The Mysteries

I had seen the video about how Bill Watterson and John Kascht had spent years figuring out not just how to make this book, but how to even rectify their apparently incompatible styles and methods. The story of two folks who one assumes must be friends (and if not friends, clearly had a lot of respect and admiration for each other) who spent years banging their heads against a wall together and somehow managed to not bang heads too hard against each other is remarkable. The story of this book could almost overshadow the book itself...

Except the book is very, very good. Given what I had heard going in, "An adult fable, a picture book, with an aggressively stylized aesthetic," I was worried I would enjoy it, find it charming and something nice to look at, but somehow inescapably trite. Instead I found my anxieties mirrored and acknowledged, and told to remember we are all dust. Not an original meditation, but a gorgeous attempt at rendering it.

I'm not going too in-depth on the "narrative" here, or what I think one should take from it. It's just an incredibly brief parable of human social evolution (I'd say "social progress" but whether or not that is debatable is, at least from the narrative's timeline, irrelevant). This is mostly a visual piece.

The book feels like a collection of... almost colloidion photography, with it's concrete starkness that sublimates into a dark etherealness. Everything has the feel of long shutter speeds and slow emulsions, a moment caught in molasses instead of film. The stark shift from John's eye for detail and Bill's efficient abstraction likely punches this effect up considerably. I'm not someone who knows much about art, but I've always fallen for it more when it heavily intersects with craft. And these images were absolutely crafted. If I'm ever in a situation where I could have wall art, I would deeply like prints of a few of the pages from this book... but given Bill's history with merchandising, I don't see that happening in any official capacity. I'm also loathe to the idea of any one of these pages out of it's context.

As I've said, it's not a new meditation, but the book made me revisit it. Upon reading it again it lay in my lap on the last page for a spell while I reflected on how... insignificant? temporary? doomed? we all are. How we could fix everything tomorrow and we'd still be one weird solar flare, one big rock, one... Mystery away from having nothing to fix ever again. It's definitely very nihilist. Big doomer vibes. I don't think that makes it inherently toxic. I think we need the space to talk about the sucking hole in many of us that have grown up relatively comfortable in a world with horrors, a pit in our stomach that grows as we watch the bubble that insulated us from those horrors crumble more and more every day... We could build a better world, but this one has a bed for me, a functional kitchen, and lots of mindless stuff for me to consume in between work shifts. What little comfort (or "control") I have took a lot of "labor" to "earn." We could just fuck up this world and I wouldn't be comfy anymore and that would be awful. So time passes and becomes a weird soup, and next thing I know I’ve spent a decade just existing. At this rate the rest of my life will just be an indistinct blur into the grave. But that’s only a helpful realization if you are able to relinquish some of your comfort to change the tempo. The narrative provides no recommendations.

This is where the craft steps in and saves it. I can only imagine the myriad conversations between the two artists as they learned how to work with each other, and the solitary satisfaction of working on an individual component for the whole. Of being a speck of dust in a mote and deciding what your purpose is in that day, what you are going to work on for yourself, for your friend, for your partner, for your family, for your community… What you are going to do in spite of knowing on a long enough timeline nothing we do matters… The craft answers what the narrative cannot.