*Spoilers below*I adore Calvin and Hobbes, and yes, that was why I dropped the money to preorder the book. However, to be clear, I didn't expect the book to be another Calvin and Hobbes. The blurb made it obvious that Watterson and his co-illustrator, Kascht, were taking this project in a different direction. I can say that I was excited to see in which new direction the book would go.Admittedly, I had not expected what amounted to a picture book with few words. But ok, I can understand how some stories are so profound and visceral that words can actually detract from the story. But this story...I don't know. I read the book this morning and I have been ruminating on it all day, going back to re-read it before I wrote this review because I thought I must be missing something essential.Maybe I thought that, if Watterson is choosing now to gift us with a new work, certainly he must have something profound to say. Maybe that is a problem with me setting expectations that are unfair for an author. I don't know.Ultimately, the story boiled down to "man is afraid of the unknown, man explores the unknown, man thinks he knows all there is and loses the primal respect for the unknown, man destroys himself in his own hubris, the universe spins ever onward without noticing". I mean, I am a recovering nihilist who still finds comfort in knowing the universe is vast beyond our joys and pain, our triumphs and follies, but I had hoped for a message with more depth. The book is noted as "a fable for grown-ups", but the message of the book is one I learned to grapple with through Calvin and Hobbes as a child, and I thought it was handled with more depth and nuance in seemingly off-handed remarks in a comic.The artwork is beautiful in a bizarre and discomforting way. This is not a book with the sweeping planetscapes of Spaceman Spiff or the verdant woods through which a boy and a tiger once roamed. This is a book with art that unsettles you the more you engage with it, the more your eyes linger, the more you gaze upon it. It is not a bad unsettling, I should add, but it is bleak and cold in a mesmerizing way. My hot take is that the book would have been better had there been only the art and no words. At least, then, it becomes a work that leads the audience to grapple with the meaning and find something of themselves within the interpretation. Or maybe that's too avant garde.In the end, I just felt weird knowing Watterson has delivered this message with more verve and poignancy through the mouth of an anthropomorphic tiger, and I paid money to be reminded that really, in the end, we can never truly go back.