Few American cartoonists are as adored as Bill Watterson, or as reluctant to embrace that adoration. In 1985, Watterson began publishing Calvin and Hobbes, his syndicated newspaper comic strip about a mischievous Midwestern 6-year-old and his best friend, who is either a talking tiger or a stuffed animal, depending on who does the looking. Watterson deftly and wittily captured the world from a child’s point of view: Calvin’s classroom daydreams become the episodic adventures of his alter egos, Spaceman Spiff and Tracer Bullet (themselves clever parodies of Flash Gordon- and Dick Tracy-style serials), while Calvin’s precocious interactions with, say, his father are opportunities for hilarious misinformation. (His father tells him that babies come from assembly kits at Sears but that Calvin was a “Blue-Light Special” at Kmart, “almost as good, and a lot cheaper.”)
Something about Calvin and Hobbes’s mixture of escapism and profundity touched many people. I still recall my discovery of the strip in an anthology at a childhood friend’s home, and the strip’s fans tend to recall their first readings with the kind of specificity people normally reserve for things like the Kennedy assassination. Watterson’s work was particularly important in pushing color Sunday strips to new artistic achievement, and it won shelves of awards and made him newspaper cartooning’s most famous creator since Peanuts’s Charles Schulz. All of which made it all the more stunning when he abruptly announced in 1995 the retirement of the strip. In a brief letter, he said he felt he’d done all he could with it, artistically.
It has been unclear what the reclusive Watterson has been doing in the almost three decades since. He has refused possibly millions of dollars’ worth of Calvin and Hobbes licensing and merchandising opportunities, which he believes would cheapen the work by turning his characters into “television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers.” He has produced no new projects aside from a few small artworks donated to charity. And he has declined most interviews and public appearances. A 2013 documentary, Dear Mr. Watterson, did not have his participation. Not much is known about his personal life.
Last month, in collaboration with the illustrator John Kascht, Watterson published his first new project since Calvin and Hobbes. It’s a “fable for grown-ups,” according to the publisher, called The Mysteries. The Mysteries is a book, but it is not a graphic novel or a comic in the traditional sense. It takes the style of a children’s picture book, with brief, one- or two-sentence narrative captions accompanied by large, single-pane illustrations on the opposing pages. It is extremely short, if read in a brisk manner probably contrary to its creators’ intentions. It may take longer to read this review than the book itself.
According to the publisher, Watterson wrote the story and worked for several years with Kascht, a cartoonist known for his celebrity caricatures, to develop a novel brand of illustration completely different from their respective styles. In a publicity video released online, Watterson and Kascht describe using a multimedia approach to create the art. The result is impressive — distinctive, vivid black-and-white images that somehow encompass both the feathery vagueness of charcoal sketches and something close to photo-realism, peopled by grotesque, three-dimensional, clay faces that might be at home in a particularly gothic Pixar film.
The story, on the other hand, seems designed to baffle and frustrate, even for Watterson fans who have been cautioned not to expect anything remotely similar to Calvin and Hobbes. We open in a medieval fairy-tale land whose citizens live in fear of a phenomenon in the forest outside their settlement that they refer to only as “the Mysteries.” The king and his court — wizards, knights — go to great pains to subdue the Mysteries. When a Mystery is finally captured, it turns out to be less frightening or strange than had been expected, though the reader is never told exactly what a Mystery is.
The story progresses to a modern-day landscape of highway overpasses and jumbo jets. Everything seems hunky-dory until seemingly strange phenomena begin to emerge again, in the possible form of changes to the ecosystem. But eons pass, humanity presumably melts from the Earth, and “the Mysteries lived happily after.”
My first reaction on finishing this slim allegory about humanity and progress was intense annoyance. It’s a fable, perhaps about climate change, and, depending on how you look at it, either maddeningly opaque and cryptic or maddeningly on-the-nose. I hadn’t expected anything remotely similar to the wry escapism of Calvin and Hobbes, nor, on the other hand, some dense, gritty graphic-novel opus in the manner of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Yet it is difficult to finish The Mysteries without feeling disappointed or even cheated.
The book’s polarized Amazon reviews suggest that the feeling is common: One review is titled “Well That Was Weird.” Another argues, not altogether as a criticism, that the “secret ingredient is … nothing.” A third reviewer complains, “I turned the pages, but nothing happened.”
The Mysteries’s vexing inconclusiveness and vagueness may be partly because the story is mostly a vehicle for Watterson and Kascht’s experimental artistic collaboration. But it also seems of a piece with Watterson’s willingness to subvert and defy expectations. He has always made his art for himself, first and foremost, and resisted commercialization. One image in the book may sum it up: One of the king’s knights, having finally captured a Mystery, hauls it before the people in a locked metal case. The case gleams and tantalizes, but we never see what’s inside.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.