I don’t know if the 80s really were a sort of Golden Age of syndicated comics, or if I’m just remembering the highlights better than the lowlights. But there were some genuinely great strips back then, many of whom made the rare decision to exit the field before they got stale and stagnant. We got ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, ‘Bloom County’, ‘This Modern World’, ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’, we got ‘Dilbert’ (hey, they didn’t all get out before going stale and stagnant…)
And we got ‘The Far Side’.
The wonder and beauty of ‘The Far Side’ is that even though it ended almost twenty years ago, in a way it’s still with us today. Because that was what made it so great; Gary Larson wasn’t just a talented writer and a gifted artist, he had a sensibility that changed the way you look at the world. And that change has been passed on ever since, a meme that has continued to spawn and mutate even though the strip is long gone from the funny pages. Gary Larson didn’t just make perfect, hilariously funny single panel comics day in and day out, he made the world seem like a strange and unusual place. Nobody who’s ever seen a ‘Far Side’ strip can quite think of human history the same way after seeing a picture of two cavemen staring at a dead mastodon, a spear impaled in its side, and saying, “Ooh. We should write that spot down.” (And it’s all part of the peculiar alchemy of his words and his art that the people who’ve never read that strip are saying, “What’s so funny about that?” while the people familiar with it are smiling all over again.)
Larson’s work was an inspiration to a generation of comedians, who went on to found single-panel “quirky” gag strips like ‘Close to Home’, ‘Bizarro’, ‘Ballard Street’, ‘The 5th Wave’, ‘Rhymes With Orange’, ‘In the Bleachers’…good strips in their own right, all clearly bearing the unmistakable stamp of their ancestry. They all work in a world where the strange and unusual is commonplace, where people are slightly eccentric in entertaining ways, and where animals behave like (slightly eccentric) people. They write what they know, and what they know is the world Gary Larson showed them. And even better, Larson’s interest in science, combined with his way of writing about it in an entertaining and humorous way (an amoeba husband hectored by his wife: “Stimulus, response, stimulus, response–don’t you ever THINK?”) inspired a generation of young people to take an interest in anthropology, astrophysics, biology, paleontology (the classic cartoon, featuring a bunch of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes with the caption “What Really Killed the Dinosaurs”) and a host of other fields. ‘The Far Side’ was witty, literate, twisted, and indescribably funny. Every day since Gary Larson brought it into the world is a slightly more amusing, slightly more amazing day. Whether it’s pushing on a door marked ‘PULL’ (“School for the Gifted”) or trying to train your dog and imagining it hearing, “blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah GINGER”, we’re all of us touched a little bit by Larson’s extraordinary perspective on the world.
Now, may I please be excused? My brain is full.
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The best gift I ever got for Christmas was “The Complete Far Side,” a big, two-volume, hardback set.
My personal favorite is the one of the vultures in the desert eating a corpse, and one of them has donned a hat.
“Hey, look at me, everyone! I’m a cowboy, howdy, howdy, howdy!”
Also, he gave us the word “thagomizer.” That’s a word that could redeem Rob Liefeld.
For all those who have a deep and abiding love of Gary Larson, you should own not just the collections of his published works, but ‘The Prehistory of the Far Side.’ It includes a lot of his early stuff, unpublished materiel, stuff from the small-town paper that published him before he got syndicated, and his story of the completely improbably chain of events that got him into daily papers across the country.
(Trivia: he didn’t pick the name ‘The Far Side’ and doesn’t know who did. Someone at Andrews & McMeel made that decision, and nobody really knows anymore who.)
Excellent book. Money quote: “In hindsight, maybe I should have just called it ‘The Cow Side’ and had done with it.”
Curse you, John Seavey. You’ve made me weep from fond memories.
And I, too, heartily recommend “The Prehistory of The Far Side”. It is humorous, fascinating, and maybe even educational, and it features cartoons about dung beetles that Gary Larson’s editors never let him publish in the papers.
Why, just yesterday my girlfriend asked me why I say ‘howdy’ all the time and I had to explain that it was because of those damn hilarious vultures.
I remember when I first read the Far Side: I was around three years old- couldn’t read yet- and my grandfather had this big book of one panel cartoons.
So I’d look through the book, and there were all were all these bizarre, disturbing pictures. There was a boy hiding under the blanket from a wolf with white eyes, and a man trapped in a box filled with snakes in midair, and a duck watching a man from across the street.
It made a whole lot more sense when I learned to read.
Far Side hit me right in my developing funny bone. My parents are Brits who came across the pond before I was born. Between Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Monty Python and Blackadder, that was it for me. Since then, I expect, even crave a certain intelligence with humor, even just the spark of it. Farce is fine, if it’s done intelligently and without a lot of malice (Community, for example) but to this day I can’t enjoy just brainless slapstick or spiteful comedy at all.
“So, Professor Jenkins, my old nemesis! We meet again… but this time, the advantage is mine!”
The thagomizer can only redeem Liefeld through direct use.
“Well, we’ve tried every device and you still won’t talk… every device, that is, except this little baby we simply call ‘Mr. Thingy.’”
I’m kicking myself for not buying the Compete Far Side when the local Borders closed. I didn’t really have room for it (and have even less now) but it would have looked nice next to my Complete Calvin & Hobbes.
Oh well, maybe I’ll get another chance when Barnes & Noble has its going out of business sale.
The Far Side made me the nerd I am today. Well, to be specific, I was a big ol’ nerd anyway, but I doubt I’d have such a skewed sense of humor without it. I might be one of those *shudder* Grail-quoters.
Ni!
I still love the one of the deer with a bullseye on its chest, being told by another deer “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal.”
The Far Side — if any comic deserves the designation “often imitated, never duplicated” — this is it.
I think my first exposure to it was a poster of “The Real Reason Dinosaurs Became Extinct” in one of high school teacher’s classrooms.
So many classic strips.
“Wonderful! So much for instilling them with a sense of awe.”
Cow tools.
And let’s not forget Herman, which got a five-year head start on Far Side (at least where syndication is concerned). Another excellent source of skewed one-panel humour.
Car!
CAT FUD –>
CAT FUD –>
“Oh please, oh please….”
His influence is all over comics that are out today because of him. And he knew to get out at the top of his game.
I’ve got the complete collection hardcovers, and that prehistory special. There were a couple of instances he marks in it about where a newspaper mixed up the captions between his strip and the Dennis The Menace strip.
If people are going to quote their favorite strip, mine’s: “Stimulus, response! Stimulus, response! Don’t you ever think?!”
Well, well, another blonde hair. Conducting a little more “research” with that Jane Goodall tramp?
“Puuuuut the caattttt outtttt….Puuuttt the caattttt outtttt….”
I can never watch any “Alien” movie without thinking of “Moommmm! Bobby Joe’s playing in the turkey!”
But my favorite has to be the Inuit fleeing two polar bears, one of whom is saying to the other in exasperation, “I lift; you grab. Was that concept just a little too complex, Carl?”
Gary Larson is a genius and it’s a real shame he retired. I was unaware of some of the cartoons he inspired though so will have to check them out.