In the fall, a leaf pile transforms into a Calvin-eating monster; in winter, Calvin sculpts a snowman swimming away from snow-shark fins; spring is rainy, and in summer the days are just packed.

I think its fantastic that Bill Waterson is still creating art and I love weird shit but I have no earthly idea what was happening here.I don’t think I’ll spoil the plot of “The Mysteries” if I say that the story finds a distinctive and unsettling path to its final three words, which are “happily ever after. In 2007, Watterson reviewed the biography for the Wall Street Journal, and reminded readers that “Peanuts” had as much darkness—fear, sadness, bullying—as it had charm. On the artwork itself: I did not find the artwork to be what I’d hoped either, as there seem to be digital blur effects that make it look less professional, or not at the correct resolution.

The woods, the streams, the snowy hills the friends career off—the natural world is a space as enchanted and real as Hobbes himself.

In his prime with Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson was famous for sometimes creating very wordy comic strips (although he also was a master of almost wordless comic strips). There's no difficult language or frightening images, there's nothing worse than say, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. A long time passes, but finally those mysteries are found, the world domesticates a lot of them—in fact far too many of them—and the planet begins to change.

I kept saying, “If Bill Watterson is putting this out after ALL these YEARS…He must have something VERY important to say, and I want to know what that is!The two friends are in a wagon, plummeting perilously forward into the unseen—a common pastime for them. 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.