New Work by Gary Larson
(thefarside.com)480 points by jkestner a day ago
480 points by jkestner a day ago
Semi-related: a plug of my project that allows you to set up exactly that for any website using CSS selectors. https://feed-me-up-scotty.vincenttunru.com/
You should try to incorporate Dennis the Menace in your retrievals.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Harmontown/comments/dsfqh7/the_far_...
The Far Side is like the Simpsons for me, many of the jokes have passed into everyday expressions. If I or my wife are on the loo when the other comes in, we’ll always quote one of my favourites:
https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
> many of the jokes have passed into everyday expressions.
Not to mention palæontology!
https://unapologeticnerd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/thag...
I've never seen it that way, but I think you are absolutely right. My favorite always has been https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFarSide/comments/179ikr2/its_a_f...
We’ve definitely had to get tutoring for a few dogs :D
This is great!
Periodically, I'll go through one of Larson's cartoon books, laughing all the way. It's like housecleaning for my brain - afterwards everything is spic-and-span and in it's proper place.
The first Gary Larson cartoon I ever saw was "Freeze...OK now...who's the brains in this outfit?". When I saw it I had to see more:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/c4/c4/75/c4c475c0a2fdc310a34c20722...
FYI, this "New Stuff" is circa 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/arts/far-side-gary-larson...
It might’ve started then, but the latest entry is a tribute to Jane Goodall that was posted three days ago:
Coincidentally just ran into this anecdote on how Goodall and Larson became friends: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624718
This one is my favorite: https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/387/house-on-hillside
When Gary started using the digital pad for drawing, he specifically said that he wouldn't be drawing every day, or on any deadline at all. So these comics really are a labour of love. They are meant for Gary to experiment, not make money.
At least, that's how he presented it himself.
I think it’s about time for me to confess: I really don’t get Gary Larson cartoons. I understand what each is about, but my amusement level doesn’t correlate with their popularity.
It’s a slightly odd, somewhat lonely feeling to see something so universally beloved and popular and feel nothing.
I don't think I've ever laughed at loud at something from Far Side, rather I've always thought of his comics as "smirk-worthy".
School for the Gifted
Dog Translator
Have you ever laughed out loud at a cartoon? I don’t think I have, and I would say I enjoy cartoons quite a bit. A grin is about the best reaction I can give to one myself
But what if there is no Garfield?
https://garfieldminusgarfield.net
https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/tagged/garfield%20minus%20...
That's totally fair. I had to dig a bit - but I'm pretty sure I may have audibly chuckled when I came across these in the wild.
Have you ever read Viz?
Specifically on the London underground (or your local public transport) during morning rush hour, with a hangover. It's hard not to laugh out loud.
I'm not sure I've ever laughed out loud at a cartoon, but as a kid, the compilation books of Charles Addams cartoons used to fill me with so much warm pleasure I would read them over and over, and his cartoons still just plain make me happy to this day. I can clearly see that Larson does that same thing for many people.
> Have you ever laughed out loud at a cartoon?
I laughed out loud multiple times clicking on links in this very thread, reading comics I've read dozens (and dozens) of times before.
Life is less lonely when you focus more on social groups you do have something in common with than trying to latch onto everything that's popular.
That said, you might not be as alone as you think. The far side has been the butt of many bits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjfkynJ4hbI
>time for me to confess
Don't feel that way. I can totally understand why some people wouldn't "get" (or I'd put it "appreciate") The Far Side. It's a very particular kind of humor, and it's fine that it's "not everyone's cup of tea". I, for example, absolutely loathe poetry. It's like the cilantro of literature of me, and I don't have the gene that makes it not taste like soap. ... Who cares!?!
I have this "joke" that I dearly love, that I've never met anyone who gets it. It is a bad joke, largely because nobody gets it. It doesn't imply something in me or something lacking in ... everyone else. Humor is just what you find in it. It is: "Well, I defended my thesis in comparative literature, but it seems like he's got a pretty healthy pulse to me..."
My favourite own joke is when I’m sitting on a beach towel or grass or whatnot and I want to get up, I’ll say,
“I can’t stand sitting, so I need a hand standing.”
Nobody ever finds that amusing but it kills me every time.
