woods, the streams, the snowy hills the friends career off—the natural world is a space as enchanted and real as Hobbes himself. The Mysteries" is the latest work of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, over 10 years in the making. It sounded like fun and maybe something people wouldn’t expect, so I decided to give it a try,” Watterson told The Washington Post. “Dave sent me a rough cut of the film, and I dusted the cobwebs off my ink bottle.”

Latest Posts

The story… yes. Exactly what it needed to be… that’s the beautifully succinct and perfectly weird. I loved it.

Now that I've read it, what do I do with it? Put it on the coffee table for guests to read? Give it to my toddler to read? Read it and reread it and reread it over and over again? I don't want to do any of these things with it. It's cool, but not that cool. The illustrations are great, but no better than a lot of the things I've seen in children's books I read to my kids. Children read and reread books like this over and over again, not adults. Shortly after Calvin and Hobbes ended, Watterson took up painting, spending time creating landscapes of Ohio woods with his father. He studied a variety of artists, from the expressionist Willem de Kooning to the Italian Renaissance master Titian, according to Nevin Martell’s book Looking for Calvin and Hobbes. Whether a sensible decision or not, his self-imposed exile soon grew into its own kind of mysterious legend. Would he ever return? Would he ever enchant and dazzle and challenge the world again? “The Mysteries,” his first public work in nearly thirty years, holds the awkward answer. Essentially a cautionary tale wrapped in a riddle, the book’s ultimate mystery can’t quite escape the gravity-well that is Watterson himself; is this the appropriate instrument, the ideal song, to trumpet the artisan’s long-awaited return? Bill Watterson, the mastermind behind the timeless Calvin and Hobbes, was once asked why he hadn’t published anything following the famous strip’s retirement. His reply implied what most already feared; Calvin was too good—too great—to be ever surpassed. And so, rather than trying to top impossible expectations, he chose to exit as an inimitable legend. He “quit while being ahead,” as the old cliché says. So, to get this out of the way: this isn’t Calvin & Hobbes. This isn’t anything like Calvin & Hobbes, except for a few minor quirks that I recognize as Watterson’s style.

New in Series

For the book's illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate—a mysterious process in its own right. Watterson drew and wrote Calvin and Hobbes from 1985 to 1995. The comic strip follows a mischievous and precocious young boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger buddy Hobbes. Watterson typically stays away from the public eye, refusing to sign autographs or license his characters. But in 2010, for the 15th anniversary of the last Calvin and Hobbes strip, he spoke to The Plain Dealer about his decision to end the strip, saying, “By the end of ten years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It’s always better to leave the party early.” The book is a collaboration between Watterson and the celebrated caricaturist John Kascht, and it appears far bleaker than either illustrator’s earlier work. The few published panels are sombre and foreboding, presented in shades of gray. “The style of the writing, the style of the art is intensely different from Calvin and Hobbes. And I think that’s a very conscious decision on [Watterson’s] part. He would not ever want to be pigeonholed as just the Calvin and Hobbes guy,” Martell says. The artwork is very different from both [Watterson’s and Kascht’s] styles,” says Robb. “So I’m really curious to know how they collaborated on that and how that worked. Because it doesn’t really look like John and doesn’t really look like Bill to me.” Lastly, humanity is merely a blip in the span of time and the vastness of our ever-expanding universe. The mysteries were here before we existed, and they'll likely exist long after we're gone.

It has everything that can make a comic strip successful,” says Robb. “It’s funny, first of all. It’s insightful. It’s wise. It’s visually appealing,” particularly in the groundbreaking Sunday strips, which eventually shed the grid layout in favor of panels of various shapes and sizes to suit the story. “You see him really stretching as an artist in the Sundays and they’re just beautiful to look at,” Robb says. “So he brings together all the different aspects of a comic strip, the writing, the characters, the layout, the artwork, and he just has a mastery of all of those.” As a hardcover coffee table type book, it just doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose. That being said I am glad I bought it. If you're looking for more Calvin and Hobbes, you'll likely be disappointed. This isn't an extension of that universe, nor does it claim to be. After an absence of nearly 30 years, no one was sure what to expect from Bill Watterson when he emerged from his self-imposed retirement. Over the years, Watterson has created a few works including some illustrations for charity auctions, a graphic for a documentary, a poster for a festival, and a few guest strips for the comic strip Pearls Before Swine (which were also auctioned for charity). According to those who know him personally, Watterson had been pursuing his artistic passions while living a normal life, including painting landscapes inspired by his surroundings, but those paintings were never released to the public. But Watterson declined to publicly exhibit his work, telling Mental Floss: “I don’t paint ambitiously. It’s all catch and release: just tiny fish that aren’t really worth the trouble to clean and cook.” In fact, Martell described a rumor that Watterson was such a perfectionist that he burned his first 500 paintings because he felt they weren’t up to his standards.So, I'm kind of left here with a hole in my heart, again because... this time, it feels like you're saying we're the syndicate Bill. As for the next chapter in Watterson’s career, Andrews McMeel describes The Mysteries as “a compelling, provocative story that invites readers to examine their place in the universe and their responsibility to others and the planet we all share”, calling it “a fable that dares to intimate the big questions about our place in the universe”.