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The Mysteries

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thinker for a father and having been taught to appreciate philosophy at an early age & growing up as an outcast in my early years.... Bill Watterson's work, since I was about 7 years old, helped raise my mentality as a kid, downright to the end including his firm stance of artistical integrity that made me admire him all the more. I cried when I read the last strip words the day it was published, from that kid and his tiger: "Let's go explore!". I think a lot of my own sense of humor grew thru Bill's art mastery, but above all, my own abilities honed as a practicioner. In essence, Bill's work has been incredibly influential to my intellectual upbringing in many ways.

Calvin and Hobbes" was a daily comic strip from 1985-1995 about a boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. Be warned - this takes like five minutes to read. It is absolutely nothing like Calvin & Hobbes and if different names were on the cover no one would suspect Bill Watterson at all. As for the next chapter in Watterson’s career, Andrews McMeel describes The Mysteries as “a compelling, provocative story that invites readers to examine their place in the universe and their responsibility to others and the planet we all share”, calling it “a fable that dares to intimate the big questions about our place in the universe”. I think it demonstrated what was possible with the comics art form, how you can tell stories that appeal to a wide audience with visual variety,” Robb says. “These are all things that had been done before. But Calvin and Hobbes brought a lot of unique features together and showed how you could create something really special and really magical.”

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Bill Watterson, the mastermind behind the timeless Calvin and Hobbes, was once asked why he hadn’t published anything following the famous strip’s retirement. His reply implied what most already feared; Calvin was too good—too great—to be ever surpassed. And so, rather than trying to top impossible expectations, he chose to exit as an inimitable legend. He “quit while being ahead,” as the old cliché says.

Like others have noted, this book was a fast read, but I've already read it a second time. It's a book with subtle and not-so-subtle themes and questions worth reflecting on, many of which align with past interviews Bill Watterson has given on his views. Here's some that I noticed: But Watterson declined to publicly exhibit his work, telling Mental Floss: “I don’t paint ambitiously. It’s all catch and release: just tiny fish that aren’t really worth the trouble to clean and cook.” In fact, Martell described a rumor that Watterson was such a perfectionist that he burned his first 500 paintings because he felt they weren’t up to his standards. If I want to share how much I love Bill Watterson with someone, "The Mysteries" will definitely not be my go-to. Only a footnote in the career of a legend.In June 2014, three strips from the Pearl Before Swine comic featured its artist Stephan Pastis being schooled by a second-grader on how to properly draw. The child’s drawings were a different style than Pastis’ normal work, and it was later revealed that Watterson had been the one behind them. The artwork is very different from both [Watterson’s and Kascht’s] styles,” says Robb. “So I’m really curious to know how they collaborated on that and how that worked. Because it doesn’t really look like John and doesn’t really look like Bill to me.” Lastly, art appreciation is subjective. I hope for Bill Watterson and John Kascht that the experience of creating this work was 5-stars. Neither one of them owes us anything, so I'm grateful they decided to share this with us.

It has everything that can make a comic strip successful,” says Robb. “It’s funny, first of all. It’s insightful. It’s wise. It’s visually appealing,” particularly in the groundbreaking Sunday strips, which eventually shed the grid layout in favor of panels of various shapes and sizes to suit the story. “You see him really stretching as an artist in the Sundays and they’re just beautiful to look at,” Robb says. “So he brings together all the different aspects of a comic strip, the writing, the characters, the layout, the artwork, and he just has a mastery of all of those.” Humans are naturally afraid of what they don't understand. Once they understand a given mystery, it's no longer necessarily something to fear. Watterson has said, of the illustrations in “Calvin and Hobbes,” “One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what’s going on in Calvin’s head.” Only one reality in “Calvin and Hobbes” is drawn with a level of detail comparable to the scenes of Calvin’s imagination: the natural world. The woods, the streams, the snowy hills the friends career off—the natural world is a space as enchanted and real as Hobbes himself.Though Watterson has been described as reclusive, that might not be the best word; he lives a normal life, says Robb, one of the few people to have interviewed him, but “he doesn’t like to be in the spotlight. He wants to let his artwork speak for itself. And he’s uncomfortable in the role of a spokesperson for comics – he would prefer that people read and experience the comic strip rather than engaging with it filtered through him talking about it.” The story… yes. Exactly what it needed to be… that’s the beautifully succinct and perfectly weird. I loved it. After an absence of nearly 30 years, no one was sure what to expect from Bill Watterson when he emerged from his self-imposed retirement. Over the years, Watterson has created a few works including some illustrations for charity auctions, a graphic for a documentary, a poster for a festival, and a few guest strips for the comic strip Pearls Before Swine (which were also auctioned for charity). According to those who know him personally, Watterson had been pursuing his artistic passions while living a normal life, including painting landscapes inspired by his surroundings, but those paintings were never released to the public.

Indeed, it’s as if Watterson wanted to subvert expectation to the most extreme degree possible, rejecting Calvin’s cute, colorful world for a bland and insufferable one. And in this, he unapologetically succeeds. As a hardcover coffee table type book, it just doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose. That being said I am glad I bought it.I don't think it's the story (which is clever, but nothing new) or the lush artwork that makes this uninteresting, I think it's the medium. I think it would have been much more interesting as a short stop motion film. Short meaning 3 to 5 minutes, max. Shakespeare this is not. John Kascht's visuals are gorgeous, and beg to be in motion. Shortly after Calvin and Hobbes ended, Watterson took up painting, spending time creating landscapes of Ohio woods with his father. He studied a variety of artists, from the expressionist Willem de Kooning to the Italian Renaissance master Titian, according to Nevin Martell’s book Looking for Calvin and Hobbes. The artwork is beautiful in a bizarre and discomforting way. This is not a book with the sweeping planetscapes of Spaceman Spiff or the verdant woods through which a boy and a tiger once roamed. This is a book with art that unsettles you the more you engage with it, the more your eyes linger, the more you gaze upon it. It is not a bad unsettling, I should add, but it is bleak and cold in a mesmerizing way. My hot take is that the book would have been better had there been only the art and no words. At least, then, it becomes a work that leads the audience to grapple with the meaning and find something of themselves within the interpretation. Or maybe that's too avant garde. In a Sunday strip on April 22, 1990, Calvin’s dad tells Calvin and Hobbes a bedtime story, by request, that is about Calvin and Hobbes. All he does, pretty much, is describe, to his rapt audience, the first part of their actual day. Calvin complains that his dad ends the story too early, that he hasn’t even gotten to lunchtime. His dad says the story has no end, because Calvin and Hobbes will go on writing it “tomorrow and every day after.” The friends are pleased to learn they’re in a story that doesn’t end.

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