One of those situations where I say: "I'm hilarious... to myself."
Often if you don't get it, its because you didn't get it.
There is a famous one of 2 explorers in the jungle and the man is saying "Holy moly Loretta, not only is it still there, but look what it did to the end of my stick !"
So not really funny unless you can recall (or imagine) a moment when you had a bug on you and you ask someone to brush it off and you have that minute of like, did you get it or is it still there ? If that has actually happened to you, its a hilarious cartoon.
A lot of his comics aren't great, having to create 7 per week, a fact he referenced in his comics themselves. But just the way he represented people - pudgy, cat's eye glasses, doing some esoteric thing like collecting butterflies or building a robot in the basement, is amusing to me.
What, not a fan of 'Cow tools'? [0]
In a way Cow Tools was too simple rather than too hard, so people thought there must be more to it.
I don't think the joke itself is a bad idea. I remember The Simpsons doing the room full of monkeys on typewriters where one comes up with "it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times" which in a way is a similar joke, right? i.e. Not a good result, but funny because it's still much more than you'd ever expect in reality.
Simpsons joke has a reference. It’s not a Simpsons original.
It is the infinite monkey theorem from the late 19th and early 20th century.
Or Rattlesnake Training?
I'm curious if you understand this joke (https://i.imgur.com/II5W6Pl.png).
I think it's similar to the Cow Tools panel.
Specifically, the Far Side panel plays on the idea of the fact that cows would have a cow-centric view of the world and would likely develop tools that were alien to us. The other part of the 'joke' is that cows don't build tools (afaik). edit: I think the "3rd" part of the joke is that the tools look like shit, which is what you'd expect from even the most talented cows.
The humor of the space alien joke is similar in that it's pointing out the difficulty that everyone has in understanding how others (other people, other species, etc.) view and describe the world.
Neither did Homer if it makes you feel better.
https://youtu.be/LjfkynJ4hbI?si=rMrpX7VChQMX23_I
(Obviously not the only one if not getting Far Side comics made the Simpsons!)
It is probably down to whether you find humor in absurdity as the far side leans rather hard into this.
The humor "is" very weird, the normal flow is a strange image that is not funny and a simple caption that is also not funny. but coupled together there is something funny about the absurd connection that is made. sort of like a caption meme with better drawing. And honestly I think there are a lot of them that we just don't "get", too strange for comprehension, and we find this funny as well.
I think about it as pushing the boundaries of the minimum amount of funny to be a joke. It's not anti humor, it's not absurdism, it's not ironic. It's trying to approach the absolute least amount of whatever a joke is. Some kind of minimum joke Komolgorov complexity.
I think that all humor belongs more or less to a particular time (a decade if you will). Garfield for example is very much a product of the 1980s. When humour is viewed outside of its time, it’s different. Did you read FarSide in the 1990s, or come to it later?
'Dinosaurs' was a masterpiece and I won't hear otherwise.
The series finale is one of the greatest T.V. finales of all time.
No, the Far Side was popular the way The Simpsons was popular.
I think you're dramatically underestimating how big it was during its run.
It might be explained by the long explanation on the linked page - these new cartoons are drawn on computer with a graphics tablet, whereas the old ones were pen and ink.
There are multiple reasons for a different style, but U think a big one is that a syndicated cartoon is expected to have a recognisable style. We recognise many cartoonists by their unique style, despite many of them being far more versatile artists than that.
The one with the pilots announcing turbulence ahead…
That’s awesome that he a digital tablet enables him to create more art. I met a comic book artist recently who was drawing nonstop even while signing autographs and talking to fans.
People on here love to dump on the iPad for being a “consumption device”, and to hate on the Apple Pencil by misquoting/misunderstanding Steve Jobs[0]…
…but if you spend any time around artists it’s evident that the iPad/Pencil/Procreate trio is one of the most significant leaps in consumer tech for visual artists of the last decade.
[0] he never said that any and all styluses are bad - he said that 1) cell phones that 2) you can only interact with by using a stylus (not an uncommon paradigm back in 2007) were bad
Like everything apple it’s not that they made something wildly new, they just found a way to do something more polished than anyone else that then is successful with a specific subset of vocal people.
