Opinion Bill Watterson is back with a new book

Calvin’s words in the final strip of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, published on December 31, 1995, now seem like a promise fulfilled. To his pal, the stuffed tiger Hobbes’s observation that the snow blanketing the ground made the world look like “a big white sheet of paper to draw on”, the world’s most famous six-year-old said, “A day full of possibilities”. One of these possibilities, it turns out, was Watterson publishing a whole new piece of work, unrelated to the boy-and-tiger-meet-world comic strip he enthralled readers with for 10 years.

Readers only have to wait till October this year for a new book called The Mysteries — described as a fable for grown-ups, as per the announcement made earlier this week — which Watterson has created in collaboration with caricaturist John Kascht. The book’s publisher has released few details about the project, apart from a brief synopsis — about a world beset with unexplainable calamities and a group of knights that sets out to find the cause — and a few panels of artwork which, rendered in shades of grey, have a darker, more foreboding look than readers might expect from the creator of Calvin and Hobbes.

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If fans are surprised by this new adult turn in Watterson’s work, they need only remember that even the beloved comic strip was never really meant for children — or, at least, not just for children. Its visual exuberance, the age of its protagonist and the fact that so many of the adventures had fantastical elements — battles on Mars or the fictional planet of Plootarg, a Tyrannosaurus Rex flying an F-14 — cannot overshadow Watterson’s incredible artistry or the serious themes he often explored: Mortality, consumerism, the insignificance of human life in a vast universe as seen in the famous “speck of dust” strip. A book that reveals a whole new side of his genius would surely be worth the almost three-decade-long wait since a boy and his stuffed tiger sledded off into the sunset.