It’s not an overstatement to say that the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes was, and remains, utterly beloved. The adventures of a six-year-old American boy and his stuffed tiger who comes alive when they are alone remains one of the most delightful depictions of imagination in any medium. In the daily comic strip—which ran from 1985 to 1995, and which at its peak was syndicated in 2,400 newspapers worldwide—creator Bill Watterson was able to demonstrate his gift for making imagination come alive on the page. Just look at how he drew splashing water: always with a leaping sensory impact that somehow felt as vibrant as witnessing your best friend cannonball into a pool. Calvin was equally famous for his imaginary adventures, most memorably involving snowmen, spaceships, and/or dinosaurs, always drawn with a sense of glee that made a little boy’s imagination seem like the most delightful place in the world.
It’s that sense of glee that people remember most about Calvin and Hobbes, and which has enabled it to maintain its vast popularity since it stopped running on the funny pages almost 30 years ago. The glee itself was so pervasive and charming that it spawned a variety of bootleg merchandise, such as the notorious image of Calvin peeing with a smirk on his face. The merchandise was bootleg because Mr. Watterson famously refused—refuses—to countenance any licensing of Calvin and Hobbes in any medium other than collected versions of the strips. This vehemence against the idea of altering his artwork for other formats added a strangely sour undertone to the contemporary feeling of the strip, which was not improved by Mr. Watterson going public with his fight for larger physical spaces for his work in newsprint. In 1992, he secured a deal with his syndicator that allowed Calvin and Hobbes nearly half a page in the Sunday color supplement, considered a highly unusual act of favoritism at the time and utterly unimaginable now, print media being what it is. The sense of glee was starting to disappear. His final strip was primarily white space, showing Calvin and Hobbes sledding down a snowy hill to go exploring. Contemporary readers knew that white space was a final kiss-off to people who had begrudged his images room to breathe. The glee was gone.
And then silence. Until late 2023, that is, when Mr. Watterson published a short picture book called The Mysteries, with text by himself and images, all black-and-white, done in collaboration with caricaturist (and friend) John Kascht. The cover depicts a man in stereotypical European medieval-peasant garb, hunched over with a look of dreadful anticipation on his face. The person appears three-dimensional in front of a background, drawn with charcoals, showing a straw-roofed hut in a forest. It’s immediately obvious that this is not a book for kids.
It’s done in the style of a kid’s picture book, but to read this to a child would create an existential crisis. It’s a brief parable about a people in a Disneyesque, Mitteleuropean kingdom under attack from an unseen force: the titular mysteries. Mr. Kascht’s career as a caricaturist is felt, as the people at the center of the images, which are possibly sculpted models, have a much more vivid feel than those who are drawn as part of the backgrounds. But regardless of their importance, it’s clear that all the people are beside themselves with terror at the thought of what the mysteries can do. Finally, after much effort and heroism, a mystery is captured. But the people are unimpressed.
The visual style is both childish and not. The story is full of cathedrals and castles. Knights in full armor ride on horseback. Kings with frill collars speak to crowds of people from balconies. But then the story slips into modernity, with an image of a weary newspaper seller wearing a cap with long ear flaps and smoking a cigarillo, leaning on a counter that displays newspaper reports of the latest mystery: So what?…BORING!…Populace underwhelmed by latest capture.
And then we are in a world where a man dressed like a Dutch burgher can be behind the wheel of a car, nose in the air, holding the steering wheel with one hand and an iced coffee in the other, as the text says, “The people lived luxuriously. They were finally in control of everything.”
Then people vanish from the story. The illustrations show our little planet, alone in the vastness of space, and the text—with sometimes as few as four words per page—makes sure we feel that solitude.
And then it ends.
The whole point of Calvin and Hobbes was to give full flower to the imagination, and to show what an unfettered expression of that imagination could look like. A child lives in a world separate from that of adults, whose time is devoted to responsibilities, meaning there’s limited room for freeform play. Children don’t have those responsibilities and do not understand how the world fully works, and therefore create wild and crazy explanations in order to make sense of things for themselves. Or sometimes children just want to roam, whether in their bedrooms with their stuffed animals or out in the yard, where they can pretend they aren’t being closely supervised. People adored Calvin because he was the kind of rambunctious child it would have been fun to be, and they related to his friendship with Hobbes because lots of children have teddies or pets that were fully alive to them.
But The Mysteries isn’t an expression of imagination; it is an expression of a lack of imagination. When the medieval-seeming people didn’t know what the mysteries were, they were terrified. Once they did—“The Mystery looked surprisingly ordinary”—they were indifferent. Knowledge bred contempt. And then they forgot about them, because they thought they knew everything there was to know.
But the visual style of the book also points to a lack of imagination. Choosing to begin the story in what is, visually, the distant and unsophisticated past is a distancing technique to allow the current reader to feel superior to these rubes. Of course the dear readers of the present moment would never be so silly! But ten minutes on any social media platform would make it clear that there are plenty of incurious and contemptuous people right here and now. So the question becomes: why was this choice made? The passage of time at the end of the story involves a time jump so vast that starting now and leaping into the future would have made little difference, and the images before the one of the burgher in his car provide enough hints at modernity that it doesn’t have the gut punch a purely modernist twist would have. There are no attempts at predicting the future, either; no Jetsons-style retro-modernity with flying cars.
