Elio Wentzel
The Mysteries by Bill Waterson, illustrated by Bill Waterson and John Kascht. Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2023, 72 pp., $19.99
Artwork by Elio Wentzel
I cast myself down the darkness of a forest path, deeper than my eyes could comprehend in light. The wind curled bellowed through and flutter was constant everything swayed. This is what I was meant to see.
“Long ago,
the forest was dark and deep.”
I've read a fair number of books cover to cover. Before high school I was ravenous, revisiting the middle-shelf broken-spined novels I knew to be true when, garrisoned between my sub-/conscious, their stories wound up my dreams. Still, these repetitions will never catch classics like Knuffle Bunny, Stellaluna, and 10 Minutes to Bedtime. The books on highest rotation are ones I heard first, until the dependable pages sightread into meaning. These bedtime stories swathed animals in their habitats—nine minutes in, there were hamsters in a bathtub and Knuffle Bunny in a New York laundromat. Stellaluna the fruit bat chomped mangoes “in a warm and sultry forest.” Accumulated hours of reading later, tucking into the last page is warm as the first release and the most familiar. I have yet to leave The Mysteries feeling the same as I did the time before, or at the beginning, or as anyone with whom I've shared this story.
The first time, I was pulled though by my brother. As he read aloud on the ferry, I felt the story's allegiance to time. My eyes on the pictures on each odd page from the passenger seat, I could've poured over the captures for ages longer than a few sentences. I wondered at the distinction in the title page attribution:
Story by Bill Watterson
Pictures by John Kascht and Bill Watterson
The pair posted a Youtube video along with the book: “Collaborating on The Mysteries.” Each piece illuminates a path. Their convergence is meaningful. A silent forest is ominous beyond darkness.
Watterson wrote The Mysteries in a different world than the one he published them in. At the end of 1995, he announced the completion of Calvin and Hobbes: “I am eager to work at a more thoughtful pace, with fewer artistic compromises.” Almost two decades later, the words to The Mysteries formed for a painting subject and then mothballed, declared “unillustratable.” Around this time, Kascht, in conjunction with Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, filmed a look into his artistic process. I watched Kascht caricature with clay; cupping eddies, cementing likeness. “My hope is that by noticing and recording these details, some glimmer of the life at the center of it all will get captured on paper too.”
In the accompanying creation story for the book’s art, Watterson continually returns to his pursuit of surprise, Kascht to the tumultuous journey. “Working through differences toward a common purpose is practically an act of defiance these days and I'm as proud of that as any other aspect of the collaboration.” As I see a story independently moving from its authors, I appreciate their collective pasts and determination to build out. Lost together, “We stuck my rough things next to John's crafted things:” as defined by Kascht, “mismatched pieces that really only fit together because we said they had to.”
Inside The Mysteries, pieces clink together. Outside, a black canvas cover accumulates pet fur from times the book was read in bed and left on counters around the house. Each time I close the book, I feel some of its certainly slip away. I never stop wondering how the people grew into fear of the trees and their mysteries. I wish for more understanding of how things came to be, refusing to believe that's how they came. Is this inherent with inheriting, how each generation feels at their coming of age?
The world holds Wizards and a short king, where specificity grounds. It's not altogether there: why build walls when the mysteries are everywhere? Eyebrows cleft in faces molded by Kascht wandering between sunlight and shade; sullen expressions imbue layers of gray that build as mustered. A Wizard in a fur-collared robe records comms with a feather, then changes into star-and-planet-dotted hooded pajamas to telescopically peer at a fiery sky. The moon is true. Illuminated in crescent, craters pockmark the glow cast on misty tree edges. If this is Watterson's work, it is a “half-remembered dream” whose details leave you wondering what to bring into the day.
“But every day,
things happened for which
there were no explanations.”
The day my brother and I picked up The Mysteries, I bought an Edward Gorey puzzle with fabricked frogs and figures in a drawing room. This guy gets mysteries. Kingfisher Bookstore has held an inexplicable fascination with Gorey for as long as I have looked around, so I had previously purchased a sealed The West Wing from them (I'm guessing a 32-paged "wordless tale" doesn't sell well in comfortable bookstores). Because I was happy to pay beyond the cover, because mysteries tend to build each other, I found the perfect slot for The Mysteries near The West Wing on my closest shelf: I found a connection between the two whose explanation shines outside itself.
The fifth illustration of The West Wing carries an etched piece of framed art, scribbled branches of two trees stretching towards each other across a river. The leftbanked tree sprouts anaphora to a painted horse and rider misted in Watterson's charcoal, river spiriting the reflection. Unfurling condensed wind carries the pair down the same path across the sky, tethering a steady translation from the moon with gravity. Light leaves darkness past shadows blowing another direction.
We grown ups read to teach each other
your turn to look at pictures
I'll lead you through
pointed verbs and corners
turn the page together.
Elio Wentzel mends provisions to sea, tendering stories, swathed in soft things.