The Far Side

• 1. Introduction

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  The Far Side, a single-panel comic by Gary Larson, ran in newspapers from the 1st of January 1980 until the 1st of January 1995. Over those fifteen years, Larson produced 4,337 cartoons. They showed cows, cavemen, castaways, aliens and monsters, all caught in situations that made readers laugh and wince in the same moment.

  The odd part is who made them. Larson enjoyed drawing as a child, but he never thought he would become a cartoonist and never studied art beyond the classes he was required to take.

  So how does a man with no art training get his work into the papers? What made editors refuse some of his ideas outright? And why would he end the strip himself, on a day of his own choosing?

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• 2. A Kitchen Table Gamble

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  In 1976, Gary Larson was working as a cashier in a retail music store in Seattle, and he realized how much he hated the job. Two days into what he called a career crisis, he sat down at his kitchen table and drew six cartoons.

  The next day, he showed them to an editor at a local magazine called Pacific Search. The editor liked them and paid him US$90. Larson quit his job and began cartooning, creating a single-panel feature called Nature's Way, which would become the basis for The Far Side.

  The money did not last. The weekly paper Summer News Review began running Nature's Way regularly, but it paid only US$3 a cartoon. Eventually Larson stopped and took a job as an investigator for the local humane society.

  In 1979, a Seattle Times reporter who had met him while looking into a case of what she called pony abuse showed Nature's Way to her editor. The feature was revived in the paper's Saturday edition, and the pay rose to US$15 a cartoon.

  About a year later, Larson took a vacation from his humane society work and drove to San Francisco, encouraged by his girlfriend. He called it a daring plan to expand his publication empire. He left a portfolio at the headquarters of the San Francisco Chronicle and went home to wait.

  Several days passed before an editor named Stan Arnold asked to speak with him. Arnold was impressed and said that, if the paper wanted Larson's work, it could be syndicated.

  Back in Seattle, Larson received a letter saying Nature's Way had been canceled because it drew too many complaints. He blamed the fact that it ran beside a crossword puzzle aimed at children. He believes that if the letter had arrived a week earlier, he would never have made the trip south.

  The next day, Arnold phoned with better news. Chronicle Features, the syndicate affiliated with the newspaper, wanted to distribute his work. It was the syndicate that coined the name The Far Side. Larson joked that the company could have called it Revenge of the Zucchini People for all he cared.

  The first contract came with a condition. Chronicle believed newspaper comics needed familiar faces, the way Peanuts had Charlie Brown, so it wanted a cast of recurring characters. Larson disagreed, feeling that a fixed cast would limit the strip and dull the humor.

  His first month of syndication earned him about US$100. The strip made its debut in the Chronicle itself, and a few months later the syndicate began offering it to other papers.

  Growth was slow and then sudden. By 1982 the strip ran in only four papers. A year later it was in eighty, and by 1985 it had reached two hundred.

  The Chronicle contract lasted four years. When it expired, Universal Press Syndicate picked up the rights, and the reasons for that choice came from an unexpected direction: a book.

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• 3. Dark Humor and Its Roots

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  Alley Oop was the strip that first made young Larson want to draw comics. Later he drew on MAD Magazine and the work of Don Martin.

  He also admired Gahan Wilson, B. Kliban and George Booth, cartoonists whose humor came more from the composition of the drawing than from the dialogue. Larson described that quality as "something almost organic going on between the humor and the art that conveyed it".

  The darker streak came closer to home. Larson has said his family had a morbid sense of humor. His older brother Dan often played pranks that took advantage of Gary's fears, and that experience left a mark.

  One more source was a childhood favorite, a book called Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat. Larson also drew on personal experience, and fear became a recurring subject, in a period when horror comedy was growing popular.

  Brigham Young University professor Kerry Soper called the strip an anomaly among newspaper cartoons. ComicsAlliance described it as "surreal, random, and occasionally very dark".

  The subjects came back again and again. People stranded on desert islands, aliens, Heaven, Hell, cavemen and medieval dungeons all appeared often. Animals did too, especially cows.

  Larson often placed animals in human positions to mock the human condition. His frequent use of animals and nature is popularly credited to his background in biology.

  The layout was simple. The Far Side used a single vertical rectangle, occasionally divided into four, six or eight small sections to tell a short story. A typed caption usually ran underneath, though speech balloons sometimes carried conversations.

  Sundays were different. Those strips were double-sized, colored and given handwritten captions.

