In 1995, Bill Watterson walked away form Calvin and Hobbes, his wildly successful comic strip that the Ohio artist tirelessly protected from merchandising offers and Saturday morning cartoon pitches. After retiring from the public eye and giving exceedingly rare interviews, Watterson has returned after 28 years with his new fable The Mysteries.
Gone are the philosophical wonderings of a young boy and his stuffed tiger, and in its place is a completely different style of storytelling that reflects Watterson’s interests since leaving behind his iconic comic strip.
“He’s been working creatively, painting and doing other types of art, since he ended the strip,” Jenny Robb, head curator of the Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, told The Guardian. “From that standpoint, it makes sense that eventually he would find a project that he wanted to share with his audience.”
“This is pretty exciting and monumental that he’s releasing a whole book,” Neal Martell, author of Looking for Calvin and Hobbes said. “I’m surprised and yet not surprised – surprised in the sense that he’s putting something out, not surprised that since he is putting something out, it’s so wildly different from what he did on Calvin and Hobbes.”
Here’s the official synopsis for The Mysteries:
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 Mysteries is now available wherever books are sold.
(Via The Guardian, Simon & Schuster)