Calvin and Hobbes creator speaks! (On his first published work in 28 years)

polygon.com:

Here are two things that don’t happen every day. Bill Watterson, creator of the revered comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, has released a new graphic novel — his first published work in the 28 years since Calvin and Hobbes ended. And the infamously reclusive, publicity-shunning artist has also spoken about the book in an illuminating and funny video describing his collaboration with the book’s co-creator, artist John Kascht.

The Mysteries, published Tuesday, is described by its publisher Andrews McMeel as “a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.” Written by Watterson, it’s an elusive story about a medieval-style kingdom afflicted by terrible events, and what happened to the knights dispatched to discover the source of these calamities. Its haunting, black-and-white mixed-media illustrations, which combine painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture, were a collaboration between Watterson and Kascht, a caricaturist.

The collaboration between the two artists took years to bear fruit, and was often a frustrating process of trying to find the common ground in their mismatched styles and temperaments. All this is detailed in the video, in which we listen to the two artists’ accounts of the process while watching their hands paint, cut, paste, and assemble artworks for the book.

Watterson’s wry humor is in full effect as he appears to revel in how difficult he made the process of producing something new, both for himself and his collaborator. He reveals that he wrote The Mysteries a decade ago as a painting subject for himself but was “baffled to discover that I had no idea what the pictures should be for what I had written. [...] There was no particular audience for it and, so