  When Larson drew his panels, they measured 6 by 7.5 inches. He penciled until the image closely approximated his vision, then inked it and handwrote the caption in pencil below. When Universal received a cartoon, it set the caption in its usual typeface and added copyright and publication dates.

  Larson sought out subjects he considered taboo, because he wanted each cartoon to be a personal statement. His editors, however, refused strips they found indecent, offensive or hard to understand.

  One rejected idea showed cowboys roasting a horse over a fire because they were "hungry enough to eat one". Another showed a bird eating scrambled babies. Editors also avoided scatological humor. During the strip's first few years, Larson recalled, he was not even allowed to draw an outhouse.

  He often disagreed with the editors and sometimes won, getting a rejected cartoon into print. Even so, he admits that most of their decisions probably saved his career. He also says he never tried to offend readers on purpose.

  The cast stayed deliberately anonymous. Larson reused stereotypes, such as a woman with a beehive hairdo, but he never named them or implied they were the same person from one cartoon to the next. The characters were there to serve the joke, and Larson had won the argument he started with his first syndicate.

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• 4. Cows, Chimps and Stegosaurs

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  A 1982 cartoon called Cow Tools showed a cow standing behind a table of strange objects, with the caption "Cow tools". Most of the objects had no apparent purpose, though one resembled a saw.

  It has been called "arguably the most loathed" Far Side strip, and Reddit posters have labeled it the series' "notoriously confusing cartoon". The media kept asking Larson what it meant, and angry letters asked where the humor was.

  The mail grew so heavy that Larson issued a press release. As he recounted in Prehistory of the Far Side, it said there was nothing to explain about the Cow Tools comic.

  Another cartoon pictured two chimpanzees grooming each other. One finds a blonde human hair on the other and asks, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?"

  Goodall herself was in Africa at the time. The Jane Goodall Institute thought the cartoon was in bad taste, and its lawyers drafted a letter to Larson and his syndicate that called the cartoon an "atrocity".

  Those efforts were stopped by Goodall herself. When she returned and saw the cartoon, she found it amusing. She commented, "It all helps to put us humans in our place, and we desperately need putting in our place."

  Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt carrying the cartoon go to the Jane Goodall Institute. Goodall wrote a preface to The Far Side Gallery 5 giving her version of the dispute, and the institute's letter was printed next to the cartoon in the complete Far Side collection. She praised Larson's ideas, which often compare and contrast human and animal behavior.

  The Complete Far Side and The Prehistory of The Far Side both print angry reader letters beside the strips that provoked them. Many of those letters were written to newspaper publishers and demanded that the strip be removed.

  It stayed in print anyway. Larson laughs at the controversies in The Prehistory of The Far Side, where he writes that the complainers have usually misunderstood the cartoon.

  One 1982 cartoon had a lasting effect far from the comics page. In it, a prehistoric lecturer refers to the tail spikes of a Stegosaurus as the "thagomizer", explaining that a caveman named Thag Simmons had been killed by them.

  The arrangement of spikes had no distinct name before that. Larson's invented word was adopted gradually by paleontologists, and it now appears in scientific literature.

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• 5. Books and Merchandise

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  In September 1982, the first Far Side book appeared, and it was surprisingly successful. Andrews McMeel Publishing, an affiliate of Universal, had acquired the right to publish collected editions that same year. The book's success influenced Larson to sign with Universal when his Chronicle contract ended.

  By January 1985, four Far Side books were on the market: The Far Side, The Far Side Gallery, Beyond the Far Side and In Search of the Far Side. All four were bestsellers at once. Only Jim Davis's Garfield had managed that feat among newspaper comics before.

  There are 23 collected editions in total. Together they have sold over 45 million copies and generated US$70 million in revenue. New books kept coming after the strip ended, and they remain in print.

  In January 1989, Larson released The PreHistory of The Far Side: A 10th Anniversary Exhibit. It carries his commentary on individual strips, angry reader letters, unpublished cartoons and some of his personal favorites.

  The largest project came in August 2003. The Complete Far Side: 1980-1994 was a two-volume anthology weighing twenty pounds, and it contains every cartoon the strip syndicated. It originally retailed for US$135.

  Larson spent three years on it. Most of that time went into redrawing characters' eyeballs, because he was unhappy with how they looked when transferred digitally.

