Celebrity Hindsight: The Far Side is back just when we need it most.
I interviewed Gary Larson at the height of The Far Side. After 25 years, he’s back. But will it play well in our hyper-sensitive new era?
Very few things in life provided a daily sense of anticipation than The Far Side by Gary Larson. In the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, the daily comic strip provided its fans with a hilarious, twisted view of life — worldly and other-worldly — that often pointed out the absurdity of humanity. Often from the perspective of the animal and scientific world, often anthropomorphic.
What was Larson going to puncture today? Who was he going to send up this time? What animal was going to show a human trait? It was all very bizarre, intellectual, piercing, and just plain damn funny.
It was during this period of mid-to-late 1980s that daily comic strips enjoyed a peak in creativity. Along with Larson’s The Far Side, there was Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County, Matt Groening’s Life in Hell (before he went on to create The Simpsons), and Bill Watterson’s brilliant Calvin and Hobbes. Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, the godfather of social commentary comics (and an obvious influence on Bloom County) was going strong.
In 1995, after 15 years of twisted observations and unparalleled popularity, Larson walked away from the daily grind of trying to be creative, original, and funny. By the time of his retirement, The Far Side was syndicated in nearly 2,000 daily newspapers, translated in 17 languages, spawned a cottage industry of licensed merchandise, and had received every major cartoonist award. He was at the peak of his popularity. And he walked away.
Then suddenly, in July 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gary Larson unexpectedly resurfaced with new Far Side panels on the official website.
“The ‘New Stuff’ that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art,” Larson stated on his website. “Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747.”
Indeed, a lot has changed since Larson last inked a daily panel (can anyone say “the internet?”) But back in 1986, I had the chance to meet the cartoonist at the height of his popularity. I was working on an article about a curated, multi-city Far Side of Science cartoon exhibit tour by the California Academy of Sciences at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
The museum was previewing the exhibit for journalists, and the shy and reclusive Larson was meeting the press to give his take on The Far Side being embraced by the scientific community. At the time, if you were to visit the office of any teacher, professor or scientist you would have undoubtedly spied more than one Far Side panel clipped from the daily newspaper and taped up. He struck a chord with this audience.
“A lot of my material is taken from my own background in science,” Larson said at the time. “And what they’ve (the curators) done is accrued most of those cartoons that have some kind of science connection.”
Larson said his science fixation began in childhood in the Pacific Northwest near Tacoma, Washington, catching “frogs and salamanders, stick them in jars and bring them home and keep them alive for a few days.” So, how do you go from that innocent foundation to drawing something that could be pushing the limit (at least to his editors)?
I asked him if he ever tried to slip one by his editors at Universal Press, if he ever tried to push his humor past the acceptable? As a matter of fact, one of my favorite panels was his attempt to test the tolerance of his audience.
“I did a cartoon of a little kid at show-and-tell,” he admitted. “He had a head in a jar he found at the beach. I thought it was kind of scary when It came out. But we didn’t get any feedback on that at all.”
But in this polarizing pandemic era we live in today, where the Trump Administration vociferously dismisses the scientific community — for reasons not entirely clear — and acknowledged positions like climate change is challenged as “opinion” despite the obvious evidence, where would Larson’s The Far Side find itself? Would a new generation of readers even get it?
Frankly, I think Larson would take that prevailing science cynicism and really run with it. I mean, this is the guy that had a chimp call Jane Goodall a tramp in one of his more audacious panels.
“The bottom line for me is that it should be funny. It shouldn’t be gratuitous In any way or intentionally malicious,” he said in our interview.
Newly armed with a digital drawing tablet (instead of his trusty ink pens), here’s hoping Larson brings his Far Side view to the world on a regular basis. We need it now more than ever — as noted with one of his newest cartoons you see at the top of this page. And I even wouldn’t mind seeing something intentionally malicious.
Hmmm. I can see it now — a couple of novel coronaviruses having a devious conversation about infecting clueless politicians?
OK, maybe not.
