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. 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. Then he disappeared almost entirely, like a funny-pages Salinger or Pynchon, busying himself with jazz guitar and presumably enjoying life. Larson didn’t publish another original “Far Side” cartoon for twenty-five years, until this month, when he published three, online. He’s working in a digital medium now, on a tablet, which has renewed his “sense of adventure,” he wrote. The images are richly colorful, almost painterly, but his style is otherwise the same; his humor is the same. 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!”
How shall we receive the return of this mammoth? Perhaps by considering it in the context of geologic time. 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. When it came out, the strip was so different from other nationally syndicated daily comics that it was a near-provocation. 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. They rarely made you laugh. 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. Some strips mocked political structures (“The king is a fink!”), but most served to accept, if not reinforce, the status quo.
The strangest thing about the funny pages was how fascinatingly antiquated they were. 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. 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. 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.
Then came “The Far Side.” It was confidently modern and confidently weird. Within its single panel, its contents were entirely unpredictable: it had no recurring characters, no ongoing narrative other than life on earth. 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. Its specificity alone, on the comics page, felt radical. So did its attention to the natural world. “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. In another, called “Fly whimsy,” a fly, hovering over a picnic, says to a friend, “Wait a second, Leonard . . . 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 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. But it also rewarded a love of the lowbrow—more than one cartoon featured birds seeing human targets below.
The humans themselves were not cute. Larson’s stylization made them look and act familiar, and therefore seem somewhat at home in the funnies, but it also mocked them. They have small heads, a lack of pupils behind their eyeglasses, unflattering leisurewear; they are doofuses. (Just ask attendees of the Midvale School for the Gifted.) Even babies are funny-looking, and possibly about to get eaten by a snake. Larson, like some of the great non-mainstream cartoonists of his generation, including Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, and Roz Chast, often draws adults with gently subversive notes of mid-century camp—cat’s-eye glasses, beehive hairdos—that suggest a baby boomer teasing his parents’ generation. (Dragons and cows, too, have names like Phyllis and Vern.) The humor was influenced by sci-fi and the macabre: Godzilla, looking pleased, driving a car with a bumper sticker that says “I 8 NY”; alligators at a party, bobbing for poodles. You could feel in these ideas and images the influence of Charles Addams, Gahan Wilson, Monty Python. Cartoons that appealed to edgier tastes were burgeoning in the seventies and eighties—in independent publishing, comic books, magazines, and alt-weeklies like the Village Voice—but not syndicated daily in the Hartford Courant or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In the mainstream funny pages, in a mass-culture era that increasingly glorified big business and big hair, “The Far Side” came not just as a minor thrill but as a relief, as if parts of us were being spoken to that hadn’t been acknowledged before. Suddenly, the world depicted was much bigger than barstools and cul-de-sacs, the humor darker and more surprising. We’d long been capable of laughing at praying-mantis jokes; finally, someone was making them.
“The Far Side” quickly became a sensation. A scene in “Cheers,” another sensation of the era, begins with Woody saying, “I don’t get ‘The Far Side,’ ” and Cliff and Norm trying to explain it for him. (Later, a “Simpsons” gag had Homer flipping through a “Far Side” page-a-day calendar and going, “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. I don’t get it. I don’t get it.”) Some readers wrote letters to their local paper expressing horror at the strip’s brutality or obscurity, demanding that it be cancelled. Millions of others were rabid enthusiasts, buying books, calendars, greeting cards. Larson, who studied some biology in college, grew up in suburban Tacoma, and once credited his world view in part to his older brother Dan, with whom he had explored Puget Sound growing up, with nets and jars, and who, he wrote, “showed me the beauty and wonder of a jellyfish” and also “the beauty and wonder of smacking your sibling in the face with that same jellyfish.” The science teachers of the world were especially tickled by “The Far Side,” and began hanging the comic in their classrooms and offices. (By the time Larson retired, he’d coined a term for Stegosaurus-tail spikes and had a species of louse named after him.) The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould expressed admiration for a gag about an amoeba couple, in which one says to the other, as they watch TV, “Stimulus, response! Stimulus, response! Don’t you ever think?” “Most of us live like the amoebae, but Larson won’t let us,” Gould wrote. “There is no more important intellectual lesson, however it be taught.”
As the years went on, Larson drew thousands of “Far Side” cartoons. Some are duds. Some are groaners—illustrated puns, along the lines of the new taxidermist cartoon, such as an image of an eel cocktail party, captioned “Social morays.” Meanwhile, the culture flourished and changed, in part encouraged by the landscape that “The Far Side” helped create. On the comics page, “Calvin and Hobbes” and “Bloom County” shared Larson’s wild playfulness; on TV, the delirious freedom of “The Simpsons” helped launch an industry of animation for adults. Subversive cartoons featuring pasty, lovable putzes came to abound. Nerd culture, and nerds, took over. All of this, as well as “The Far Side” ’s familiarity, made its innovations feel less novel, and, at some point, its oafish humans and chatty insects began to leave me cold. I remember being at a Barnes & Noble in 2003, staring at the newly published “Complete Far Side”—a massive boxed set with a foreword by Steve Martin—and feeling no desire to investigate, then wondering where my love had gone.
In 1994, in Larson’s farewell letter to newspapers, he cited “simple fatigue” and a desire to avoid easing into the “Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons.” On the comics pages, mediocrity followed in his wake. The funny pages today feel startlingly similar to the ho-hum amusement I knew as a kid, but several strips use Larson-flavored weirdness as a kind of selling point (see “Close to Home,” “The Argyle Sweater,” “Bizarro,” “Non Sequitur,” “Rhymes with Orange,” and “Off the Mark,” among others), with tame results. “The Far Side” helped weirdness, once taboo, become a funny-pages genre—and, depressingly, a boring one. So I was pleasantly surprised, after making a masked foray into the Strand this week to pick up some used “Far Side” collections, by how many of Larson’s old cartoons made me laugh. Abe Lincoln’s first car, made entirely of logs; a chicken fortune-teller with ghoulish predictions for a fellow-chicken. I began to see how—in making humans hapless costars alongside goldfish and Holstein cows, and showing again and again how we all meet the same pitiful end—Larson created a kind of levelling empathy among creatures. “It all helps to put us humans in our place,” Jane Goodall wrote, after describing various “Far Side” cartoons of interspecies squashing. “And we desperately need putting in our place.” This year, when we’ve been definitively put in our place, there’s something lovely, even encouraging, about the fact that Larson, who isolated himself from the public for so long, has humbly reëmerged, wanting to reëngage. Will he surprise us? He already has. Anything beyond that would just be extra honey on the Cub Scouts.
