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 can't say I knew what I was getting from the description or the art preview, but I had prepared myself for something different than the expected material of the past. The Mysteries has the shape of a children’s book, but its tone, style, and message are decidedly for older readers. I may have to, and am completely willing to, sit with the book a bit longer to see if my initial view changes.

There were also very few clues about the content, save that there’s a kingdom in trouble, living in fear of mysteries.I'm confused (and pleased) to report that it is indeed different but absolutely familiar to the previous work of both. 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. 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. Six days a week, the strip appeared in short form, in black-and-white, and each Sunday it was longer and in color. Then, here is Watterson's haunting six-word epitaph for our world as we know it: "Rather late, the people grew alarmed.

cry the people when confronting the car crash/gang rape ethics and future prospects of human society. I think its fantastic that Bill Waterson is still creating art and I love weird shit but I have no earthly idea what was happening here.En route to his meeting with the Green Knight, in the Green Chapel, he tries to behave well with the seductive wife of the lord who graciously hosts him. 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. 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. 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.