Gary Larson

Gary Larson (born August 14, 1950) is an American cartoonist who created The Far Side, a single-panel cartoon series that was syndicated internationally to more than 1,900 newspapers for fifteen years.

In 1976, he drew six cartoons and submitted them to Pacific Search (afterward Pacific Northwest Magazine), a Seattle-based magazine.

After contributing to another local Seattle paper, in 1979 Larson submitted his work to The Seattle Times.

Under the title Nature's Way, his work was published weekly next to the Junior Jumble.

To supplement his income, Larson worked for the Humane Society as a cruelty investigator.

Larson decided that he could increase his income from cartooning by selling his Nature's Way strip to another newspaper.

While on vacation in San Francisco, he pitched his work to the San Francisco Chronicle and, to his surprise, the Chronicle bought the strip and promoted it for syndication, renaming it The Far Side.

Its first appearance in the Chronicle was on January 1, 1980.

A week later, The Seattle Times dropped Nature's Way.

Unlike Charles Schulz, who resented the name Peanuts imposed by his publisher, Larson had no such qualms, saying, "They could have called it Revenge of the Zucchini People, for all I cared."

In 1987, Larson married Toni Carmichael, an anthropologist.

Early in their relationship, Carmichael became his business manager.

In The Complete Far Side, Larson says that his greatest disappointment in life occurred when he was at a luncheon and sat across from cartoonist Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family.

Larson was not able to think of a single thing to say to him and deeply regretted the missed opportunity.

Addams died in 1988.

Larson is an environmentalist.

"Protecting wildlife is 'at the top of my list', he says."

Larson lives in Seattle, Washington.

According to Larson in his 1989 anthology The Prehistory of The Far Side, he was working in a music store when he took a few days off, after finally realizing how much he hated his job.

During that time, he decided to try cartooning.

The series ended with Larson's retirement on January 1, 1995.

The Far Side ran for fifteen years, syndicated initially by Chronicle Features and later by Universal Press Syndicate, until Larson retired with his final strip published on January 1, 1995.

Themes in The Far Side were often surreal.

Often, the behavior of supposedly superior humans was compared with animals.

For instance, a father explains to his son that a bird song is a territorial marking common to the lower animals, while surrounded by fences and dense housing.

Animals and other creatures were frequently presented anthropomorphically.

One strip depicts a family of spiders driving in a car with a "Have a Nice Day" bumper sticker, featuring a smiley face with eight eyes.

One of Larson's more famous cartoons shows a chimpanzee couple grooming.

The female finds a blond human hair on the male and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?"

A representative from the Jane Goodall Institute thought that this was in bad taste and wrote a critical letter to Larson regarding the cartoon.

In September 2019, his website alluded to a "new online era of The Far Side".

On July 8, 2020, Larson released three new comics, his first in 25 years.

His twenty-three books of collected cartoons have combined sales of more than forty-five million copies.

Larson was born and raised in University Place, Washington, in suburban Tacoma, the son of Verner, a car salesman, and Doris, a secretary.

He graduated from Curtis Senior High School in University Place and from Washington State University in Pullman with a degree in communications.

During high school and college, he played jazz guitar and banjo.

Larson said his family has "a morbid sense of humor", and that he was influenced by the "paranoid" sense of humor of his older brother, Dan.

Dan played pranks on Gary, for example by taking advantage of his fear of monsters under the bed by waiting in the closet for the right moment to pounce.

Dan "scared the hell out of me" whenever he could, Gary said, but Dan also nurtured Gary's love of scientific knowledge.

They caught animals in Puget Sound and placed them in terrariums in the basement, and also made a small desert ecosystem.