The Mysteries

Thanks to a booklisting posted by Simon & Schuster, the news is out: legendary cartoonist Bill Watterson has collaborated with legendary caricature artist John Kascht on The Mysteries, an illustrated “fable for grown-ups.” 

According to the website, the 72-page illustrated storybook is scheduled for release on October 10th, 2023. The book will be published by Andrews McMeel Publishing and distributed by Simon & Schuster.

The Mysteries

Here’s the description of The Mysteries from the website:

“From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding. 

“In a fable for grown-ups by cartoonist Bill Watterson, a long-ago kingdom is afflicted with unexplainable calamities. Hoping to end the torment, the king dispatches his knights to discover the source of the mysterious events. Years later, a single battered knight returns.

“For the book’s illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate—a mysterious process in its own right.”

About the collaborators

Watterson is best known for his seminal comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which ran from November 1985 through the final day of December 1995. The title remains among the best sequential graphic narrative work to have ever been published.

In 2014, Watterson was named the named the Grand Prix winner at the Angoulême comics festival. While he did draw a poster for Angoulême 2015, that was the extent of his direct participation.

Meanwhile, Kascht’s work has appeared in a laundry list of periodicals that reads like a “who’s who” of respected publications, including Rolling StoneMAD MagazineThe New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. Two dozen of his works are displayed at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

Arriving in October 2023

Will you be checking out The Mysteries when it arrives in October?

The Beat is waiting to hear from you! Give us a shout-out, right here in the comment section or over on social media @comicsbeat, and let us know what you’re thinking.


Thanks to Steve Lieber for Tweeting about this exciting news yesterday afternoon.