A Short True Story About Far Side's Gary Larson

I like to pontificate about The Far Side because I can only name a few humorists who had a great impact on my life before I launched Londons Times Cartoons. Only one was a cartoonist. The others were comedians and actors such as Steve Martin, Mike Myers, Steven Wright, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Lucy, Rowan & Martin, Peter Sellers, and and several dozen others. One other cartoonist was the late great Charles Schulz, and they all influenced me in a different way.

The reason Gary Larson had such an impact is that, like a lot of confused young people in our society at that time, his even greater confusion made sense of it all, and did so with very few words, sometimes no words, but only an illustration. He was a step above so many other cartoonists in that he most often “stuck to what he knew”. He had a major in biology and aside from the frequent use of cows and insects, biology and mad funny looking scientists were often his theme-de-jour.
Before Larson launched The Far Side, he was working on a cartoon called “Nature's Way”. The Seattle Times was the first paper to publish it in 1979. A year later, Chronicle Features picked The Far Side up for syndication and it ran fifteen years. Larson put down his pin on New Years Day, 1995. For awhile we heard nothing. Then he wrote a very biologically-accurate children's story about worms titled “There's A Hair In My Dirt” which quickly became a New York Times Best Seller.
When asked why he was retiring, he said, he simply didn't want to become mediocre. He stopped while he was ahead.
He could be labeled more than a cartoonist, perhaps a “cartoon surrealist” of sorts. A lot of his cartoons featured bovine behavior and conversations that cows had when no people were around. The behavior was often erudite to make the reader understand he or she perhaps might not be so much smarter than these cows (and other animals, from squid to deer to bears. A great many dogs and cats appeared in The Far Side as well, usually as “mortal enemies”. One of the most popular is a dog who has led a trail with chalk that said “Cat Fud” that led to an open dryer in a laundry mat and the dog thinking while holding the door open ready to close it, “Oh Pleeeeeze” as the cat sniffed around.

One popular Far Side panel features two chimpanzees grooming each other. One discovers a blonde human hair on the other and asks "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?" Her institute board members felt it was in bad taste, and had their lawyers draft a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate, in which they described the cartoon as an "atrocity". They were stopped in their tracks, though, from no other than Goodall herself, who loved the cartoon. Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon benefit the Goodall Institute.
Most recently, Larson has published a 2007 calendar and 100% of the royalties benefit Conservation International.
So Gary Larson not only turned out to be a very talented man, but a man who cares about the world in which he lives, and does something about it in a very unique way. He will always be remembered by his friends, fans, and other cartoonists such as myself.