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A review by ericderoulet
The Mysteries by Bill Watterson
2.0
I wanted to like this. Certainly, the book's concept is worthwhile (even if the theme is far from unprecedented), and the art direction on display here makes for a good coffee table book or perhaps a portable art gallery. I'm also not especially surprised that the text in this book (really more comparable to a graphic novel) is sparse; it's normative, after all, for comics and graphic novels to do at least as much storytelling through the visuals as they do through their text.
Unfortunately, I thought both the visual and the textual storytelling fell short here. The text is so terse that it amounts to a vignette with not much of anything substantiated. I understand that the abstractness of the village, the forest, and most everything else is intentional—the book is clearly an allegory, applicable to any society, for hubris and our obsessive desire to be in control of our circumstances—but it results in characters I can't feel invested in and a world that doesn't feel lived in. The narrative style, as I've said elsewhere, provides less a bird's-eye view of the situation than the view of overlooking the landscape from the window of a passenger jet. It's pretty to look at, yet far too distant. Worsening matters is that most of the art panels, rather than supplementing the (again, terse) text, merely illustrate it for the most part. There are a few eye-catching visual paradoxes (society modernizes yet holds on to its old institutions), and the caricatured character art is interesting to look at at first, but these visual elements aren't enough to elevate the story into something noteworthy.
Again, I liked the overall message and the art for the most part. There just isn't much substance to this story, even compared to other works of its length. And I'm trying not to evaluate The Mysteries based on prior expectations, as many other reviewers have, but that's a tall order when the writer and co-illustrator is arguably the most influential comic artist of the last half-century or so.
Unfortunately, I thought both the visual and the textual storytelling fell short here. The text is so terse that it amounts to a vignette with not much of anything substantiated. I understand that the abstractness of the village, the forest, and most everything else is intentional—the book is clearly an allegory, applicable to any society, for hubris and our obsessive desire to be in control of our circumstances—but it results in characters I can't feel invested in and a world that doesn't feel lived in. The narrative style, as I've said elsewhere, provides less a bird's-eye view of the situation than the view of overlooking the landscape from the window of a passenger jet. It's pretty to look at, yet far too distant. Worsening matters is that most of the art panels, rather than supplementing the (again, terse) text, merely illustrate it for the most part. There are a few eye-catching visual paradoxes (society modernizes yet holds on to its old institutions), and the caricatured character art is interesting to look at at first, but these visual elements aren't enough to elevate the story into something noteworthy.
Again, I liked the overall message and the art for the most part. There just isn't much substance to this story, even compared to other works of its length. And I'm trying not to evaluate The Mysteries based on prior expectations, as many other reviewers have, but that's a tall order when the writer and co-illustrator is arguably the most influential comic artist of the last half-century or so.