The Mysteries

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Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. A master of the form, he has caricatured thousands of famous faces for magazines, newspapers and Broadway marquees. These are stories about difficult and not infrequently destructive characters who are lost in their own worlds. The Mysteries” doesn’t entirely lack that lightness—the contrast of modern and medieval in the illustrations is often funny—but humor is not its main tool.

George Herriman drew “Krazy Kat” for more than thirty years, through to the year of his death, 1944. 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. Gawain chops off the head of the Green Knight, who then picks up his head; says, See you in a year; and rides away. Almost 30 years after Bill Watterson's last Calvin and Hobbes strip, we get this strange work of art.

It ultimately is kinda slight, but it does point to interesting new directions should Watterson continue releasing his work, unlikely as that may be. I almost think Watterson should have published this under a pseudonym so people would see it with fresh eyes and appreciate it for what it is—not what you hoped it would be. I certainly plan to read it with my grandkids, who I know will marvel at the illustration and ask lots and lots and lots of questions. Or you might say insufficiently fearful: the woods are cut down, the air becomes acrid, and eventually the land looks prehistoric, desiccated, hostile to life.

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. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.The Mysteries, working in collaboration with John Kascht, is both something more and something less than what I would expect after such a long absence. It’s about how the fear of the unknown can hold us back, and, simultaneously, about how a lack of respect for the limits of our understanding can bring catastrophe. I've been a fan of Bill Watterson's work since Calvin and his tiger Hobbes debuted just before Thanksgiving in 1985 and I mourned with millions a decade later when Watterson ended the award-winning series.

Calvin and Hobbes,” which débuted in 1985, centered on six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, Hobbes, a tiger who to everyone other than Calvin appears to be a stuffed animal.For the book's illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. 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. The characters, unnamed, are drawn from that strange eternal medieval world of fantasy: knights, wizards, a king; peasants with faces like Leonardo grotesques, wearing kerchiefs or hoods. In 2007, Watterson reviewed the biography for the Wall Street Journal, and reminded readers that “Peanuts” had as much darkness—fear, sadness, bullying—as it had charm.

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.There's like twelve words on a page and while the illustrations are cool, black and white, photorealistic depictions of what almost look like marionettes, there's no actual story to follow. 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. 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.