The Mysteries

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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.

I may have to, and am completely willing to, sit with the book a bit longer to see if my initial view changes. It’s also kin to the ancient story of Prometheus, a myth we now associate with technological advancements.

George Herriman drew “Krazy Kat” for more than thirty years, through to the year of his death, 1944.

Now, I’ll put The Mysteries in the Little Free Library outside of my house in the hopes that someone else will go on a journey of their own. I hate to be the one peeing in the punchbowl here, but the sad fact is if Bill Watterson's name wasn't attached to this book, it would just be one of dozens - if not hundreds - of well-drawn, minimally-written (coming in at just around 400 words total) picture books for…just who, exactly? 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.

Reading “The Mysteries” after rereading “Calvin and Hobbes” reminded me of the Brothers Grimm story “The Goblins. Some of the illustrations appear to be photographs of small clay sculptures alongside elements composed in graphite and maybe paint—but the materials aren’t specified. 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. think of The Mysteries as a one-of-a-kind experience from Bill Watterson and John Kascht that you can pick off of your shelf whenever in need of wonder and mystery. This book is 72 pages and the text is only 43 sentences—two of those sentences just two words—which I know because I counted.

cry the people when confronting the car crash/gang rape ethics and future prospects of human society.For Calvin and Hobbes, the years never passed—in “The Mysteries,” time’s arrow can’t be missed for a moment. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. It’s possible that Watterson quit because he tired of the demanding work, or because he’d said all he had to say, or because he was worn out by the legal battles over his characters. My ten-year-old daughter makes a detailed argument (it involves bicycles, ropes, and scratch marks) that Hobbes is indisputably real; millions of us have the more decisively illusory experience of having grown up with Watterson.

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. I think there are many people who need to heed this message, but are they the ones picking up a book by Bill Watterson? The resonance of the story with facing the perils of a dark and unknown wood, of nature itself, is pretty clear.

If you want something equally beautiful but infinitely deeper, try Shaun Tan's The Arrival - now that's a masterpiece.