If you care to read more, there's a fascinating New York Times feature by Neima Jahromi, an editor at the Book Review, explaining how Watterson showed this basic story to artist John Kascht in 2018. This collaboration was very unlikely to succeed because their aesthetics are vastly different—yet they hammered away at the idea for years and finally produced this landmark volume. Hopefully it won't take him another 30 years to follow this up with a Jazz record, a contemporary art exhibition, or a performance piece at the MoMA. The woods, the streams, the snowy hills the friends career off—the natural world is a space as enchanted and real as Hobbes himself.

This is why you won’t find a plot summary or anything remotely spoilery here—you could read my synopsis in the same amount of time it’d take to read the book itself.I may have to, and am completely willing to, sit with the book a bit longer to see if my initial view changes. Calvin and Hobbes,” which débuted in 1985, centered on six-year-old Calvin and his best friend, Hobbes, a tiger who to everyone other than Calvin appears to be a stuffed animal. With a different artist, I might interpret this as an enticement, but it seems more likely that Watterson is merely averse to marketing—he did no publicity for his first “Calvin and Hobbes” collection, and fought for years to prevent Hobbes and Calvin from appearing in snow globes, on pajamas, on chip-bag clips, on trading cards. The general theme of the art is that people are rendered in very sharp, almost photorealistic, detail, while everything else is blurred and vague and obscured. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.

This book is 72 pages and the text is only 43 sentences—two of those sentences just two words—which I know because I counted. The characters in “Krazy Kat” also didn’t age or really change much: Krazy Kat is a black cat forever in love with Ignatz, a white mouse who serially hits Krazy with bricks, an action that Krazy misinterprets as a sign of love. Other than that Bill Watterson hasn’t seemed to have changed all that much (not a bad thing), and that odd, beautiful illustrations are always fun, who really knows?To me, the ending follows from both good behavior and enchantment—good behavior being something Calvin despises, and enchantment being the realm in which he is king. There's no difficult language or frightening images, there's nothing worse than say, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It ultimately is kinda slight, but it does point to interesting new directions should Watterson continue releasing his work, unlikely as that may be. These are stories about difficult and not infrequently destructive characters who are lost in their own worlds. I've now read this book a couple dozen times and those six words are sure to be quoted over and over again in coming years.

The resonance of the story with facing the perils of a dark and unknown wood, of nature itself, is pretty clear. At the same time, these characters embody most of what is good: the gifts of play, of the inner life, of imagining something other than what is there.As a college student at Kenyon, Watterson spent much of a school year painting his dorm-room ceiling like that of the Sistine Chapel, and then, at the end of the year, painted it back dorm-room drab. Somewhere on the outskirts of Cleveland, their creator is probably irked that his old characters are pouncing into all these reviews of this other endeavor. If only humans heeded the warnings within mysteries as well as they followed the blueprints for making Teflon pans and missiles. Now we both read the nearly comic-free online news instead of the material papers, into which, Watterson has said, “little jokes” were placed as a respite from “atrocities described in the rest of the newspaper.