Larson, now 44, first burned out in 1988, when he began a 14-month sabbatical; he studied jazz guitar with Jim Hall while papers reran old cartoons. This year he claimed “simple fatigue” and dread that his work might “ease into the Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons.” Some fans feared it was already getting there; for the first time, as essayist Henry Allen noted in the Washington Post, “you could tell how he thought it up.” So it’s more guitar for Larson, and “Broomhilda” or some damn thing for us.
Larson may have been influenced by Mad’s Don Martin, The New Yorker’s George Price and Gahan Wilson and sinister cat cartoonist B. Kliban – with Charles Addams lurking in the background – but he really had little to go on except intuition and inspiration. No gag formulas, no continuing characters, no topics from the news: just lunacy on demand at the rate of seven free-standing panels a week. (Five, after his sabbatical.) Larson had been a musician and a cruelty inspector for Seattle’s Humane Society when his cartoons began appearing in the late ’70s, in The Seattle Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and then in syndication. The Chronicle came up with the condescending title as a caveat – which didn’t keep some papers from canceling “The Far Side” over such affronts to family values as the babysitting witch who eats the kids.
“The Far Side” was surely the most-often-posted cartoon on American refrigerators. Only the first of 19 collections has missed The New York Times best-seller list; the “Far Side Off-The-Wall Calendar” has been the best-selling calendar for the past decade. Add in the mugs, greeting cards and whatnot, and Larson’s off-center visions may have generated $500 million over 15 years. Scientists took particular delight in his talking amoebas, intestinal parasites and larger fauna: his ubiquitous cows, snakes with harlequin glasses – and scientists themselves, like the popeyed professor who theorizes that dinosaurs were “the discarded “chicken’ bones of giant, alien picnickers.” In tribute, they named one of God’s creatures just for him: the Strigiphilus garylarsoni, a biting louse.
Subversive though he was, Larson honored cartoon conventions: explorers, cavemen, cowboys, desert islands, hell and, of course, talking animals. He made them new by dancing on – or over – the edges of bad taste (the mummy in the toilet stall whose neighbor grabs his wrappings) and obscurity (the shapeless, functionless “Cow Tools”), and by mixing kitsch with the macabre: the plastic Donner Party snow-dome, the lobster on its way to the kettle shrieking “Auntie Em, Auntie Em! . . . There’s no place like home!” With enough time and ingenuity, you might be able to explain just why this stuff is funny. But only Larson could have pulled it out of wherever he pulled it out of. So he wants to go off and play guitar? He’s entitled. And we’ll be here.
