The Far Side was a comic strip for smartypants kids and the adults they grew up to be. Then, in another twist, you have to know a little something extra - namely, who Jane Goodall is - to experience the full effect of the joke. Think, for instance, of the famous strip where a female chimpanzee finds a blonde hair on a male chimpanzee's shoulder and asks if he's been spending more time with that "Goodall tramp." (The strip proved popular with Jane Goodall herself, and later proceeds from it benefited her organization.) It was a familiar situation, the wife accusing the husband of cheating on her, but filtered through the perspective of animals. The Far Side was a comic strip for smartypants kids and the adults they grew up to beĪ typical Far Side comic shifted the perspective through which the reader might view a common situation. Larson's comics slowly spread from paper to paper after publishing locally in his hometown of Seattle, Larson landed a syndication deal via the San Francisco Chronicle. (By most accounts, his true passion was jazz guitar.) The Far Side was intended to be a better way to make a living, not the marketing behemoth it became. He simply seized upon drawing jokes as a way to get out of the music store job he hated. Creator Gary Larson hadn't wanted to be a cartoonist all his life or anything like that. What it did have was a unique blend of sheer weirdness, scientific curiosity, and dark humor. Far Side didn't even have familiar faces to fall back on. Both might have featured a single gag every day, but they also had recurring characters. When it began in 1980, its single-panel format hadn't been in vogue in the comics pages since at least the 1960s, if not longer, and at the time, the longest-running comics of that type were gentle family humor panels like Dennis the Menace and The Family Circus. Of the two, The Far Side was the stranger beast. The oddball legacy of The Far Side An exhibit of Far Side cartoons was displayed at the Natural History Museum in 1986. The strips were The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, and comics fans still miss them. But they both rocketed to massive success that hasn't been replicated since. Their creators followed very different paths to success, and the strips couldn't have been more different in both form and content. So the newspaper comic strip died in 1995, because that was when the last two strips that became legitimate pop culture sensations ended their runs, with their respective final strips bookending the year. Related The bleak world of Peanuts, one of the 20th century's greatest works of artīut that feeling also stems from the belief that comic strips are trapped forever in the past, where the best, longest-lasting strips are ones that launched in the 1920s or '30s strips like Hägar the Horrible, which debuted in 1973, are relative new kids on the block.
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