It’s been decades since Bill Watterson closed shop on his Calvin & Hobbes comic and retired. This year, however, Watterson is coming out of retirement with a new book called The Mysteries, which he created with caricaturist John Kascht.
Watterson and Kascht have apparently been working on The Mysteries, whose book cover is shown above, for years. Here’s the 72-page book’s official blurb:
In a fable for grown-ups by cartoonist Bill Watterson, a long-ago kingdom is afflicted with unexplainable calamities. Hoping to end the torment, the king dispatches his knights to discover the source of the mysterious events. Years later, a single battered knight returns.
For the book’s illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate—a mysterious process in its own right.
The details of how that unusually close collaboration for the images worked are unknown, but it’s intriguing to figure out how the end result of their work would be something that neither of them expected. And looking at the few pages shared here, it seems like a safe bet that the tone of this work will be markedly different than the Calvin & Hobbes comic.
The Mysteries releases on October 10, 2023 and is now available for pre-order.
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