I’m not much of a digital artist and views in this space probably vary wildly.. but if I steel man the pro iPad case I think it’s a few things 1. Screen quality. iPads look better than cintiq bc the display in the iPad is actually pretty awesome. Like recommended by the color nerds for being the best color you can get for the price, 2. Pen distance on iPad your pen is closer to the actual pixels. The cintiq had more space between the screen and the surface, feels like you draw above the page a little. 3. Biggest of all is portability. Artists love desks but they also love drawing everywhere all the time. iPad is just better at this because it’s designed as a tablet totally. The pre-apple pencil Wacom stuff existed as tablets but from what I remember was mostly just windows laptops. So software wasn’t built for touch and wanted keyboards and stuff. Responsive multitouch and the os(and drawing apps) built to integrate it tightly is a level of polish Wacom couldn’t do as just a pen input system. 4. Cost cintiqs always cost a ton and a lot of them don’t even have the computer part, iPads aren’t cheap but are way more accessible.
Maybe Wacom has caught up with newer offerings? it’s been a while since I looked at their stuff. There are also totally reasons why you’d wanna go that route for some digital pen stuff (eg high end digital sculpture or texture painting type stuff that really needs the power and integration you can get from a desktop and desktop os)
As always, Apple didn't wholesale invent a product category, but they made the first product that synthesized all the right tradeoffs in a sufficiently compelling package that enabled them to sell tens/hundreds of millions of units fairly quickly[0].
- hardware quality wise, already the 1st gen Apple Pencil had the specs of the higher end tablets (12-bit pressure sensitivity, orientation, azimuth, all in a sleek package)
- you can use your iPad for a bunch of other stuff too, and it's super portable - whereas for the high end tethered drawing tablets, they're pretty single purpose, and they take up a bunch of space on your desk. This all matters to broke artists living in dorm rooms/tiny apartments.
- the Procreate team designed a tool that was really focused on the digital drawing experience and managed to make a high quality, affordable product out of it. The standard for digital drawing on those tethered tablets is mostly Photoshop, which a) is meant for tons of stuff beyond drawing, making it quite complex and b) has 4 decades of interface cruft piled up at this point.
Honestly yeah, there truly are pre/post iPad+Pencil eras in consumer tech for anyone doing work that involves hand illustration/sketching.
[0] whereas their competitors struggle to sell low numbers of units at terrible margins
Yep totally, Procreate on an iPad with a paper-like screen protector and a Pencil is an amazing creative juicer.
If you like Gary Larson, check out Gahan Wilson, who has a very similar sense of humor.
https://www.kensandersbooks.com/pages/books/59859/gahan-wils...
I should really start to read the Far Side comic... I've heard about it for the first time, along with Heathcliff and Pants, on the latest Solar Sands video "The Surreal Worlds of Single Panel Comics": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4npsyTE-m_k
I had a client once in the 90's when Olive Garden was the first wave of consumer Italian spots to serve specials.
After we ordered our entrees the waiter left one of those coloring labyrinths. Well, I couldn't tell at the start of the sketch that it resembled a mandala.
As a comic book artist, his studies in a parapsychology were in the practice of comic strips.
Gary's work reminds me of that afternoon.
No one is able to capture stupidity on a person's (or cow's, or chicken's) face quite like Gary Larson.
Wow, thank you for posting (you have to click the green "Enter" button, it's not super obvious -- someone needs to have a sit-down with Gary about design conventions! It's also completely un-bookmark-able, as there's no URL leading to the latest comic every day).
This one made me laugh out loud for the first time in a while: https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/387/house-on-hillside He's still got it!
EDIT: Ahh, it's very, very small. I was excited by the "387" in the slug, but that seems to be meaningless (?). There's 8 total comics in no clear order, and the caption system is completely broken (it says they were all posted this past Wednesday) :(
Been meaning to post this but if you're interested, I set up a RSS feed for the daily Far Side comic[0]. It's a simple scraper that runs daily on GitHub actions and creates an entry for the 2-5 comics and captions of the day. Source code is on GitHub.[1]
I'll have to look into this new section of the website and see about adding that to the feed.
[0]: https://sphars.github.io/rss-feeds/feeds/the_far_side/feed.x...
[1]: https://github.com/sphars/rss-feeds