And here is where the choice of John Kascht as co-illustrator comes into play. He is on record talking about how his career as a caricaturist is built on his talents for mimicry and impersonation, but his drawings—which, as with all caricatures, heighten appearances in not always flattering ways—are for him a celebration of people’s uniqueness instead of mockery. But he has also gone on record with his belief that this work is not political.
It’s not political to say that the choice of who gets to be caricatured and what aspects of a person’s appearance are considered the most flattering—not to mention who does the caricaturing—is as old-fashioned as pointy jester hats or living in a hut in the woods. Of course, the world has changed since 1995, which Mr. Watterson knows because he has been living in it. In that time Mr. Kascht has also been freelancing for a long and prestigious list of American newspapers and magazines.
This means that the reader comes to the slow realization that the style of artwork here is down to Mr. Watterson and Mr. Kascht’s lack of imagination. The book’s cover image is a pretty remarkable depiction of the facial expression you might achieve as this realization sinks in. The superior feeling we are meant to derive from the artwork is theirs—Mr. Watterson’s and Mr. Kascht’s—and the foolish peasants and hapless kings who prompt such superior feeling are us.
And once that realization kicks in, the solution as to what the mystery is becomes clear. It is artistic talent. The mystery is talent. The big idea here is that talent is something unimpressive and easily contained once the populace knows what it is. Familiarity breeding contempt, and that.
Beside the text “They laughed at the old paintings” is an image of a bald museum guard sitting on a chair with a posture of great boredom. He is sitting between two small portraits of googly-eyed monsters and one large one of the Grim Reaper, on a horse, flying over a city on fire. Everyone who remembered the Renaissance has been dead for hundreds of years. But we have their buildings, and their art. We might not appreciate the work that they left behind—life is too different, and products so divorced from the labor of making them, that sometimes it’s too much to imagine why somebody dressed like that—but nevertheless. The art that has outlived its time gives us a window into lives other than ours, and allows us physical things to wonder about, if we want to.
And then we are back to that sense of wonder, that idea that the imagination—and the talent to describe that imagination—remains the most important and enduring thing there is, whether we notice it or not. But with Mr. Watterson, there’s always the question of controlling the talent, too, and the idea that the talent should have the right to control what is said and done about it.
Ideas belong to their creator—that is a given—but they can also change shape without losing their essence or their connection to their creator. Peanuts was able to endure as a comic strip on top of its consistent, enormous, and continuing merchandising (and TV shows, and movies, and Broadway spectacles) because its subject was childhood as meta-commentary on the problems of being an adult. (Even the porny bootleg stuff somehow has never lost this, either.) Calvin and Hobbes’s singular focus was on imagination, and the question of whether Hobbes was real, meaning its meta-commentary was about imagination itself. The comic was meant to be something to wonder about, not to play with, but refusing to provide a physical manifestation of that wonder meant the fuss about the merchandising became more important than any merchandising itself.
But this means the choice of a caricaturist as Mr. Watterson’s collaborator is the sting in the tail. It adds a sour note to the entire enterprise, and makes it clear that this book is not meant as an exploration of something that cannot be explained. Instead, it’s a sneer from two people who think they see the world more clearly than the rest of us. Who think they know better than others how to look at the old paintings. This is churlish at best, but above all it is not true.
The entire joy of art is that there is no wrong way to experience it. Someone who knows Greek literature and the importance of calligraphic shapes to convey meaning in ancient art will be able to appreciate the Book of Kells more deeply than someone who thought it was painted with rocks, but their opinions about it are both equally valid. And there is very little more irritating than hearing people with expertise use their deep knowledge only to point out that other people don’t experience art as insightfully as they do. Such as through unflattering depictions of their physical features, for example.
Is this the curse of someone who, over only ten years, created art so extraordinary and beloved that it has quite possibly rendered him immortal? That Mr. Watterson feels he is above the rest of us thanks to whatever remarkable gift he has? Well, he might have a greater talent, or one that was able to be accurately channeled in his own lifetime. But talent and curiosity ought to go hand in hand. If the artist is not curious about the people absorbing his ideas—if he even goes so far as to express contempt for us—then how are we meant to care about his work?
Once contempt enters the equation—Boring! So what?—no mutually satisfactory answer will ever be found. There are very few audiences that appreciate being treated like a bad smell. It is therefore the challenge of the artist to build a bridge between their talent and the world’s ability to understand it. It is one thing to be unequal to the task. It is quite another to be bored by its necessity.
The Mysteries ends with the usual ending of children’s fables, but this time it’s alongside an image of a galaxy in space, the cold and dark vastness. It’s hard to imagine this being the open space most people dream of when they gleefully go exploring. It’s a sour and spiteful addition to a glorious career.
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