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The Far Side
Hello fellow Far Side fans!
About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!
Ps. Sub to all my comic strip communities:
Bloom County !bloomcounty@lemm.ee https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty
Calvin and Hobbes !calvinandhobbes@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes
Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness
Garfield !garfield@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/garfield
The Far Side !thefarside@sh.itjust.works https://lemmy.world/c/thefarside@sh.itjust.works
Fine print: All comics I post are freely available online. In no way am I claiming ownership, copyright or anything else. This is a not for profit community, we just want to enjoy our comics, thank you.
Gary Larson has commented on how he accidentally writes some pretty indecipherable comics. His most famous one even has its own Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
"I regret that my fondness for cows, combined with an overactive imagination, may have carried me beyond what is comprehensible to the average Far Side reader." -Gary Larson
Surely the most famous one is the kid trying to enter the school for the gifted, right?
That one's easy to understand once you see the "pull" sign though.
I wonder how he got famous in the first place if his comics are hard to understand. A product of his time I suppose.
I think a couple things are in play:
TLDR: Like a stupid meme, many Larson comics require shared transient context we're missing now. Some are also just fukin weird, like cow tools. But some were very accessible and became hugely popular. These mega-star strips cemented Far Side's popularity, and which gave Larson the autonomy to stay weird when he chose. Now we waste time trying to figure out what they meant.
/thread
Thanks. I understand this a little better now. As for other comics, I've read Calvin and Hobbes and have no problem reading them cover to cover. And the comparison to memes make this whole thing make a lot more sense - we weren't there for it, so it makes little sense, but they might still have been funny in its time like Markiplier farquad saying "E" was (for a few weeks some time ago) for us.
When I was young, I used to have a t-shirt of the comic where a dog is trying to lure a cat into a dryer with a sign that says "CAT FUD". I mostly encountered his comics in a similar way. In bookstores, posters, etc. I didn't even know the name of it at the time. So I agree it felt like a cultural thing back then to me.
The absurdity of cow tools makes it pretty funny if you have no idea what the reasoning behind it is. A lot of the comics are just absurdist humor too, so the funny is that the situation is absurd.
I have his whole anthology from the 90s. Two massive books. He was the first one to do a single panel comic. There is almost always at least double meanings If not triple so you have to know the common phrases or slang that's being referred to. One in the oven? Pregnant, but for a witch, it's Hanse and Grettle cooking children. The party and the bananas? Who is Tarzan going to invite to a dinner party? So after they host a party it's bananas everywhere. Instead of typical dinner party cleanup. You got one comic a day and sometimes you have to look and think and others were obvious. If it alludes to something and you don't know the reference, then you're lost. The chickens, cows and dogs were all recurring themes. I still absolutely die laughing at the boneless chicken ranch one. Probably my favorite. https://www.cardcow.com/911282/boneless-chicken-ranch-gary-larson-far-side/
Yeah boneless chicken ranch is pretty funny.