"Think Chris Van Allsburg’s 'Jumanji' gone darker, crossed with Fritz Lang’s 'Metropolis.'"

"The characters, unnamed, are drawn from that strange eternal medieval world of fantasy: knights, wizards, a king; peasants with faces like Leonardo grotesques, wearing kerchiefs or hoods. There are forty-three sentences in total, and one exclamation point. The magic of condensation that is characteristic of cartoons is also here, in a story with a quick, fairy-tale beginning: 'Long ago, the forest was dark and deep.'..."From "Life After 'Calvin and Hobbes'/Bill Watterson’s return to print, after nearly three decades, comes in the form of a fable called 'The Mysteries,' which shares with his famous comic strip a sense of enchantment" (The New Yorker).

You can buy "The Mysteries" at Amazon — and if you use that link, I'll receive a commission. Keep in mind that Watterson is only the writer. The illustrations are by John Kascht. And the writing is minimal. 43 sentences. Sample page:

"If you want to be tough about it — okay, it's a pretty silly yarn and it is played in a manner no less fatuous by the sundry members of the cast."

"But Mr. Lang is still a director who knows how to turn the obvious, such as locked doors and silent chambers and roving spotlights, into strangely tingling stuff."

Wrote the movie critic Bosley Crowther in 1948 about Fritz Lang's "Secret Beyond the Door," which I'm reading about because I saw this fabulous screen grab:

How to take your hands out of your pockets in the most exciting way.

That's "Woman in the Moon"/"Frau im Mond," a 1929 silent movie written and directed by Fritz Lang (who also made "Metropolis"):

Several prescient technical/operational features are presented during the film's 1920's launch sequence, which subsequently came into common operational use during America's postwar space race:

• the rocket ship Friede is fully built in a tall building and moved to the launch pad

• as launch approaches, the launch team counts down the seconds from ten to zero ("now" was used for zero), and Woman in the Moon is often cited as the first occurrence of the "countdown to zero" before a rocket launch.

•the rocket ship blasts off from a pool of water; water is commonly used today on launch pads to absorb and dissipate the extreme heat and damp the noise generated by the rocket exhaust

• in space, the rocket ejects its first stage and fires its second stage rocket, predicting the development of modern multistage orbital rockets
 • the crew recline on horizontal beds to cope with the G-forces experienced during lift-off and pre-orbital acceleration

• floor foot straps are used to restrain the crew during zero gravity (Velcro is used today).

So he didn't predict velco, eh? Well, then how prescient is it? Quite aside from prescience,* I was fascinated to just scroll randomly to the middle of a place in the film and — without the ability to read the German intertitle explaining what was going on — witnessed the most amazing Man Takes His Hands Out of His Pockets I have ever seen. Yes, rockets are awesome — but pockets? Make pockets awesome and I declare you a genius!

_____________________

* Prescience ≈ pre-science. It ought to be a synonym for science fiction.