The comic news of the year, ironized a journalist on Twitter, is an illustrated book. Hard to sum it up better. Because after almost three decades of contemplative retreat and almost sepulchral silence, Bill Watterson, creator of ‘Calvin & Hobbes’, returns to bookstores, although not with a comic or a comic strip, but with an illustrated book. A four-handed job with the artist John Kascht who, according to the publisher Simon & Schuster, It will arrive in October under the title of ‘The mysteries’.
“From Bill Watterson, best-selling creator of the beloved Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned cartoonists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding,” celebrates the editorial in a statement that reveals very little. Just the title and part of an argument centered on a kingdom that is affected “by inexplicable calamities.” Hence, presumably, the title. “In the hope of putting an end to the torment, the king sends his knights to discover the origin of the mysterious events,” the note abounds.
According to Simon & Schuster, Watterson and Kascht They have been working “unusually closely” for years. “Both artists abandoned their old ways of working, inventing images that neither could anticipate.”
‘The mysteries’ It will be Watterson’s first work since the last ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ strip was published in December 1995. At that time, the American cartoonist, who was only 38 years old, decided to retire to, as he put it, “work at a more meditative pace, with few artistic commitments.” In practice, this meant that the cartoonist practically wiped himself off the map and has only broken his silence to take charge of the poster for the 2015 Angoulême Festival and some sporadic cameo in strips by Stephan Pastis.
The Astiberri publishing house has begun to recover the strips of ‘Calvin & Hobbes’
“My personal interests have changed, and I believe I have done what I could within the constraints of the deadlines and the size of the panels,” Watterson alleged in his farewell letter. Since then, the painting occupies a good part of the space that the cartoons have vacated, although there is a legend that readers who leave a ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ album at the bookstore in the town where they live can find it signed by Watterson himself after a few days.
By chance or not, the cartoonist’s return coincides with the recovery of his strips that the Astiberri publishing house has just undertaken: last October ‘The great Illustrated Calvin and Hobbes’ appeared and ‘A magical world’ awaits on the horizon.
The ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ stories, published in 1985 and published for ten years in more than 2,400 newspapers around the world, earned Bill Watterson numerous awards: two Eisner, two Reuben, eight Harvey, the award for best foreign comic and the grand prize at the Angoulême International Festival. His books have sold more than 45 millions of specimens around the world.