The Mysteries

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To me, the ending follows from both good behavior and enchantment—good behavior being something Calvin despises, and enchantment being the realm in which he is king.

In response, a king bids his knights to capture a mystery, so that perhaps its “secrets could be learned” and its “powers could be thwarted. I don’t think I’ll spoil the plot of “The Mysteries” if I say that the story finds a distinctive and unsettling path to its final three words, which are “happily ever after. These are stories about difficult and not infrequently destructive characters who are lost in their own worlds. The faces and art is very much a wonderful work of Kascht, and every face deserves a study in the next few readings. While rereading “Calvin and Hobbes” comics for this piece, I was surprised that almost all of them were not entirely forgotten.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. Perhaps part of what drove Watterson, “Ahab-like” by his own telling, back to the drawing board with his boy and his tiger day after day was a subconscious commitment to staying a child.

At the same time, these characters embody most of what is good: the gifts of play, of the inner life, of imagining something other than what is there. 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. We turn to the familiar to blot out the mysterious, but our life (and our society) begins and ends with mysteries that we cannot comprehend. 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. Almost 30 years after Bill Watterson's last Calvin and Hobbes strip, we get this strange work of art.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. Watterson is legendarily reclusive - I would have been only slightly more shocked if they’d announced that the late JRR Tolkien was going to finish A Song of Ice and Fire. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate-a mysterious process in its own right. 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. Now we both read the nearly comic-free online news instead of the material papers, into which, Watterson has said, “little jokes” were placed as a respite from “atrocities described in the rest of the newspaper.

If only humans heeded the warnings within mysteries as well as they followed the blueprints for making Teflon pans and missiles. I can openly admit I bought this solely because of Bill Watterson's name (and John Kascht certainly only adds to the hype). It ultimately is kinda slight, but it does point to interesting new directions should Watterson continue releasing his work, unlikely as that may be.

The story is a simple but evocative fable, enhanced by Kascht and Watterson’s illustrations, moody black and white scenes, the kind that would lose a lot of their impact if they were forced onto poor quality newsprint. Graphic novels usually aren’t, and this isn’t even what I would think of as a graphic novel, really. As something you could spend time with your child discussing what they think it means it might be a little better.