  The set sold 350,000 copies and was, at the time, the most expensive New York Times bestseller. A new, lighter edition followed in November 2014.

  Beyond books, the market for Far Side goods was enormous. It ranged from greeting cards and posters to t-shirts and mugs.

  For many years, Larson produced a yearly calendar with a cartoon for each day. Greeting cards and calendars sold 110 million and 45 million copies respectively in the years they were available. Larson stopped the annual calendar in 2002 but made another edition in 2006, and all its proceeds went to Conservation International.

  In 1987, Larson said he was personally embarrassed by how much money he made from the merchandise. That same year, a very different kind of recognition arrived from a museum in Washington, D.C.

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• 6. Museum Walls and Legacy

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  In 1987, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., put on a special exhibit of 527 black and white Far Side panels. Of those, 127 were originals, shown in the rotunda on boards that each held 50 panels.

  The display later became a traveling exhibit. It stopped in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Orlando, Chicago, Toronto, New York City, Denver and Los Angeles.

  The California Academy of Sciences also had a Far Side gallery with some of Larson's panels. It included a giant microscope that visitors could stand beneath, based on one of his cartoons. Looking up through the objective lens revealed a giant blinking eyeball.

  That building was torn down and replaced, and the exhibit did not move into the new facility.

  The cartoonists' own community honored Larson repeatedly. The National Cartoonist Society gave him its Newspaper Panel Cartoon Award for 1985 and 1988, and its Reuben Award for 1990 and 1994.

  Writing in The New Yorker, Sarah Larson, who is unrelated to the cartoonist, placed the strip's first run in a particular moment. Newspaper comics then were generally more grounded, with strips such as Peanuts, Garfield, For Better or For Worse and Doonesbury.

  The Far Side helped bring modern, surreal humor into those pages, and it influenced strips such as Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County. It also pushed nerd humor to the forefront, as reflected in series like The Simpsons.

  Larson's first return to television-style work came in 1994, with an animated special, Tales from the Far Side, that used his art style and gags from the strips. He made a sequel in 1997.

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• 7. Walking Away

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  In October 1988, Larson stopped drawing the strip and went abroad to study jazz guitar with Jim Hall. He did not come back until January 1990. When he resumed, he negotiated an arrangement that required only five cartoons a week, down from the seven he had been drawing since 1987.

  He had begun with six cartoons a week, sent to papers a few weeks in advance. The pace had always been demanding.

  In October 1994, Larson wrote a letter to his followers announcing the end. He cited "simple fatigue" and said he wanted to avoid letting The Far Side fall into the "Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons". He also said later that he wanted to pursue a career as a jazz guitarist.

  Universal briefly re-syndicated the strip for three months in late 2003 to promote The Complete Far Side. Many newspapers still publish reprints today.

  Larson's attitude toward the internet was strict. He asked fans not to distribute his cartoons online, writing in a letter that the work was too personal and important to him to have others "take control of it".

  For that reason, Universal's online service GoComics does not carry Far Side cartoons. In at least one case, Larson sent a cease and desist letter to a comics-aggregation site that reproduced the strip. An official Far Side site existed, but it offered only information about the comic and its books, with no strips.

  He made one notable exception to his retirement. In 2003, he drew the cover for The New Yorker's Cartoon Issue, dated the 17th of November, an offer he said he could not refuse.

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• 8. Pen to Tablet

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  On the 13th of September 2019, the official Far Side site was redesigned, with a teaser promising "a new online era of The Far Side". The full site launched on the 17th of December 2019.

  It offers a daily dose of several randomly selected comics, a weekly themed collection, and extra material such as art from Larson's sketchbooks. In an open letter, Larson said he hoped an official home would persuade sites hosting his comics to take them down and send readers to the official one.

  Then, on the 7th of July 2020, Larson published new Far Side strips for the first time in 25 years. He had switched from pen and paper to a graphics tablet.

  The reason was small and practical. On the rare occasions he drew after retiring, mainly for his annual Christmas card, his pens had clogged from disuse. Frustration led him to try a digital tablet.

  The new freedom of the medium changed his mind about drawing. Larson wrote that he soon found he "was having fun drawing again".

  He was clear that he was not restarting a daily cartoon. He described what he was doing as "exploring, experimenting and trying stuff." The site won the 2020 Webby People's Voice Award for Humor in the Web category.

  Larson has said he does not plan to draw regular Far Side comics, but he may add new material every once in a while when he updates the site.

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