(Just ask attendees of the Midvale School for the Gifted.) Even babies are funny-looking, and possibly about to get eaten by a snake. They have small heads, a lack of pupils behind their eyeglasses, unflattering leisurewear they are doofuses. Larson’s stylization made them look and act familiar, and therefore seem somewhat at home in the funnies, but it also mocked them. But it also rewarded a love of the lowbrow-more than one cartoon featured birds seeing human targets below. In a time when nerd culture was in its infancy, “The Far Side” rewarded the reader for knowing something about opposable thumbs, “ Moby-Dick,” Lewis and Clark, or the workings of a proboscis. I just wanna go down there, land on that potato salad, and take off again.” Squid children bickered over keeping tentacles to themselves dinosaurs smoked cigarettes and went extinct. In another, called “Fly whimsy,” a fly, hovering over a picnic, says to a friend, “Wait a second, Leonard . . . “Well, this may not be wise on a first date, but I just gotta try your garlic wharf rats,” a snake says in one cartoon, looking psyched. So did its attention to the natural world. Its specificity alone, on the comics page, felt radical. It could depict anyone or anything, and Larson seemed to take it all in, from office worker to water buffalo, chimpanzee to psychiatrist, Martian to snail. Within its single panel, its contents were entirely unpredictable: it had no recurring characters, no ongoing narrative other than life on earth. Then came “The Far Side.” It was confidently modern and confidently weird. Several strips, like homesteaders, had claimed real estate on the comics page and passed it down from generation to generation, their humor forgotten or incidental, providing pleasure via familiar images in a familiar world. I read them in fascination, every day, in their glorious two-page spread in the Hartford Courant, amid other stodgy forms of fun: Ann Landers’s advice (“Wake up and smell the coffee!”), a bridge column, Sydney Omarr’s self-serious horoscopes, and “Jumble,” which looked like something that you’d be served alongside peanuts in a veterans’ bar. Andy Capp’s snooker shenanigans, Dagwood Bumstead’s hair style, elaborately illustrated melodramas such as “Rex Morgan, M.D.” and “Mary Worth”-all of them seemed to speak a visual language of a bygone postwar world. The strangest thing about the funny pages was how fascinatingly antiquated they were. Some strips mocked political structures (“ The king is a fink!”), but most served to accept, if not reinforce, the status quo. In that context, the comparative grumpiness of “Garfield” felt edgy the loose-lined, loose-ponytailed earnestness of “For Better or For Worse” stood out, as did the sharp, satirical “Doonesbury” and the ever-brilliant “ Peanuts.” But creative daring was generally in short supply. At the time, most of them were clean-lined and cute, whether set amid suburban families (“Hi and Lois,” “Blondie,” “The Family Circus”) or on Viking raids (“Hägar the Horrible”), and strenuously safe. When it came out, the strip was so different from other nationally syndicated daily comics that it was a near-provocation. Those three jokes land softly now, but, in the early eighties, Larson’s impact was seismic “The Far Side” became, arguably, the smartest and most inventive daily comic of the late twentieth century. How shall we receive the return of this mammoth? Perhaps by considering it in the context of geologic time.
The village voice returns its voicey full#
In one cartoon, bears gathered around a picnic table are eating honey-covered Cub Scouts in another, aliens out looking for humans discuss plans for “probe and release” in the third, a man on a city sidewalk hails a yellow vehicle full of stiff-looking animals, and yells, “Taxidermist!”
The images are richly colorful, almost painterly, but his style is otherwise the same his humor is the same. He’s working in a digital medium now, on a tablet, which has renewed his “sense of adventure,” he wrote. Larson didn’t publish another original “Far Side” cartoon for twenty-five years, until this month, when he published three, online. Then he disappeared almost entirely, like a funny-pages Salinger or Pynchon, busying himself with jazz guitar and presumably enjoying life. Its creator, Gary Larson (no relation!), retired in 1995, after having been syndicated in more than nineteen hundred newspapers and selling more than forty million books. Recently, like a woolly mammoth emerging from a melting glacier, “The Far Side,” the single-panel comic that débuted in 1980 and helped make the Reagan era more bearable, reappeared from the mists of time. “The Far Side,” the single-panel comic that débuted in 1980 and ran for fifteen years, was confidently modern.
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